Anson Au

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Verified

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Few studies have examined how non-verbal functions are implicated in online communication and in non-Western contexts. Addressing these lacunae, this article analyzes interviews with Hong Kong youth to interrogate how likes are exchanged in online interactions within the context of guanxi. This article discovers that likes are reimagined as a digit...

Cryptocurrencies have fuelled an ideological bifurcation between utopian imaginaries of borderless individual economic sovereignty and egalitarianism among libertarian sympathizers since Hayek and more recent dystopian admonitions against financial disruption and inequality by state actors. Providing a state-of-the-art sociological account of this...

In an age of digitalization, who still refuses to use digital technology? Drawing on nationally-representative Chinese General Social Survey data, this article finds that about half of Chinese households do not actively use the Internet or e-payment systems, despite their ubiquity. This article estimates the effects of socioeconomic resources on th...

Sociological research has identified persistent disadvantages that face women in hiring and promotion opportunities in firms. This article extends this research on gender inequality to examining firm preferences for women’s layoffs when faced with the prospect of an economic recession. Drawing on nationally representative microdata on workers in Ch...

From 2020 onward, sweeping reforms were implemented in China's domestic Internet sector that stirred debate about its future. Analyzing all Chinese government policies and penalties issued on domestic Internet enterprises from 2020 to 2022, this article provides the first systematic account of the authoritative themes that guided the design of the...

The past decade has witnessed an increase in stakeholder pressures for publicly‐listed firms to reduce their emissions. While most firms have been receptive to these pressures, they have also been observed to devise strategies to circumvent regulatory guidelines and avoid liabilities. Drawing on a sustainable finance dataset on cross‐border listed...

This article introduces the novel concept of “mobility spaces” to investigate the role of geographical and professional distances in career mobility and how they are influenced by social structural factors. Mobility spaces encompass physical, social, and legal spaces that professionals navigate while shaping their career trajectories over time. The...

This article investigates the career trajectories of Hong Kong solicitors during two historical turning points, specifically 1994–1997 and 2018–2021, when hundreds of lawyers left private practice to pursue alternative career options such as business and finance, government and politics, or relocation to other countries. Data are sourced from the c...

Neobanks have risen as popular digital challengers to incumbent banks, especially in emerging markets (EMs) where the banking sector is often characterized by oligopolies. This article first estimates the value of Nubank and StoneCo in Brazil, two of the fastest-growing neobanks in Brazil. Normalizing revenue growth assumptions from their financial...

The October 2017 Las Vegas shooting was the deadliest shooting in modern American history, but little scholarship has examined the public uproar in its wake, particularly in digital networks. Drawing on a corpus of 100,000 public Tweets and 1,119,638 unique words written in reaction to the shooting, this article addresses this lacuna by investigati...

This article examines how different forms of digitalization affect inequality in Europe. Using a cross-national dataset of economic development and digitalization across a range of regression specifications including country and time fixed effects, this article explores the heterogeneous relationships of disparate forms of digitalization – human ca...

Hong Kong is a storied city of dynamic ethnonational identities, with attention growing around a Hongkonger identity purportedly distinct from a Chinese one. Using mixed methods, this article critically appraises the social construction of the Hongkonger identity by adopting a relational approach to ethnonational identification. Multivariate regres...

Scott Feld’s focus theory stimulated one of the most important traditions in the study of the concept of homophily in connection to individual action and network behavior across sociology and organizational studies. This article uses Feld’s focus theory as a starting point of reference to examine the major theoretical developments and empirical app...

The econometric measurement of inequality and poverty in advanced capitalist economies has been preoccupied with aggregate measures of relative deprivation, namely, the Gini Index and a relative poverty rate, both of which are based on economic distances from the population median. Using the case of Hong Kong, this article demonstrates the limitati...

Through ethnographic fieldwork in cosmetic surgery clinics in Seoul, South Korea in 2018, in this article I investigate how professional clinicians persuade consumers to purchase surgery during consultations. Enamored by the ascendancy of the Korean cultural industry, many non-Koreans are drawn to Korea for the storied, domestic brand of surgery be...

Sociological research richly documents the many ways through which education becomes a form of convertible capital, but focuses less on the cultural schemas that graduates possess and use to respond to disruptions of capital conversion processes. Using the case of international degree holders in Hong Kong, this article draws upon Bourdieu’s theory...

Embodied goods like cosmetic surgery comprise a unique and growing consumer industry, most of all in the Asia‐Pacific, yet the rationalisation processes motivating their purchase are less understood. Addressing this lacuna, this article builds upon open‐ended surveys and semi‐structured interviews of consumers in Seoul, South Korea to articulate a...

Conflicts are everyday sources of professional disagreement in the workplace. This article advances the study of professional conflicts by examining the symbolic interactionist processes through which professionals in South Korea cooperatively work through conflicts. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a large hospital in Seoul in 2018, it...

