[Commlist] New Book: The Labor of Reinvention

lin zhang is delighted to announce the publication of /The Labor of 
Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the Chinese New Digital Economy 
<http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-labor-of-reinvention/9780231551298> 
/(Columbia University Press, 2023). Please consider reading the book if 
you are interested in digital labor, entrepreneurship, innovation, 
non-Western tech and science, China & Asia.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

 From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to 
rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women 
reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has 
affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an 
entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing 
economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also 
reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, 
and identity.

Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention 
is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the 
stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across 
rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a 
multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese 
economy. Zhang explores the surge in digital entrepreneurialism against 
the backdrop of global financial crises, the U.S.-China trade war, and 
the COVID-19 pandemic. She argues that the rise of internet-based 
industries and practices has simultaneously empowered and exploited 
digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Despite embracing high-tech 
innovation, state-led entrepreneurialization does not represent a 
radical break with the past. It has provided a means for implementing 
developmental goals while retaining the importance of the traditional 
family and generating new inequalities.

Shedding new light on global capitalism and the digital economy by 
centering a non-Western perspective, /The Labor of Reinvention/ vividly 
conveys how the contradictions of entrepreneurialism have played out in 
China.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface: The Cult of Entrepreneurialism
1. The Labor of Entrepreneurial Reinvention
Part I. City in Transition
2. Navigating the Investor State: Elite and Grassroots Entrepreneurs in 
Zhongguancun
3. From Science Park to Coworking: ZGC’s Contested Spaces of Innovation
Part II. Back to the Countryside
4. The Platformization of Family Production: Reinventing Rural Familism 
and Governance for the E-Commerce Era
5. Moving Beyond /Shanzhai/? The Contradictions of Entrepreneurial 
Reinvention in Rural China
Part III. Transnational Encounters
6. Between Individualization and Retraditionalization: Reinventing Self 
and Work Through Platform-Based /Daigou/
Epilogue: Toward a China Paradigm
Notes
Index
Some initial reviews:
_Blurb:_
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-labor-of-reinvention/9780231551298 
<http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-labor-of-reinvention/9780231551298>


_China-Britain Business Focus:_
https://focus.cbbc.org/how-the-digital-economy-transformed-entrepreneurship-in-china/#.ZCH3gezML0o 
<https://focus.cbbc.org/how-the-digital-economy-transformed-entrepreneurship-in-china/#.ZCH3gezML0o>
_
_
_MIT Technology Review:_
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/01/1067505/china-tech-entrepreneur-book-zhang/ 
<https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/01/1067505/china-tech-entrepreneur-book-zhang/>


Dr. Lin Zhang's research centers on critical innovation studies, 
information/platform capitalism, and intersectionality, focusing on 
China and ethnic Asian people in a global, comparative context and in 
spaces of transnational encounters. A communication scholar by training, 
her interdisciplinary research engages Asian/Asian American Studies, 
Science and Technology Studies (STS), Economic Geography, and 
Anthropology. By conceptualizing technologies in terms of global 
capitalism, she emphasizes the mutual imbrication of economy, culture, 
and politics in digital technologies, and also highlights the historical 
continuities and ruptures of information capitalism as an uneven world 
system.

More information about the author
https://linzhangweb.org/ <https://linzhangweb.org/>



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