Beyond Market Meritocracy

Beyond Market Meritocracy investigates how employers evaluate and treat male and female employees with varied family care responsibilities in three different labor regimes of Chinese societies - the neo-liberal 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 non-caregivers 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.

Haijing Dai is an associate professor of social work at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD degree in social work and sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research explores how gender and inter-generational dynamics in household division of labor, family care arrangement, and family life interact with socio-economic and welfare-system changes in Chinese societies, and how new patterns of stratification and inequality are constructed in these processes. Her articles have appeared in Social Service Review, British Journal of Social Work, Journal of Social Policy, Social Forces, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.