Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

xgzhou@stanford.edu
(650) 725-6392 (voice)
(650) 723-6530 (fax)

Research Interests
institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society.

Xueguang Zhou is a professor of sociology and an FSI senior fellow. His main area of research is institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.

One of Zhou's current research projects is an ethnographic study of rural governance in China. Zhou adopts a microscopic approach to understand how peasants, village cadres, and local governments encounter, and search for solutions to, emerging problems and challenges in their everyday lives, and how institutions are created, reinforced, altered, and recombined in response to these problems. Zhou also examines property rights as a relational strategy in interfirm strategic alliance, and on patterns of managerial attention allocation in Chinese organizations. In addition, Zhou conducts sociological analysis of economic phenomena, especially the role of reputation in the marketplace.

His recent publications include The State and Life Chances in Urban China: Redistribution and Stratification, 1949-1994, Cambridge University Press 2004, "The Institutional Logic of Occupational Prestige Ranking" American Journal of Sociology, 2005, "Chinese Bureaucracy in Transition: Changing Promotion Patterns in the Post-Mao Era" (with Wei Zhao) Organization Science 2004, " Embeddedness and Contractual relationships in China's transitional economy" (with Wei Zhao, Qiang Li, He Cai) American Sociological Review, 2003.

Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and The People's University of China. He received his PhD.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.