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Despite the large number of working-class students having to work while attending schools, their work experience and the potential of class solidarity have been largely unaddressed. By bringing in a social psychological perspective, this article revives the sociological debates of working-class solidarity and challenges the defeatist view of solidarity since the neoliberal turn of the global economy. This article comprises two studies. In Study 1, a "working-class solidarity measure" (WCSM) was developed through interviews, followed by factor-analysis of a vocational school sample in China (n = 509). In Study 2, we validated the factor structure of the WCSM and adopted structural equation modelling to show that prosocial behaviour positively predicted solidarity among vocational school students (n = 2534). Contrary to the understanding that the working-class is divisive and fragmentary, our work shows that working-class solidarity can be built and consolidated through layers of prosocial behaviours by students with work experience.

Worker solidarity is a recurring theme in the digital labour debate. While recent studies of the on-demand platforms contribute to highlighting digital affordances in fostering solidarity among gig workers, few have explored how this works in depth and offered a theoretically informed evaluation of this potential. This study of Didi drivers in China fills this gap by looking at how agential practices amplify or constrain the effects of digital communication. We contribute to constructing a mediated framework of affordances for association, for discourse and for mobilisation to examine the process of fostering worker solidarity. Increasingly under structural constraints of platform control and state surveillance on labour activism, this article discloses the theoretical puzzle of 'solidarity in question' by rooting the agential practices firmly in the analysis of workers' gender, migratory status, work experience and critical media literacy, and how they intersect with the tactical appropriation of social media to create potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situating in the different social, political and cultural contexts of schooling in China, which is more embedded in mixed neoliberal value, authoritarian state control and collective morality, we use a somewhat different theoretical angle to understand the process of 'learning to labour' and the reproduction of working class at school and at work. Our study extends the horizon of Willis' analysis of cultural reproduction at school by seriously analysing students' work experiences through their internship at the site of production. Taking a sociological rather than cultural analysis approach, we re-conceptualize working-class agency embedded in a double contradiction of schooling as a site of contestation. This double contradiction is generated by conflicting experiences caused by inevitable conflicts among the three spheres of material production, social reproduction and cultural reproduction in educating ideal labour subjects to serve the state, market and family, providing fertile soil for re-negotiating working-class solidarity.

This article illuminates an intellectual puzzle of how South Korean cooperative movements attempt to overcome the dilemma between localistic practices and the value of internationalism. Moving beyond anti-capitalistic debates of building links globally, the cooperative movement brings Fair Trade products from developing countries to consumer cooperatives in South Korea, resulting in a scaling up of community economies globally and forging real international solidarity. Engaging with feminist theories put forward by Gibson-Graham and their collaborators, this article calls upon an expanded feminist politics that challenge the "spatial bounding" of community economies that are often joined with localistic practices. Born as one of the most significant forms of community economies to address the economic precarity of grassroots farmers and workers during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, iCOOP was set up as a consumer cooperative federation to support local Korean producers with alternative market linkage. Through Fair Trade movement, iCOOP serves as an interesting case to overcome localistic practices and nurture the value of internationalism. This article develops an expanded feminist politics of community economies to confront the tendency of localistic practices by providing four layers of analysis: value, campaign tactics, new governance structure, and scaling solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrasting existing scholarship in 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', this article builds on the theorisation of infrastructural capitalism as an emerging global-capitalist project entangled with both China's state-socialist ideology and the latest nationalistic revitalisation agenda, serving both political and commercial goals, yet also rendering discontent and resistance in daily business and employment practices. Through participant observation across 13 Alibaba departments or subsidiaries, semi-structured interviews with workers in Alibaba and other Chinese platform companies, and the analysis of corporate documentation and media reports, our ethnographic study highlights the 'physical and digital (phygital)' nature of infrastructure, and theorises how discursive, symbolic, and sensorial techniques are adopted to direct and sustain infrastructural capitalism in daily organisational setting through three unique mechanisms: public-private partnerships, corporate prosumption networks (CPN) and imagineered global competition. This article's key contributions are threefold: to dissect the intertwined discursive, symbolic and affective mechanisms through which the 'invisible' infrastructures of capitalism are made 'visible' and 'sensible'; unpack the variegated impacts and inherent dilemmas of infrastructural capitalism; and reimagine the possibility of individual resistance and systemic transgression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does entering the labour market via precarious employment have a long-term scarring effect on one's career? Prior research proposes diverse arguments, but firm conclusions remain elusive. Using