Sociological and cultural research on market participation has been preoccupied with creative markets and traditional labor markets, overlooking alternate types of markets, particularly those of human goods which have proliferated in Asia. This article analyzes South Korea's cosmetic surgery market to examine how and why consumers participate in ma...

This article commemorates the legacy of bell hooks by bringing core themes in her oeuvre to bear on several debates on the conceptualization and use of qualitative research methods in sociology. Despite the uptake of qualitative research methods in sociology as a launching point for critical inquiry with analytical and political overtones, they hav...

Purpose This article investigates how medical specialists as professionals and elective cosmetic surgery tourists as consumers relationally negotiate decisions within the cosmetic surgery clinic. Drawing on a Goffmanian approach, this article explores the processual social structures that shape consumer logics in the clinic as a social space and as...

Reflecting on an (auto)ethnographic study from the standpoint of a person of colour, this article uses the narrative myth of Gaia to analyze and structure the recollection of over 5 years of teaching people of colour at a large Canadian university and distill from them the character of pedagogical care. This article demonstrates how narrative metap...

Organizations have been an important setting in which social capital exchanges (SCEs) occur, but little work has been done to distinguish two predominant species of organizations in the social network literature: voluntary associations and formal work organizations. Addressing this lacuna, this article comparatively examines how the two organizatio...

In 2019, the government of Taiwan legalized same-sex marriage, the first to do so in Asia. Yet, despite its celebration as a sign of liberal progress, legalization appears at odds with the results of referendums that show a majority of Taiwan citizens oppose LGBTQ acceptance, following a steady decline in tolerance for LGBTQ people in Taiwan. To ex...

How do people form personal ties? A consensus holds in sociological and social network scholarship that in-person networks are dominated by status homophily and that guanxi networks rely extensively on balance. This article argues that social networking sites (SNSs) reconceptualize the character of homophily and tie-formation altogether in guanxi n...

The subject of (de)colonization in the academy has witnessed an upsurge in attention over the past two decades across the social sciences and the Global North-South divide. This article critically examines central themes that have guided the conceptualization of decolonization thus far and foregrounds the convergences that decolonization shares wit...

This article develops a novel ethnographic toolkit for examining the networking pathways that hard-to-reach populations use to socially survive. The toolkit consists of two sampling strategies (snowball and purposive sampling) and three data collection practices (role shuttling, site shuttling, and autoethnography). This article illustrates the app...

This article uses the case of law firms in Hong Kong to develop a processual approach for understanding lateral mobility in professional service firms. Based on the analysis of 1,461 lateral moves of law firm partners reported in 300 monthly issues of the official journal of the Law Society of Hong Kong during 1994–2018, as well as archival data an...

(1) Purpose: This paper aims to examine the economic costs of protests at micro-to-firm, market sector and aggregate levels. This paper then develops institutional policy recommendations for allaying these costs. (2) Design/methodology/approach: This paper conducts a case study of the anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong by examining news a...

Qualitative methodological development has produced canonical tendencies that over-complexify and fix a fluid and lived social world. Meanwhile, critical theory has produced critiques on methodology but without enough attention to the qualitative tradition. I bridge these gaps by using an Adornoian position to interrogate the concepts of systematic...

Purpose This paper aims to examine how financial technology (FinTech) knowledge from foreign firms flows into and among elite commercial banks in Hong Kong’s financial sector to drive innovation. Design/methodology/approach Using social network analysis and regression analysis on a novel database of patents held by Hong Kong’s elite commercial ban...

China’s rapid rise as a global power in the early twenty-first century has significant economic and political consequences to markets and legal systems across the world, particularly in Asia. Focusing on the rapid growth of Chinese law firms in Hong Kong in recent years, this article examines how a contested gateway for the globalization of Chinese...

The dual trajectories of Japanese sociology and Japan itself are poised at a watershed moment in their shared history. In recent years, Japanese sociology has enlarged its international presence in unprecedented fashion and the Tokyo Olympics have positioned the global spotlight on the entire nation of Japan, making it an opportune moment to reflec...

As digitalization binds society to an apparently perpetual acceleration, questions about the nature of time and speed have gained new urgency in the social sciences. Yet, theorizations of these issues have neglected their implications for social life and generations. Linking these lacunae, this article articulates how digital media and social netwo...

This article examines how literature is a networked social space of political repression and resistance, refracting broader contestations over national sovereignty, self-determination, and identity. Politicizing the traditionally apolitical “world of letters” in Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, this article employs a novel...

