With immense sympathy and curiosity, Woronov untangles the economic and political structures limiting life prospects for vocational education students in China. Refusing to see 'class sorting' as a solely Chinese problem, Class Work provides a rich critique of the neoliberal human capital model linking employment and education. Woronov sensitively enters the social world of oft-ignored young people trapped in the ... Read moresystem-a fine ethnography by a masterful writer.
Judith Farquhar
University of Chicago
Class Work is an ethnography of vocational education and an anthropology of class formation. It offers an entirely new analytical perspective on the structure and practice of vocational education in China and provokes stimulating theoretical reflections on the making of social hierarchy and class after Mao. It is an excellent piece of scholarship that deserves a broad readership of students and researchers from different academic disciplines.
Mette Halskov Hansen
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Class Work provides deep and original insights into the 'nascent formation of a new urban working class,' which are of particular interest for scholars of labor, education, public services and social inequality in China, as well as comparative sociologists focusing on education and social stratification in developing countries.
Armin Muller
China Quarterly
This engrossing volume makes one wonder if these young people's circumstances portend an atomized urban world to come, even as Woronov senses a new sort of class in the making. The sensitive fieldwork and perceptive reflections of this study mark it as a piece of scholarship that transcends its own subject matter, and it should attract and engage readers at various levels in the fields of anthropology, sociology, education, and political science. The book will encouragecontemplation among those who would not have imagined that studying these outcast students could carry much weight.
Dorothy J. Solinger
The China Journal
In this deservedly ambitious book, Woronov argues for the emergence of a new working class in China, one employed in the short-term service sector. Her powerful and rich ethnography of two vocational schools reveals nothing less than the transformation of value/s in China.
Nancy Abelmann
University of Illinois
Class Work certainly meets the criteria good ethnography as it contributes both to deepening our understanding of the particular while also theorising from the particular to further broader questions on youth, education, and class formation that are of obvious relevance beyond the Chinese context. As such, Class Work deserves a wide readership both within and beyond youth studies and should certainly not be read by China scholars only.
Roy Huijsmans
Children's Geographies
While everyone else looks the other way, Woronov draws our attention to the unglamorous experiences of millions of vocational students, who are viewed as academic and moral failures in urban China. This exemplary ethnography is full of insights into education, class formation and capitalism. It's an engaging read for anyone interested in China's complex realities and its potential futures.
Tamara Jacka
The Australian National University
Combining rich ethnography with incisive analyses, Class Work is a wonderfully original account of the political economy of vocational education in contemporary China. Woronov illuminates several timely issues including the making of a new urban working class for the service sector, shifting regimes of value, flexible labor, and the fate of youth who are labeled as 'failures' in a transforming China.
Li Zhang
University of California, Davis
Woronov's Class Work is a masterful piece of scholarship depicting a relatively understudied youth group in contemporary China. It deepens our understanding of how these 'failures' of the stereotypical Chinese cram schools struggle with the ideology of numeric capital, and meanwhile, build up new moral meanings and social relations in reference to the so-called 'mainstream society.' Woronov's sharp observation might open up new possibilities for further discussion of the process of new class formations and social transformations in the rapidly changing Chinese society.
Linlin Li
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
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