We are happy to share with you that Prof. Haijing Dai has published a new book titled "Beyond Market Meritocracy: Work and Family Care in Chinese Societies" by Oxford University Press (online first, in print in November 2025).
This book investigates how employers evaluate and treat male and female employees with varied family care responsibilities in three different labor regimes of Chinese societies—the neoliberal Hong Kong market under a productivist welfare system, the market-driven private sector of mainland China struggling with the post-COVID-19 economic decline, and the state-supervised public sector of mainland China with socialist legacies. Through extensive and empirical data, it uniquely enriches the existing literature by examining the rationales of employers in the comparisons of different types of family caregivers and noncaregivers and of different labor regimes in China. While previous studies on family caregivers’ dilemmas in the labor market often focus on the incompatibility of family care duties with the capitalist market meritocracy, this book identifies four schemes of rationales among employers in the three labor regimes of China: a market meritocracy of competence, competitiveness, and efficiency; a moral virtuocracy of family care and responsibilities; a cultural schema of gendered division of labor; and structural resources and constraints embedded in labor protection and family welfare policies. The four schemes sometimes corroborate but sometimes contradict one another in different employment contexts, based on which employers construct their evaluations of family caregivers in the labor market. The multiplicity of employers’ rationales demonstrates how their attitudes and practices go beyond merely calculating the market merits of family caregivers and sheds new light on the complexity in the relationships between workplace organization and labor rights and future directions for work and family policy programs.
This book consists of eight chapters, namely, Introduction; Paradoxes, Employers, and Social Policies; Work and Family Care in Chinese Societies; Research on Three Labor Regimes in Chinese Societies; Virtuous Family Caregivers yet Unwanted Mothers: The Intertwined Caregiver Bonus and Penalty in Hong Kong; "Work is Work": The Caregiver Penalty in Shenzhen's Private Sector; Family Care as a Need: Workplace Communities and Their Boundaries in Shenzhen's Public Sector; and Conclusion: Family Care and Labor Protection in the New Era.
Please visit this URL if you would like to find more details about this book.
Congratulations to Prof. Dai!
