Class Work: Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth

摘要

Terry Woronov's ethnography, Class Work, takes the reader on a sobering journey through vocational school classrooms full of sleeping students, who are supposed to study subjects such as computer technology, landscaping, accounting, tourism or construction site management. Its conceptual innovation of "numeric capital" highlights the creation of social value via examination regimes and discourses of cultural norms and social capital. Class Work provides deep and original insights into the "nascent formation of a new urban working class" (p. 8), which are of particular interest for scholars of labour, education, public services and social inequality in China, as well as comparative sociologists focusing on education and social stratification in developing countries.