Details of Research Outputs

This paper delineates the affective geographies of China's socioeconomic transformations by studying the reform of China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under globalisation. Drawing on the scholarship of relational economic geography and affective relations in everyday life, we investigate SOE reform through affective relations and their potentials in reproducing social, spatial, and temporal relations. Specifically, we explore how SOEs may be active contexts by focusing on SOE everyday life. A case study of SOEs in the northeastern provinces of China is deployed, and triangulates data sources of secondary statistics, personal biography, and movie stills. The data show that the ways workers attached meanings to two affective relations of stabilities and mobilities informed their ongoing strategies in everyday life, and led to potential in divergent ways. This suggests SOEs as active contexts associated with some remaking of social, spatial, and temporal relations. The paper contributes an empirically rich case study to the affective geographies of China's socioeconomic transformations by combining plural data. Theoretically, it expands relational economic geography by investigating affective relations of everyday life, and broadens the understanding of SOEs as involved in the production of new cultural economies. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin. All rights reserved.