Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology

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252 Chapter 14

from these departments, and were formulated according to the migrant

workers’ knowledge structure and daily life.

Observation of the Night School Operation

The Baigou migrant worker night school launched its first class on Octo-

ber 7, 2005, and we have held three courses so far. Two hundred and fifty-

four people participated in night school courses, out of which 224 people

were migrant workers. Fifty-four percent of the worker students were female

workers, only 7 percent of them went to high school while the majority just

finished elementary school or middle school; 3 percent of them were under

the age of 16, and 21 percent were between 16 and 18 years old (according

to law, 16 years old is the minimum age for a person to be employed in

China while adulthood is set at 18 years of age, when people need to be

responsible for their criminal deeds).

Building Workers’ Communication Platform

Because these migrant workers came from different regions, ethnicities,

and factories, one of the fundamental objectives of the night school was to

establish a channel for them to communicate with each other. For example,

early in the computer class, we asked each student to introduce themselves

to others, including their names, place of birth, factory, type of work, and

interests. And they all had to type their names on the big computer screen

in order that all teachers and students could know and remember them

easier and quicker. When students got proficient in typing, we asked them

to write whatever they would like to write about on the computer. Then

we saw letters to their families, reflections on their work, experiences of

working in Baigou, protest against factory employers, essays and poems,

and even love confessions, which gave insights for all the students to know

each other well. It also enabled us to understand more about the workers’

true life and feelings.

In the English class, most lessons offered very typical life scenes as well

as a good chance for the students to know their classmates. For instance,

there was a unit about “Meeting People.” I told the students that “I would

like two students to perform the situation, and those who raise their hands

first get to choose their own partner.” A moment of silence occurred, and

students began to look around the class. Several seconds later, a boy shyly

raised his hand and walked toward a beautiful girl at the front seat, “Hello,

my name is Li Jun. I am a worker from Liangdian factory. Nice to meet

you!” The girl blushed and stood up slowly, “I am Chen Hong from Star-

link factory. Nice to meet you too!” Suddenly the boy added something

to everyone’s surprise, “Shall we go to a movie together sometime?” All

Integrating the Four Sociologies 253

at once a blast of laughter broke out among the students. Role playing in

class promoted the students’ English skills, enhancing their ability to create

situations and act in them. More importantly, it helped them express their

ideas and learn about their fellow workers.

Implanting Consciousness of Rights

In the labor law class, there were many occasions in which we needed to

carefully select topics and create special situations in order to lead workers

to see the real exploitative relationship between their factory employers and

workers, to learn about their rights, and to use the weapon of labor law to

protect themselves. For instance, there was once a debate on contract law

in the probation period. Usually when a new worker came to work in a

factory, the factory employer would not sign any contract with the worker

until he worked there diligently for at least a month. Many worker students

in the classroom complained that they were often underpaid for this month

and unemployed after the probation period was over. What was even worse

was that novices were very likely to get hurt and the factory employer would

take no responsibility for sending them to the hospital for treatment. The

factory employers would maintain they did this because they needed to

know whether this worker was worth hiring and training. They would

further maintain that some of the new workers were considerably unstable

in that they ran off to other factories or went back home during the proba-

tion period. This was a dramatic moment for both factory employers and

workers. By listening to the argument, the workers had the opportunity

to understand the standpoint of the factory employers, which was often

obscured by interpersonal relationship. They were then in opposition to

the factory employers collectively, regardless of their factories and origins.

And it was exactly what we were looking for, a situation created for making

evident the conflict and cultural stakes. Our teacher also participated in the

dispute and then explained the whole issue in the light of law, mostly sup-

porting the workers.

Engaging Multiple Publics

Migrant workers in Baigou were largely cut off from the outside world.

This was so because they worked so many hours a day that they didn’t have

extra time or energy to engage with the outside world. Another factor con-

tributing to this was that their work and life was so limited within the fac-

tory realm that they had little access to the outside world. Moreover, their

factory employers imposed very strict rules on their wages and personal

relations. As a result, they couldn’t afford or had no avenues to get informa-

tion from the outside world.

