Social Structure and Personality during the Transformation of Urban China

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SES- 0549345Melvin KohnJohns Hopkins UniversityThe is a study of social structure and personality during the transformation of urban China that tests the generality of previous findings and interpretation about the relationships between position in the social structure and personality that were developed in analyses based primarily on a large-scale survey of employed U.S. men. The study was later extended to employed men in Poland when it was socialist--to test whether the findings and interpretation of the U.S. study applied as well to a socialist society; further extended to employed Japanese men--to test whether the findings and interpretation were generalizable to that non-Western capitalist society; and most recently re-examined in a study of Poland and Ukraine during the early stages of their transition to nascent capitalism--to test whether the interpretation was valid (both for men and for women) even under the conditions of radical social change that took place in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during their transitions from socialism to nascent capitalism. The China study will not only afford a unique opportunity to further test the generality of the findings and interpretation of the relationships between social structure and personality during a much different type of transformation, but also to study how larger social processes, especially the extent and success of privatization, affect those relationships. The prior studies consistently showed that position in the class structure and in the social stratification hierarchy are closely linked to such fundamental dimensions of personality as intellectual flexibility, self-directedness of orientation, and a sense of well-being or distress. Moreover, the explanation of the relationships between social-structural position and personality was much the same in all the times and places studied: Position in the class structure and in the social-stratification hierarchy are highly correlated with job conditions that facilitate or limit the opportunity to be self-directed in one's work--notably the substantive complexity of the work, how closely it is supervised, and how routinized it is. These job conditions, in turn, are reciprocally related to intellectual flexibility, self-directedness of orientation, and (except for Poland when it was socialist) a sense of wellbeing or distress. Broader impacts: The study China will extend the comparisons to a radically different type of transformation: Instead of the transformation of the economic system following the collapse of the political system, as in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, in China the "privatization" of the economic system is taking place under the aegis of the Communist Party, with thus far little or no evidence of the political system changing substantially. The processes by which position in the social structure affects (and is affected by) personality could be quite different from what has been found in past studies, and the relationships between social structure and personality might be altered in unpredictable ways. The research will study these possibilities in cities of varying wealth and degree of privatization, as well as population size. The research will introduce Chinese social science to research on social structure and personality, not previously studied in China. As prelude to this study, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is now translating into Chinese, for publication by their Academic Press, two of the PI's books on social structure and personality, one comparing socialist Poland to the U. S., the other comparing Poland and Ukraine in transition to Poland when it was socialist. Thus, the impact of the research on Chinese social science may be considerable, as may be its utility for social planning.