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"Monopsonizing Experimentation: Making Persons and Orders through Social Work in China’s Anti-Drug Field"
This study examines the intricate interplay between government contracts, social work innovations, and ethics of doing good in contemporary China, particularly focusing on the problem domain of illicit drug use. Based on 18 months’ ethnographic fieldwork in various service sites and institutional spaces of a nonprofit social work organization, the project reveals an emerging mechanism through which the authoritarian Party-state manages social stability by monopsonizing the rights of doing good—that is, establishing itself as the sole buyer in a burgeoning market of experimental social work services. The study examines the development of social work in China under the government service contracting scheme, treating “social work” not as an established profession but as an assemblage of local experiments in reinventing a Western-imported apparatus. This emerging mode of governance contributes to upholding the political and moral legitimacy of the authoritarian rule in a changing society of increasingly heterogenous social actors and complex social problems. Focusing on the anti-drug sector, it delves into the ramifications of these systemic moral and political arrangements in (re)making subjects and social orders, particularly with regard to marginalized groups like drug users whose acceptance as full member of society is constantly at issue. This project draws on and contributes to scholarship from multiple disciplines including critical social work studies, theories on ordinary and systemic ethics, anthropological studies of state, governance, and addiction, as well as research on social and moral transformations in contemporary China.
Yun Chen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology and Social Work.