254 Chapter 14

To change this situation, and to provide an opportunity for enriching the

workers’ knowledge and encouraging their spontaneous communication,

we set up a small library in our night school. Through the effort of many vol-

unteers, we collected thousands of books and magazines from teachers and

students in Tsinghua University. These books and magazines covered a wide

range of areas, including sociology, law, history, literature, fiction, natural

sciences, and entertainment, to name just a few. We even had a collection

of Shakespeare! The library was open on every Friday and Saturday, and

all migrant workers were welcome to borrow the books they liked for free.

The most frequently borrowed books and magazines were news magazines,

entertainment magazines, readers’ digests, philosophy of life, and novels. As

time went by, more and more migrant workers who heard about our night

school and library from their fellow workers or friends came to the library

to borrow books and study in the night school. Most of the time, the library

was crowded with a great many workers from different factories, talking

and laughing, and building a bridge between migrant workers from diverse

backgrounds. Besides the workers, many volunteers, students, teachers, gov-

ernment officials, and local residents were also actively involved in it.

Indeed, “public sociology brings sociology into a conversation with pub-

lics, understood as people who are themselves involved in conversation. It

entails, therefore, a double conversation” (Burawoy 2005a:7).

INSPIRATIONS FROM CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY

Critical sociology is present throughout the “Baigou” project. It reinforced

the moral stance of the sociologists, which propelled the transition from

one type of sociology to another under proper conditions; it examined the

context and meaning as well as the unique means (the night school) of the

public sociology project; it proffered important principles for empower-

ment of the oppressed groups; and it provided a critical lens for evaluating

the entire project.

Transformation of Society, Sociology, and Sociologists

Critical sociology is the moral commitment to and critique of sociology

as a whole. It is exactly the moral responsibility of our researchers that

pushed the original academic question “formation of Baigou market” and

the “special factory regime” from professional sociology to the “Sending

Medical and Legal Services to Village and Family” of policy sociology, and

finally to the public sociology of “Baigou Migrant Worker Night School.”

What underlies the transformation of sociology is the larger economic and

political context that shaped both the transformation of society and trans-

formation of the moral stances of sociologists.

Integrating the Four Sociologies 255

China is now at the intersection of three waves of marketization in

Burawoy’s terms. Its labor, money, land, and environment are being com-

modified all together in such a fast pace that the migrant workers are in a

miserable situation—being extremely poor in economic terms, being mar-

ginalized in political terms, and being threatened by hazardous working

conditions in violation of their labor rights, social rights, and human rights.

It is the historical moment for sociologists to address the real cause of the

devastating transformation, to make a critical turn to public sociologies,

“to make visible the invisible, to make the private public, to validate these

organic connections as part of our sociological life” (Burawoy 2005a:9).

The public sociology project we are undertaking should be seen both as

a counter-movement to the rapacious three waves of marketization and an

opportunity to reconstruct the society. The project does this by enhancing

the capacity of publics to make their private issues public, and to struggle

for a better world.

Night School as a Case of Strong Intervention

As mentioned earlier, to help the migrant workers establish citizen and

class consciousness, the foremost task would be to penetrate the seemingly

harmonious social relations which veiled the actual exploitation and class

situation in the factory regime in Baigou. Here enters Alain Touraine, who

assumed that sociology’s main method should be to make possible the di-

rect observation and analysis of social relations masked by order and domi-

nation (Touraine 1988). This then “presupposes the active intervention of

the sociologist whose task is to bring out these social relations concealed

behind a mesh of approved and organized practices. Intervention helps

the actor to shake free of the constraints by which he is surrounded, to

extend his field of analysis and become more capable of action” (Touraine

1981:139). The way to carry out intervention is for sociologists to create a

situation (for example, meetings) to highlight the core of conflict involved

where oppositional groups confront each other and conduct self-analysis.

Meanwhile sociologists keep an objective role in the process. He proposed

an important method for detecting the real domination behind the har-

monious social relations; however, his version of sociological intervention

must be modified in several ways in order to apply to China.

