Institutional Holes and Job Mobility Processes: <i>Guanxi</i> Mechanisms in China's Emergent Labor Markets

Abstract

China's economic transition toward a market-oriented system should give rise to a legal-rational logic of resource allocation. A transition of this kind, if occurring, implies that guanxi rules, which are commonly understood to be informal and anti-rational, would decline. This hypothesis has been put forward with the attention to decision-making processes at the level of economic enterprises in Chinese cities (Guthrie 1998). In the context of labor markets, Hanser and Guthrie argue in their chapters in this volume that guanxi ties may have become less relevant among their interviewees.