In China‘s expanded higher education, middle and upper middle class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds not only in job access but also occupational attainment. Literature depends mainly on social capital theory, attributing the advantages of middle class students in the graduate labour market to their higher status contacts and vaster social networks. Yet, literature has largely ignored the influence of growing market mechanisms in the graduate labour market, as well as the agency of individual job seekers. Inspired by cultural capital theory, this study is devoted to understanding the cultural processes that underlie individual advancement in a stratified society. Emphasizing the influences of cultural capital in the process and outcome of job searching, this study argues that the advantage of middle class students during job search is determined not only by the higher status contacts embedded in their family social network, but by the tight link between parental involvement, accepted institutional policies and practices, and ideal notions of personhood, i.e., a highly synthesized cultural advancement system. Between January and June, 2012, 60 fourth-year students from two universities in Wuhan were interviewed. Drawing upon these data, it is found that, firstly, the family cultivated certain qualities at the early stage before the student entered higher education. What‘s more, middle class parents always keep their children on the right track of the ‘standard middle class career path‘, and sometimes even act in a more assertive role to ‗correct‘ students‘ derailed inclinations. However, the parents of underprivileged students know little about campus life and the job searching experiences of their children. Secondly, the ―excellence‖ emphasized in school discourse aligns with middle class values. Middle class students are very familiar with the cultural codes and manners required to obtain this ―excellence.‖ Additionally, the evaluation criteria and award mechanisms prevailing on campus also favor the performance of middle class students. Their awards, usually in the form of certificates, prizes or titles, are directly interpreted into higher employability during their job search, contributing to greater opportunities of the middle class during their job search. And thirdly, shaped by their socialization both at home and school, middle class students manage to accumulate a whole set of class-based dispositions towards control and success while underprivileged students fail to do so. Guided by these dispositions, middle class students employ purposeful strategies and demeanours on campus in order to cater to the labour market‘s requirements. The findings suggest that social reproduction during job search is due to the mixed functioning of the cultural advancement system, taking into consideration the negotiation and interaction between the contextual features, i.e., the gradually implemented market mechanism, inadequate legal enforcement, and guanxi as a cultural psychology. This study suggests that the cultural advancement system could be extended through more scholarly thesis to explain how the middle class continue to pull ahead of lower classes, thus perpetuating class inequality in transitional China. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

In the labor market, workers can increase their chances of meeting potential employers through costly search. My first chapter aims to empirically quantify the search intensity of workers, both employed and unemployed. My second chapter develops a theoretical model to study the optimal unemployment insurance with search intensity endogenously chosen by unemployed workers. I devote my third chapter to empirical identification of whether major illness leads to persistent household poverty in rural China. My first chapter studies the search behaviors both on and off the job, and the effect of search intensity on wage determination. Four determinants of wages are considered: productivity, workers’ bargaining power, competition between employers due to on-the-job search, and search intensity. I estimate the structural model using the 2001 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), together with supplementary information from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). The empirical results demonstrate that search intensity declines as the worker gets a wage rise from her current job. My second chapter addresses the efficiency issues arising from the externalities and hidden-action features of search effort. The solution to the social planner’s problem may not be decentralized in a competitive market. Calibration shows that the current US unemployment insurance (UI) system generates an 8.07% welfare loss relative to the socially optimal allocation. In the third chapter, I use a unique dataset on Chinese rural households to test whether severe illness can cripple a rural household’s economic resources leading to temporary and/or persistent poverty. When health shocks are assumed to be exogenous, in the sense that households cannot control the arrival rate of adverse health shocks by choosing the amount of medical expenditures, a Markov regime-switching regression model reveals no significant evidence that a severe illness causes persistent household poverty. To endogenize health shocks and choices on medical expenses, a dynamic structural model is employed. The structural estimates support the view that major illness leads to persistent household poverty. / text

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy