eprintid: 10204045
rev_number: 13
eprint_status: archive
userid: 699
dir: disk0/10/20/40/45
datestamp: 2025-02-27 16:30:06
lastmod: 2025-02-27 16:30:06
status_changed: 2025-02-27 16:30:06
type: thesis
metadata_visibility: show
sword_depositor: 699
creators_name: Gong, Eleanor Yue
title: Constructing Meritocratic Selves, Language and Mobility: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Highly Skilled Professionals in Chinese Global Workplaces
ispublished: unpub
divisions: UCL
divisions: B16
divisions: B14
divisions: J77
abstract: This thesis investigates the ideological, linguistic, and spatial construction and management of "meritocratic selves" within Shanghai, a pivotal hub of global capitalism and meritocracy. It explores the integration of neoliberal, global, and nationalist agendas that shape self-enterprising worker-citizens in China's globalised economy. Drawing on a sociolinguistic ethnography in a Shanghai-based industrial park hosting multinational companies, the research examines the interplay between language policies, migration regimes (e.g., Shanghai's hukou policy), and labour regulation practices in global workplaces. A multi-dimensional and multi-sited perspective is adopted to study negotiations and tensions between the government, multinational companies, and highly skilled professionals. 
The idea of "meritocratic selves" with Chinese characteristics is conceptualised through a genealogical review and analysed adopting Foucault’s theories of governmentality and subjectivity. Three inter-related dimensions of meritocratic subjectivity are identified: desiring subjects, reflexive subjects, and bilingual plus subjects, each revealing the structures of feeling that underpin the promise of language skills for socioeconomic mobility and middle-class identity in China. These dimensions reflect a structural approach to economic development and social organisation, regarding meritocratic subjectivity as both a subject and object of governmentality.
This study illustrates a city-workplace-employee mechanism that constructs multi-layered meritocratic institutions and actors. Within this mechanism, meritocratic selves function as a discourse, a skills-register, and a behavioural model to naturalise the neoliberal logic of language-mediated human capital and normalise institutional dispositions of skill-based meritocracy. It extends governance by aligning nationalist ambitions with enterprise profits and individual goals, thereby privatising the Chinese Dream of Rejuvenation into institutional interests of development and individual aspirations for geographical and social mobility. I also investigate language's role in justifying merit and indexing ideal workers, prompting perpetual self-investment in language acquisition. I contend that language shapes hierarchical workforce structures, cultivating meritocratic subjects within meritocratic workplaces as part of the broader endeavour to establishing Shanghai as a meritocratic city.
date: 2025-01-28
date_type: published
thesis_class: doctoral_md_only
thesis_award: Ph.D
language: eng
verified: verified_manual
elements_id: 2356480
lyricists_name: Gong, Yue
lyricists_id: YGONG18
actors_name: Gong, Yue
actors_id: YGONG18
actors_role: owner
full_text_status: none
pages: 305
institution: UCL (University College London)
department: Culture, Communication and Media, Institute of Education
thesis_type: Doctoral
citation:        Gong, Eleanor Yue;      (2025)    Constructing Meritocratic Selves, Language and Mobility: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Highly Skilled Professionals in Chinese Global Workplaces.                   Doctoral thesis  (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).