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state and party institutions, work-place relations, family and neighbourhood. The danwei is, needless to say, an effective agent of both formal and informal social control. Henderson and Cohen caution, however, against more extreme views which impute to it unlimited scope and power. They show that there is within this generally rigid framework a surprising amount of flexibility. Unit members and clients, for example, can manoeuvre collective decisions and outside opinion to protect individual interests. Lest one should see in the danwei a radical socialist innovation that engenders behavioural response unfamiliar to the Chinese, the authors stress that in actual fact the work unit system expresses and reinforces traditional behavioural patterns. They show that hierarchical relations, paternalism, avoidance of conflict, and the use of third-party intermediaries to resolve conflict, all characteristic of traditional cultural behavioural patterns, continue to characterize almost every unit relationship.
Henderson and Cohen's portrayal of the hospital danwei raises many questions of sociological interest. If, as the authors show, there is so little separation between the private and the public, what can guard against the intrusion of one set of values from one institutional sphere into another? How will this influence the tasks of modernising medicine? What will happen to the professional authority of the physician if there is the parallel authority of party cadres in the hospital administration? How does the community nature of the danwei affect the nature and extent of job satisfaction among its members? How does it affect the family? What can possibly happen to the power structure of a complex organization if the lower participants' involvement is at once ‘moral' (oriented by party ideology), ‘utilitarian' (oriented by economic rewards), and ‘alienative' (when neither entry nor exit is at one's will)? Can 'back-door' endeavours be ended if work relations are so inextricably bound up with party authority, family and neighbour relations? At the micro level, one wonders how, in the middle of complex role structures, the individual may cope with role strain, conflicts of roles, and the difficulty of staging role performances.
The book's answers to some of these questions are revealing and instructive. For example, the authors show that party membership provides administrators with an extra source of control
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state and party institutions, work-place relations, family and nei- ghbourhood. The danwei is, needless to say, an effective agent of both formal and informal social control. Henderson and Cohen caution, however, against more extreme views which impute to it unlimited scope and power. They show that there is within this generally rigid framework a surprising amount of flexibility. Unit members and clients, for example, can manoevre collective deci- sions and outside opinion to protect individual interests. Lest one should see in the danwei a radical socialist innovation that engen- ders behavioural response unfamiliar to the Chinese, the authors stress that in actual fact the work unit system expresses and rein- forces traditional behavioural patterns. They show that hierarchi- cal relations, paternalism, avoidance of conflict, and the use of third-party intermediaries to resolve conflict, all characteristic of traditional cultural behavioural patterns, continue to characterize almost every unit relationship.
Henderson and Cohen's portrayal of the hospital danwai raises many questions of sociological interest. If, as the authors show, there is so little separation between the private and the private, what can guard against the intrusion of one set of values from one institutional sphere into another? How will this influence the tasks of modernising medicine? What will happen to the professional authority of the physician if there is the parallel authority of party cadres in the hospital administration? How does the community nature of the danwei affect the nature and extent of job satisfaction among its members? How does it affect the family? What can possibly happen to the power structure of a complex organization if the lower participants' involvement is at once ‘moral' (oriented by party ideology), ‘utilitarian' (oriented by economic rewards), and ‘alienative' (when neither entry nor exit is at one's will)? Can 'back-door' endeavours be ended if work relations are so inextri- cably bound up with party authority, family and neighbour rela- tions? At the micro level, one wonders how, in the middle of complex role structures, the individual may cope with role strain, conflicts of roles, and the difficulty of staging role performances.
The book's answers to some of these questions are revealing and instructive. For example, the authors show that party mem- bership provides administrators with an extra source of control
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