Speaker: Prof. Haijing Dai, Chairperson and Associate Professor of Department of Social Work, and the Co-Director of Center for Chinese Family Studies, CUHK
Time: 11:00am-12:30pm, 28 November 2025 (Friday, HK Time)
Venue: Rm 505, Esther Lee Building, CUHK
Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/mycuform/view.php?id=3904935
About the book: Beyond Market Meritocracy investigates how employers evaluate and treat male and female employees with varied family care responsibilities in three different labor regimes of Chinese societies. Through extensive and empirical data, it uniquely enriches the existing literature by examining the rationales of employers in the comparisons of different types of family caregivers and noncaregivers and of different labor regimes in China. While previous studies on family caregivers’ dilemmas in the labor market often focus on the incompatibility of family care duties with the capitalist market meritocracy, this book identifies four different schemes of rationales among employers in the three labor regimes of China. The multiplicity of employers’ rationales demonstrates how their attitudes and practices go beyond merely calculating the market merits of family caregivers and sheds new light on the complexity in the relationships between workplace organization and labor rights and future directions for work and family policy programs.
About the Speaker: Haijing Dai is an Associate Professor of Social Work at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD degree in social work and sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research explores how gender and inter-generational dynamics in household division of labor, family care arrangement, and family life interact with socio-economic and welfare-system changes in Chinese societies, and how new patterns of stratification and inequality are constructed in these processes. Her articles have appeared in Social Service Review, British Journal of Social Work, Journal of Social Policy, Social Forces, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.
