Disreputable exchanges are morally disapproved and often legally prohibited exchanges that exacerbate and reproduce social inequality but remain ubiquitous. Although previous literature explains the phenomenon by material interests and structural relations, we propose a cultural approach based on three major conceptions of culture: culture in relations, culture in interactions, and culture in inequality. We illustrate this approach by a case study of China’s hongbao (the red envelope) exchange, a typical disreputable exchange through informal medical payment. Drawing on interviews with doctors and patients, we find that participants of the exchange mobilize items from their cultural repertoires, such as professional ethics, face, power, fairness, and affection, to redefine different situations of interactions and project positive self–images to render their problematic exchanges morally acceptable to each other. Moreover, as the participants’ responses to our vignettes show, they negatively evaluate the exchanges in general moral terms, such as equality and fairness, but culturally justify their own involvement. This discrepancy between saying and doing tends to legitimize the disreputable exchange amid enduring public outrage and institutional prohibition. These cultural processes contribute to the reproduction of unequal access to scarce health care resources. Findings of this research not only offer insights into understanding disreputable exchanges but also contribute to research on other cases of social problems in which deviant behaviors are morally and culturally justified.

In this essay, we review the burgeoning field of the cultural sociology of China. We first describe the trajectory and features of the development of the cultural sociology of China. We argue that the evolution of this scholarship has involved three intertwined social, political, and intellectual processes across national boundaries: (1) the production, diffusion, reception, and reproduction of modern social scientific paradigms from the West, especially the USA, to China; (2) the tensions between China studies as “area studies” in western academia and sociology as a discipline; (3) the entangled relations between politics and knowledge in both China and the West. Then we review existing cultural sociological studies of various topics in three broad categories: economy, politics, and civil society. We end our essay with a discussion of promising topics and agenda for future research and potential challenges.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate Chinese parents' buying behaviour towards baby milk powder in the context of China's One-Child policy. The study examined the Chinese culture, social trends, the influence of product attributes among urban Chinese parents and parents' product knowledge of baby milk powder. This study is an exploratory study. A questionnaire was used to collect the data from 400 respondents at Shangdong University, China. There are 312 respondents' questionnaires used to analyse the results. The results were discovered through the use of four research objectives. Firstly, the results reflect that family and friends do have an influence on buying decisions on baby milk powder. There parents rely more on word-of-mouth communication and shop assistants play a negative role in parents' buying decision. Secondly, mothers need to opt for baby milk powder for their babies due to the flood of women into the job market and incomes from dual earners. Thirdly, parents perceive high price with good quality; the preferred brand by the parents have a significant impact on their brand loyalty and parents generally hold positive views of foreign-made baby milk powder. Fourthly, parents have a high level of subjective and objective knowledge of baby milk powder. This study was limited to the sample size and the geographic area. Consequently, results of this study can not be regarded as representative of the entire Chinese population. The results may help marketers develop more effective marketing programmes to affect consumers' buying decision. In addition, this study is one of a few studies that apply the theory of buying behaviour in the context of China's One-Child policy in the marketing field.