The course which I take is “Late Industrialization and Social Change” (not the essay topic)
Choose one or two of the readings below and write a critical review. Try to think why you disagree in case you do not disagree, and in case you agree is what the author says enough? What can you add your own thoughts and ideas to those of the author? Is there enough evidence to support the arguments? Is there logical consistency in the arguments?
All in all, the professor is seeking how much thinking you put into critical review. Not summary of the readings. You should have strong argument (with a why question).
6-8 pages, double spaced. I will upload a sample of critical review later.
Readings:
The Soviet Union
*Jan Pakulski, “Bureaucracy and the Soviet System.” Studies in Comparative Communism. Vol. 19, No. 1, 1986.
*Joshep Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 160-206.
*Ken Jowitt, “Soviet Neotraditionalism：The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime,” Soviet Studies (July 1983).
*Gerald M. Easter, “Personal Networks and Postrevolutionary State Building: Soviet Russia Reexamined,” World Politics, Vol. 48. No. 4 (1996).
*Timothy Willerton, Patronage and Politics in the USSR (Cambridge：Cambridge University Press, 1992), Ch. 1.
*David Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), Ch. 2.
China
*Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism：Work and Authority in Chinese Industry(Berkeley：University of California Press, 1986), Ch. 4 & 5.
*Jean C. Oi, State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Chapters, 1, 6, 7, 10.
*Vivien Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), Ch. 2 & 3.
*Yusheng Peng, “Kinship Networks and Entrepreneurs in China’s Transitional Economy,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 109, No. 5 (March 2004), pp. 1045-1074.
*Sun Liping, “Societal Transition: New Issues in the Field of the Sociology of Development,” Modern China, Vol. 34, No. 1, The Nature of the Chinese State: Dialogues among Western and Chinese Scholars, I (Jan., 2008), pp. 88-113.
DO NOT forget thesis questions or critical observations in the paper.
