Weichu Wang

My dissertation is an institutional and social history of maintenance in Chinese textile industry, from 1949 to 1966. Based on newly-available archives and oral histories, it explores how central and local leaders, factory managers, technicians and workers conceptualised maintenance activities and translated their theories into institutional arrangements, i.e., the distribution of authority, accounting mechanisms, incentive structures and resource allocation regulations, and the organizations through which those decisions were carried out. My dissertation also analyzes maintenance practices on the shop floor as they mutually shaped worker identities, shop floor politics and grassroots mediation of central policies.