First, what Touraine dealt with were social actors engaged in various

social movements (he studied movements in Eastern Europe and Latin

America as well as Western Europe) that had already achieved a great degree

of self-organization and self-consciousness. They were capable of conduct-

ing self-analysis and thereby enhancing their ability of action. In contrast,

we faced people who were marginalized and oppressed without the least

degree of self-organization and self-consciousness. This situation therefore

called for stronger sociological intervention, from design to operation.

256 Chapter 14

Second, Touraine emphasized that sociologists should take an objec-

tive role in the sociological intervention process. His adaptation of the

objective role came from his experience in the study of the 1968 French

student movement, in which, as a professor, “objective distance” would

help him get a better interaction position in the intervention process

(because students generally didn’t trust their professors then). However,

in the third world, the sociologist as outsider and objective researcher

is unacceptable in face of the suffering populace. Liberation sociology

insists that as researchers we must take sides with the oppressed people,

make their daily life and experiences a source of knowledge, and reveal

the underlying social structural causes of inequality (Feagin and Vera

2001).

Third, about the intervention procedure, “meetings” suggested by Tou-

raine were definitely infeasible, in the presence of such an unequal power

relation. Paulo Freire advocated “popular education” in such a situation.

The oppressed groups were not only taught basic knowledge but also taught

to develop a critical perspective about themselves and the world they live

in. However, given that the oppressed groups are usually shy and lacking

self-confidence, a superior approach is Hsiao-Chuan Hsia’s praxis-oriented

research applying the techniques of the “theatre of the oppressed”

and

transformed traditional research methods to empower marginalized groups

(Hsiao-Chuan Hsia 2003).

Taking all these methods into consideration, we transformed Touraine’s

sociological intervention into “strong sociological intervention,” in which

sociologists take sides with the most oppressed groups, aiming both at

creating knowledge from these groups and reconstructing the society they

live in. A best form for the strong sociological intervention, we thought,

might be a migrant worker night school in our case, which would help

workers confront their employers in the labor law class, and to learn basic

knowledge such as computer skills or English so as to break the globaliza-

tion and high-tech myths. Through role playing in the class they could gain

self-confidence and heightened consciousness. Moreover, it would help

sociologists obtain better knowledge about workers’ life and work. It would

also facilitate communication between sociologists and workers, as well as

among workers themselves. In the long run these results would enhance the

workers’ ability to act and transform society.

EMPOWERING THE OPPRESSED IN A

PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY PROJECT

By carrying out the night school project for two years, with incessant reflec-

tions from critical sociology, we learned that there are important principles

Integrating the Four Sociologies 257

for empowering oppressed groups in a public sociology project. They can

be summarized as “Four Unifications”:

Unification of Cognition and Praxis

“Praxis” doesn’t equal “action”; it has a dimension of “social reconstruc-

tion.” “Praxis” is an important concept that refers to the purposive action

aiming at reconstructing the material world and society, including human

beings themselves. Taking praxis as the starting point, researchers must treat

reconstructing society and empowering the oppressed as their basic task.

However, the objects praxis-oriented research deals with are usually people

who are oppressed by the existing political-economic structure. They appear to

be incapable and silent (such as illiterate or with low education status). Hence

we as researchers can’t just adopt the “objective” attitude, as Alain Touraine

suggested. Instead, we have to take sides with the oppressed. Our purpose is

not only to help the illiterate to read and write, but also to help them under-

stand critically about the reality of society so as to change it (Freire 1970).

Unification of Empowerment and Service

Our ultimate goal is to empower the migrant workers, however, we learned

that empowerment must be combined with service to gain access to the work-

ers shielded by the bulwarks of village and family, and to obtain trust and

legitimacy among various actors in the community, including government

officers and factory employers. As mentioned earlier, teaching only labor law

would incur the resentment from the factory employers, or even government

officers, and would achieve no resonance from the workers. We need to make

the workers feel that they can get concrete benefits from our project (such

as physical examinations, free computer and English classes, and free books

from the library) so that they are willing to participate in the project and be

empowered through the long-term process. For instance, one factory em-

ployer once said, “I can’t imagine such good things as having free computer

classes! That’s why I let my workers come so that I can learn it too.”

