Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search

Open Access padlockePrints

'The revolution will not be televised': the institutional work of radical change in China's cultural revolution

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Stewart Clegg

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.


Abstract

Mao Zedong sought both to destabilize existing institutional categories for ordering meaning, and impose new ones, initially through the Great Leap Forward and subsequently during the Cultural Revolution. The paper explores the institutional work that made this process of radical change possible. At its core was the construction and deployment of a set of binary categorization devices. These are explored in the paper to argue that persistent and morally sophisticated institutional work is necessary to make radical change possible. Macro, meso and micro processes of institutional work operate in parallel, reinforcing each other and articulating utopian desire with local possibility. There is no single revolutionary event, no central scene to be represented. Together, leaders and followers at several levels participate in the processes of categorizing and managing the result of such categorizations. Categorizations of radical change have explicitly stigmatizing purposes and managing categorization/stigmatization is an important institutional work, instrumental for radical change.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Chan A, Clegg SR, Cunha MP, Rego A

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Journal of Political Power

Year: 2015

Volume: 8

Issue: 1

Pages: 61-83

Online publication date: 02/03/2015

ISSN (print): 2158-379X

ISSN (electronic): 2158-3803

Publisher: Routledge

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2158379X.2015.1011377#.VbjjtJk1hHg

DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2015.1011377


Altmetrics

Altmetrics provided by Altmetric


Share