Networking Guanxi

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Networking Guanxi1 Barry Wellman, with Wenhong Chen and Dong Weizhen March 13, 2001 wellman/wenchen/wdong@chass.utoronto.ca

www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

Concluding Chapter in: Social Networks in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi Edited by Thomas Gold, Douglas Guthrie and David Wank Cambridge University Press 2001 guanxi3a.doc The Social Network Approach From Metaphor to Toolkit The end of every journey is the beginning of the next adventure. As my tired eyes rest from reading the chapters in this book and my exhilarated soul reflects, I think back on the wonders I have encountered and think ahead about what to do next. As I basked in the pleasure of learning about guanxi, I started thinking about how some of the tools of my trade – social network analysis – might help me and others to delve deeper into guanxi's mysteries. Yet there is a danger sign along the road, a bit old fashioned but still worth pondering: The Economist (2000: 7) warns that outsiders may find guanxi an unfathomable “mystical concept”. With the ironic tone of a jaded old China hand, the magazine asserts: “If you don’t have the patience to learn about guanxi old boy, you might as well pack your bags and go home.” Thrilled by what I’ve learned about guanxi, the last thing I want to do is to go home, warned off by a claim that newbies can neither understand guanxi nor provide useful advice about studying it. Reading this book has been a wonderful journey, and I do not want to pack my intellectual bags just yet. My intention is to show how some of the toolkit of my specialty, social network analysis, could lead to new understandings of guanxi, both as a phenomenon in itself and in relation to other aspects of Chinese societies. This is not just the case of using an available hammer to fit all nails: The fit between network analysis and guanxi is tight (see also Lin forthcoming). Although scholars of guanxi often talk about “the social network” as a useful, organizing metaphor, social network analysis – like guanxi analysis – has developed beyond the metaphor. I deliberately enter what Kipnis calls “the trap of making guanxi either `an orientalist gloss for networking’ or an acultural, universal necessity.”2 Where area specialists argue for the particularity of their 1 We thank Eric Fong, Tom Gold, Douglas Guthrie, Hsung Ray-May, Michael Patrick Johnson, Emi Ooka, Ruan Danching, Janet Salaff, Scott Tremaine, and Beverly Wellman for their advice, and Kristine Klement for her assistance. This work has benefited from the long-term research support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council for our NetLab’s studies of social networks. 2

Kipnis reports that the query about “an orientalist gloss for networking” “comes from a series of questions posed by Thomas Gold at the conference in which this volume was conceived.” All citations in this text that do not


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