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The Chinese Hospital: A Socialist Work Unit. By Gail E. Henderson and Myron S. Cohen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
The authors of this book worked one as a medical researcher and the other as an English teacher and translator - and lived for five months between September 1979 and March 1980 at the Second Attached Hospital (SAH) of Hubei Provincial Medical College. This rare opportunity allowed sociologist Gail Henderson and physician Myron Cohen to undertake field research at a Chinese "work unit”, or danwei (“an administrative term referring to the organization of almost all urban workplaces under the authority of the central government"), and observe at close distance the organizational structure and process of what Fox Butterfield describes as "the basic building block of (urban Chinese) society”. The research methodology employed was appropriately participant-observation and the result: a fascinating case-study that reveals many insights into social life and health care in post-Mao China. Between the covers there is much rich empirical material and many observations that will interest China scholars, medical sociologists, and researchers on comparative organizational studies.
The study confirms the importance of the work unit as a central institution in organizing the social, economic and political life of China's urban population. In the SAH, which is a rather special kind of danwei for sure, approximately two-thirds of the 830 people who work in the hospital also live there, and many spouses and even some children are employed by the danwei. What is even more significant is that 70 to 80 per cent of all hospital and medical staff are married to colleagues within the hospital. Participation as members in the danwei is basically involuntary, for assignment to a work unit is a decision always made by the state. When workmates are frequently also neighbours or close family members, and when marriage, divorce, childbearing, education, job assignment, job transfer and the resolution of disputes all involve the knowledge and, in most cases, approval of danwei leadership, there can hardly be any material separation between the public and the private, and indeed different institutional spheres of life. What results from this is a unique community that integrates the