Industrial citizenship, workplace deliberation and participatory management in China: the deliberative polling experiment in a private firm

Abstract

A variety of forms and practices of citizenship in China has been well studied, but, unfortunately, studies on industrial citizenship are missing. Moreover, while there has been a growing literature on Chinese workers and their relationship with management in the last decade or so, most of it has focussed on protest and litigation rather than on deliberation and industrial citizenship. This paper fills the intellectual gap by applying T. H. Marshall’s idea of industrial citizenship to workplaces in China and examining it through a case study of a workplace deliberation experiment. The workplace deliberation experiment showed that, first, workplace deliberation in China can be seen as a form of industrial citizenship and “participatory management”, which still retains an element of hierarchy, but falls short of the radical idea of industrial democracy and unionism. Second, workplace deliberation improved management practices but still faced significant obstacles, such as asymmetric power relationships and the control characteristics of industrial relations. Though Chinese industries are institutionalizing more workers’ voice input, Beijing nevertheless forestalls the Polish style of an independent trade union, thus workplace deliberation can be seen as a part of its authoritarian empowerment strategy.