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People at Work: Life, Power, and Social Inclusion in the New Economy

As with any piece of research, there are tradeoffs for strengths and weaknesses. The thorough, detailed, and historical analysis of China makes the book very appealing for area specialists, but less appealing to sociologists interested in urbanization in the nonChinese context. Though offering analysis and challenges to many theories of urbanization and development in the specific case of China, the authors fail to take the last step of reformulating the broader theories at play. For instance, researchers working on questions of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asian contexts would find China’s Urban Space a good model of a country study on urbanization, but would find little developed theory immediately relevant to their own work on the concepts previously mentioned. The authors could go further in reformulating theories in light of the Chinese context, rather than simply presenting challenges to current theory. A second limitation of China’s Urban Space is another flipside of its strengths. As noted before, the authors go to great lengths to provide very detailed contexts, history, explanations, and analyses of both China and the four case study cities. Often the massive contextualization leaves the main theses and contributions of the work obscured or overshadowed. For an area specialist, this would perhaps be captivating, but for the generalist, it sometimes makes for tedious reading. Lastly, some of the contributions the authors set out to make are not fully covered or convincing by the end. For example, from the beginning the authors state their aim of setting Chinese urbanization in the context of globalization. Other than mentioning foreign investment a few times with regard to specific cities, discussion of globalization is largely absent from discussions of China as a whole. Additionally, though the spatial aspect is a theme throughout the book, the title would lead a reader to believe it is the main focus of the book, whereas the subtitle is a more appropriate summary of the book’s main emphasis. Overall, this is a strong work that brings up important challenges to urban theory and raises several concepts that deserve inclusion and attention in future works on urbanization. China’s Urban Space will be particularly relevant to China area specialists and particularly those working on Chinese urbanization, and will also be useful to those studying urbanization in other contexts.