Unification of Inculcation Education and Heuristic Education

In disseminating law to rural industrial communities, the Baigou Project

believes transformative theories are introduced to the working class from

outside. People perceive the world as a series of events rather than as social

structure. It is the task of researchers to present the true picture of society to

the workers and endow them with weapons to understand and fight. At the

same time, as Freire pointed out, though discussing macro-issues is impor-

tant in raising the consciousness of the oppressed, the representation of these

258 Chapter 14

issues must be closely connected to actual problems if it is to stimulate criti-

cal understanding and actions for change. Therefore, in the teaching process,

we try to link their personal experience to our classes as much as possible.

For example, we used examples workers brought to the labor law teacher for

consultation as cases for teaching. Workers felt that “this has happened to me

too” or “my co-worker had the same trouble” which increased their interest

and willingness to learn and actively engage in the class discussion.

Unification of External Service and Internal Reflection

In such a public sociology project, it is important to strike a conversation

both between the publics and researchers, as well as among researchers

themselves. Before each class, we would first summarize the course arrange-

ment and effects of last week, then discuss the class content for that day,

outlining the keystones and expected results. Each period before classes

began and after classes were over, we asked students about their feelings

and suggestions so that we could adjust our courses accordingly. When

the classes of Friday ended, we held another meeting, reflecting on what

happened in the class and collecting feedback. Every Saturday afternoon

we held a meeting to talk about details of the class that night, and after the

classes were over, we still kept discussing class schedule and preparation

for next week on our way back to Tsinghua University. When every seminar

was finished, we held a conference in the Sociology Department, Tsing-

hua University, to summarize the situation, evaluate gain and loss, and

discuss educational orientation and method for the next session. We also

designed questionnaires for migrant workers about their opinions of the

night school. It was in this process of ceaseless reflection that we integrated

workers’ needs and requests with the night school’s ultimate goal, making

the project more effective.

Limitations

Nevertheless, as hard as we tried, we still faced many obstacles and di-

lemmas. For one thing, the ability of workers to participate was difficult

to sustain. This was because most factory employers were unwilling to

sacrifice two hours of work time to let their workers learn things which

might one day be used against them. For another, our association with

the local government gave us legitimacy and, thus, facilitated our conduct

of the project on the one hand. But on the other hand, our dependence

on the local government for recruiting migrant workers (because workers

who were controlled strictly by their employers within the factory were

not simply free to attend the courses) resulted in considerable turnover of

students. Moreover, what we have been doing is a collective effort to carry

Integrating the Four Sociologies 259

out organic public sociology in the field. However, we are still at a primi-

tive stage in our project and we do have a lot to learn about engaging the

publics. As a long-term enterprise, it is hard to say to what degree we have

accomplished our original goal.

Still, already we do have some tangible results. In respect to skills,

through the study in night school, most migrant workers enhanced their

English listening and speaking skills, got to know the basic labor law provi-

sions for protecting their rights, and could operate the computer very well.

In respect to psychology, they became more confident and ready to express

themselves; in respect to social intercourse, they extended their personal

relationship realm, and were ready to associate and help workers from

other factories.

CONCLUSION

The foundational idea of Burawoy’s analysis of sociology is the interdepen-

dence of the forms of practice.

Burawoy emphasized that

Indeed, my normative vision of the discipline of sociology is of reciprocal

interdependence among our four types of sociology—an organic solidarity in

which each type of sociology derives energy, meaning, and imagination from

its connection to the others. Without a professional sociology, there can be no

policy or public sociology because they would lack legitimacy and expertise,

but nor can there be a critical sociology—for there would be nothing to criti-

cize. Equally professional sociology depends for its vitality upon the continual

challenge of public issues through the vehicle of public sociology. (Burawoy

2005a:15)

We have spent a century building professional knowledge, translating com-

mon sense into science, so that now, we are more than ready to embark on

a systematic back-translation, taking knowledge back to those from whom

it came, making public issues out of private troubles, and thus regenerating

sociology’s moral fiber. (Burawoy 2005a:5)

In our “Baigou Project,” professional sociology plays an important role in

providing the theoretical lens for identifying research problems (such as the

origin of the Baigou bag market, the features of the special factory regime,

and the dilemma of the migrant workers), as well as methodological tools

for gathering data (for example, document analysis, in-depth interviews,

participant observation, surveys, etc.). However, we must “build up profes-

sional sociology as the moral and not just the structural core of the disci-

pline” (Burawoy 2005b:154).

