Department for Organization and Institutional Studies

The department's main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary China, focusing on processes and mechanisms in social development. Scholarly publications examined micro-level institutional processes such as cooperative mechanisms, participatory processes, and self-organizing processes, and issues related to the formation of interest groups and those processes that generate tensions as well as the reconstitution of the Chinese society.
Since the 1990s, researchers in this department have established a number of long-term research sites to study regional development and institutional variations. These research sites cover a variety of localities: developed areas, underdeveloped villages, areas with ethnic group concentration, and natural disaster-pron areas.The researchers adopt sociological and ethnographic approaches to understand how peasants, labors, 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.
The department is in the process of creating an electronic database including audio recordings, historical documents, field notes, working reports and other related materials. The database will provide rich materials for social science research on the process of social transformation at the grassroots level. v