Sida Liu

Lawyers, State Officials and Significant Others: Symbiotic Exchange in the Chinese Legal Services Market

In Chinas legal services market, lawyers face strong competition from a variety of alternative legal service providers. Based upon 256 interviews with law practitioners and public officials, three years of ethnographic work on a professional internet forum, and extensive archival research, this article develops a theory of symbiotic exchange to analyse the competition between lawyers, basic-level legal workers and other practitioners in ordinary legal work, as well as how the state regulates these competing occupational groups. It argues that the dynamics of professional competition in the Chinese legal services market can be explained by the symbiotic exchange between law practitioners in the market and their regulatory agencies and officials in the state. Chinese lawyers have a weak market position because their exchange with the state is often not as strong and stable as their competitors. The prevalence of symbiotic exchange leads to the structural isomorphism between market and state institutions in Chinas transitional economy.

Field and Ecology

This article offers a theoretical comparison between field and ecology, as developed by Pierre Bourdieu and the Chicago School of sociology. While field theory and ecological theory share similar conceptualizations of actors, positions, and relations, and while they converge in their views on structural isomorphism, temporality, and social psychology, they are quite different on several other scores: power and inequality, endogeneity, heterogeneity, metaphorical sources, and abstraction. With a fine-grained comparison of the two approaches, this article provides the basis for a continuous dialogue among social theorists and empirical researchers regarding the nature of social space, its structural and processual composition, and how it changes over time.

The Shape of Chinese Law

Following the Simmelian tradition of social geometry, this essay proposes an analytical framework for understanding the legal systems social forms. It analyzes the basic social forms of the contemporary Chinese legal system in terms of its social structure, operational mode, ideological conflict, and cultural essence. This analytical framework fully recognizes the contradictions and conflicts inherent to the legal system, and it adopts a perspective of social interaction rather than social integration to examine its structure and change. The essay is both an empirical analysis of the social forms of Chinese law and an effort of theoretical innovation for the sociology of law.

Beyond the Manifesto: Mustafa Emirbayer and Relational Sociology

Mustafa Emirbayer’s “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology” calls for a process-in-time understanding of the unfolding interaction between structure and agency that reproduces and transforms practical action. This chapter seeks to situate Emirbayer’s Manifesto essay within his broader intellectual pursuits in the direction of relational sociology. We begin the chapter by outlining the dynamic interplay among structure, culture, and agency on which Emirbayer builds his research agenda for relational sociology. We then examine the enduring influences of John Dewey and Pierre Bourdieu on Emirbayer’s relational thinking. Finally, we discuss Emirbayer and Desmond’s research agenda for studying the racial order in America as a prototype of Emirbayerian relational sociology in practice.

Advocates, experts, and suspects: three images of lawyers in Chinese media reports

Abstract Research on the public image of lawyers often focuses on lawyers’ role as advocates and neglects other representations. Based on the content analysis of 669 media reports of Chinese criminal cases between 1979 and 2009, this article provides a typology of lawyers’ media images: as advocates, as experts and as suspects. Even when lawyers are characterized as defenders of suspects, media depictions of their roles are vacuous and lawyers may be considered unnecessary and dispensable. Furthermore, the characterization of lawyers in the case stories has a binary quality that is contingent upon the medias substantive judgment of case outcomes. With findings from the Chinese case, the article calls for more attention to lawyers’ images in the media, both in China and in comparative research on the legal profession.