260 Chapter 14

In our case, a tragic incident facilitated the transition from professional

sociology to policy sociology. The incident exposed the pain and troubles

of the invisible migrant workers—which were hidden behind the dual ram-

part of village and family—to researchers and the larger society. The tragedy

offered an opportunity to gain access to their work and life, and laid a basis

for further empowerment of this oppressed group. However, the limitations

of such policy work were all too obvious, which led to the organic public

sociology project.

Throughout the project, critical sociology was present in discerning

problems of domination and inequalities; infusing moral stances for so-

ciologists; challenging normative assumptions of professional sociology,

policy sociology, and public sociology; as well as offering evaluations of

the whole project. It also offered hints in contriving many original strategies

in running the project, for example, the selection of “the oppressed migrant

workers as our publics,” the focus on “breaking the myths” to empower the

“oppressed” and their relation to the courses offered, the design of the “sand-

wich class,” and the use of “real pertinent cases” for teaching. Other strategies

derived from critical sociology were the importance and effects of the “dra-

matic moment” for factory employers and workers, building class and citizen

consciousness and self-confidence through “encouragement and praise,” and

the continuous dialogue and improved strategy enkindled by the method of

reflective education.

During the operation of the night school, the systematic design and

planning of the project was based on the knowledge and data generated

from professional sociology. Later more information was collected within

the process of teaching and conversation. That made possible further pro-

fessional research on certain topics. As policy sociology helped open the

door to the field, the far-reaching effects of the night school elicited much

attention from the media, which reported the event to general publics;

from some labor NGOs, which afterward built a cooperative relationship

with the research team; and from local and higher government, which ad-

justed their policies to ameliorate the conditions of migrant workers and

strengthen the enforcement of labor law. And most importantly, initially

by engaging our targeted publics—the migrant workers—as the project

proceeded, it gradually inspired multiple publics to be actively involved in

the process, including doctors, lawyers, students from different disciplines,

teachers, volunteers, government officials, NGOs, local residents, and so

forth, pushing the whole project to a higher level.

From the trajectories of our “Baigou Project,” it is clear that it started its

life in professional sociology, extended its relevance through policy soci-

ology, was modified by critical sociology, and reached its culmination as

organic public sociology. As already pointed out by Burawoy, “sociology

Integrating the Four Sociologies 261

can straddle these ideal types or move across them over time” (Burawoy

2005a:11), and that “the core activity of public sociology—the dialogue be-

tween sociologists and their publics—is supported (or not) by professional,

critical and policy moments” (Burawoy 2005a:12), the Baigou Project

shows how exciting and fruitful the integration of professional sociology,

policy sociology, critical sociology, and public sociology can be, each pro-

moting the others as it promotes itself.

NOTES

1. The ”Baigou Project” is a series of research efforts carried out by the Labor

School of Tsinghua University led by Professor Shen Yuan, and many of the research

projects were run jointly with other departments and institutions.

2. Source of information: www.bdlyj.gov.cn/gaikuang/gaobeidian/g1.asp.

3. The Theatre of the Oppressed is a method elaborated by the Brazilian direc-

tor Augusto Boal, who was influenced by the work of Paulo Freire, starting from

the 1960s, first in Brazil and then in Europe. This method uses theater as a means

of knowledge and transformation of the individuals thinking in the social and re-

lational field. The public becomes active, so that the “spect-actors” explore, show,

analyze, and transform the reality in which they are living.

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———. 2005c. “The Critical Turn to Public Sociology.” Critical Sociology 31(3):313–

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