ALSA 2025 meeting

Drawing on insights from sociology and new institutional economics, Extralegal Governance provides the first comprehensive account of China's illegal markets by applying a socio-economic approach. It considers social legitimacy and state repression in examining the nature of illegal markets. It examines how power dynamics and varying levels of punishment shape exchange relationships between buyers and sellers. It identifies context-specific risks and explains how private individuals and organizations address these risks by developing extralegal governance institutions to facilitate social cooperation across various illegal markets. Adopting a multiple-case study design to sample China's illegal markets, this book utilizes four cases - street vending, small-property-rights housing, corrupt exchanges, and online loan sharks - to examine how market participants foster cooperation and social order in illegal markets.

This article examines inmate hierarchies in a large-scale women’s prison in China, both the formal hierarchy imposed by prison officers and the informal status hierarchy that emerges spontaneously among inmates. It investigates the legitimacy of the formal hierarchy and the interactions between formal and informal hierarchies, arguing that the formal hierarchy retains legitimacy when it aligns with the informal but loses legitimacy when the two systems conflict. Tension between the two systems lead to a loss of inmate confidence in the formal hierarchy and creates a feeling of unfairness and frustration within inmate society. An illegitimate formal hierarchy fosters feelings of unfairness among inmates and erodes their confidence in prison authority. Drawing on empirical data from field observations and 75 semi-structured interviews (41 inmates and 34 frontline prison officers), this research advances the study of social organization in women’s prisons in a non-Western context.
Keywords: social hierarchy, inmate code, legitimacy, women’s prison, China