The legitimacy of feminist ways of knowing and the well-being of marginalized identities they attend to are endangered by a “post-truth,” North American political climate. There thus arises an urgent need to examine and vindicate the significance of feminist methods (FM) for women and people of color (WPC). This article contributes to this goal by...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how inequality – in the way ethnography as a research tool itself is used – underwrites many of the methodological tensions in the recently published and widely-debated On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman. Design/methodology/approach The author conducts an in-depth, crit...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the study of social capital focused on the level at which it is embodied, cross-comparing two prominent camps that have emerged in the social capital literature: a communal level and an individual level. Design/methodology/approach: This paper reviews the intersections and departures between communal...

Scholars have charged Adorno of hypocritically abandoning efforts to articulate possibilities of social transformation, a propensity he emphasizes is central to social critique and sociocritical sociology. Keeping consistent with his fundamentally negative position, this essay reexamines democracy by scoping his work and reorganizing its philosophi...

During a night of severe pain and weakness, I found several plausible-sounding diagnoses online: occipital neuralgia, nerve damage, and meningitis. The next day, I consulted a physician who did not offer professional guidance; instead the physician suggested tests entirely based on my self-diagnoses. What resulted was an unnecessary array of length...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to challenge the practice of having, using, and constructing any canon in sociological theory. This paper argues that the elitism of American sociology and the forms of inequality it engenders are sustained by the construction of a canon itself. Design/methodology/approach: This paper adopts a conceptual appro...

Background: Patients and clinicians are often required to make tradeoffs between the relative benefits and harms of multiple treatment options. Combining network meta-analysis results with user preferences can be useful when choosing among several treatment alternatives. Objective: Using cholesterol-lowering statin drugs as a case study, we aime...

Existing methodological efforts subsume the interview into broad epistemological abstractions, neglecting actual mechanics of the interview as practice, and dismiss linguistic and cultural asymmetry in the interview as a matter of (in)adequate resources. Reflecting on 24 semi-structured interviews exploring social media use among Hong Kong youth, t...

Studies of social media and its uses have focused on how it shapes behavior but less so with emotion. Overcoming this limitation, this article investigates the role of emotion in understanding and shaping actions online, and how, conversely, different uses of social media are leveraged to manage and express emotions, focusing on Facebook and Instag...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the nature, gravity, and consequences of physician use of social media use surpass professional identity, by bringing to attention the nuanced, potential conflicts between patient-physician interests in current educational policies. Design/methodology/approach: Analyzing a case study of a ph...

Criticism against quantitative methods has grown in the context of “big-data”, charging an empirical, quantitative agenda with expanding to displace qualitative and theoretical approaches indispensable to the future of sociological research. Underscoring the strong convergences between the historical development of empiricism in the scientific meth...

Mainstream structuralist and new social movement theoretical approaches to studying social movements in Western sociological traditions fail to explain why the Sunflower movement fostered solidarity among the Taiwanese while Occupy Central caused public division in Hong Kong. In response, I argue that the successes and failures of both were a funct...

The family as an institution and support unit has generated much discussion on its role for stress and mental health problems. Against this backdrop, this paper re-examines the family as a factor and as a locus of cultural norms and expectations derived from the society within which it exists. Using the cases of immigration, sexual minorities, and...

Existing social movement theories subsume protests into abstract conceptualizations of society, and current ethnographic studies of protests overburden description. Through a case study of London protests, this article transcends these limitations by articulating a social ecological approach consisting of critical ethnography and autoethnography th...

The stress process model in the sociological study of stress has changed over the thirty years of its use, developed continually to reflect changes in society and to include intellectual refinement. This paper represents a review that aims to do the same, filling the gaps in the original model with the inclusion of major developments in its structu...

Anti-Sinoism in Taiwan has penetrated the state, crystallizing into an ethnic conflict that has escalated to include induced immigration, and pressured emigration. Contemporary constructions of what it means to be Taiwanese both echo anti-Sinoist themes from historical social movements, and ultimately infuse civic nationalism with anti-Sinoism.

This article applies the stress process model to navigate and evaluate the familial norms embodied in the East Asian culture, grounded on Confucianist principles, in terms of its impact on East Asian immigrants’ mental health and low rates of participation in mental health services. Explicating the cultural principles at work in East Asian familial...

Using the Sunflower movement as a case study, this article seeks to articulate a theoretical framework to evaluate online "free spaces" as tools for political mobilization. To this end, this article conducts a thematic and content analysis of 151 posts on the official Facebook page of the Sunflower movement. Key results uncover four thematic functi...

Reflexivity involves the ability to understand how one's social locations and experiences of advantage or disadvantage have shaped the way one understands the world. The capacity for reflexivity is crucial because it informs clinical decisions, which can lead to improvements in service delivery and patient outcomes. In this article, we present a sc...

Context or setting: This study examined the development of reflexivity within health professional clinical training programs. Reflexivity is the ability to engage with and understand how one’s social locations have shaped how we understand the world. This insight is crucial for clinicians as their clients’ social locations may vastly differ from th...