panel data from Hong Kong, this study rekindles this debate by revealing the long-lasting effect of first job precarity on workers' subsequent career prospects. A comprehensive measure of precarious employment is constructed to simultaneously account for employment status, contractual status and occupational status, and random effects models are used to test the scarring effect of first job precarity on subsequent monthly income, job satisfaction and fringe benefits. It is also observed that macroeconomic situations, particularly periods of economic crisis, have a detrimental effect on entry into precarious employment. Importantly, the results show the substantial negative consequences of initial precarious employment, highlighting the adverse impact of economic crises on first job precarity and the subsequent scarring effect on career prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risks of youth poverty in relation to employment have largely been overlooked both internationally and locally, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving beyond the concepts of income, economic factors and in-work poverty as applied to the general population, we examine the multi-scalar employment risk confronting highly educated working youth (aged eighteen to twenty-nine) in Hong Kong by assessing the intersection of precarious employment and in-work poverty, which is crucial to understanding youth poverty. Drawing on in-depth interview research on creative workers, this study calls for the reconceptualisation of in-work poverty through the lens of precarious employment, which is not viewed as a separate economic entity, but as an organic whole encompassing a multi-scalar risk in economic, social, psychological and political terrains generating an existential problem shaping young people's sense of future and work-life meaning. This article sheds light on the policy implications of high-educated youth suffering from in-work poverty in the creative industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We take infrastructure as a 'keyword' in foregrounding the production and the reproduction of contemporary capitalism as well as its complexities and contradictions. To tease out the capitalist dynamics of the contemporary moment as infrastructural capitalism, this paper moves beyond a dichotomous constellation of the logic of capital and the territorial logic of power, to argue how a triple logic- capital, power, and culture informs the cultural politics, attempting to simultaneously resolve the economic crisis and glorify China's fast-speed capitalism. As the vanguard of Chinese infrastructural politics, the high-speed rail spearheads the Chinese spatial economic system towards one that is not an alternative to capitalism but, at best, a variegated form of moving capitalism, which we call infrastructural capitalism. Illuminating the political role of the infrastructural projects in creating invisible social contradictions, this article highlights a wide array of affected working-class masses who take individual and collective actions that result in the reversion of 'the vanguard', dissolving the condensation of the materiality of infrastructural capitalism into the global assemblage of unpredictable but inescapable contradictions driving China into global imperial rivalries and class conflicts. (178 words) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the large number of working-class students having to work while attending schools, their work experience and the potential of class solidarity have been largely unaddressed. By bringing in a social psychological perspective, this article revives the sociological debates of working-class solidarity and challenges the defeatist view of solidarity since the neoliberal turn of the global economy. This article comprises two studies. In Study 1, a working-class solidarity measure (WCSM) was developed through interviews, followed by factor-analysis of a vocational school sample in China (n = 509). In Study 2, we validated the factor structure of the WCSM and adopted structural equation modelling to show that prosocial behaviour positively predicted solidarity among vocational school students (n = 2534). Contrary to the understanding that the working-class is divisive and fragmentary, our work shows that working-class solidarity can be built and consolidated through layers of prosocial behaviours by students with work experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic engenders unemployment risks globally and locally. Reflectively engaging in Beck's risk society debates, this paper critically reviews the discursive effects of „risks" when employed by the government in debates about unemployment insurance since the 1997 sovereignty handover. We break down the concept of risk into four layers: moral risk, financial risk, socio-economic risk and political risk and bring to light the contradictory outcomes that colour the nuanced attitudes among the state, the NGOs and the affected subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies on digital media and labor seldom pay attention to youth in vocational education (VE), nor do they consider the use of and attitudes towards digital media in connection with labor subjectivity. This research fills the gap by exploring how patterns of digital communication relate to each other in exerting influence on labor knowledge and attitudes in the setting of a vocational school. We present findings from a unique survey dataset (N = 1761) collected in Shaanxi, China. Aided by fieldwork, interviews, and observations of online discussions among students, we constructed reliable composite variables for behavioral and attitudinal patterns of digital communication and found that (a) participation in online forum discussion enhances labor-rights knowledge and predicts more consumerist usage of WeChat, but it does not encourage more reflections on gaming or achieve more labor-related attitudes; (b) reflective attitudes does not increase labor knowledge, but it is positively correlated with work-related attitudes; (c) there is no significant relationship between consumerist usage on the one hand and labor knowledge or attitudes on the other; and (d) labor knowledge indeed helps enhance labor attitudes. Contributions and implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]