This monograph is yet another example of an academic milestone set between covers without much consideration for what should distinguish a book from a dissertation. It retains all the conventions of a dissertation – elaborate theorizing, extended descriptions of methods, lengthy concept explications and reviews of the literature, obligatory chapter introductions and conclusions about what will be covered and what has been covered, constant reminders of central propositions, and confident assertions of research findings and significant theoretical implications. As a product of author Jianhua Yao's doctoral work in sociology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, it bears the imprimatur of an assiduous learning process. As a volume for sharing with larger scholarly communities, its achievements are more modest.

The title alone promises a great deal – to inform us about contemporary China's “knowledge workers” writ large through the specific circumstances of “reform and resistance” in the country's publishing industry. The scrutiny actually is confined to a very particular sector of knowledge workers, namely, media producers; and the background discussion ranges over a good deal of past scholarship in this area. Vast swaths of other types of knowledge workers, say, computer scientists or accountants or lawyers, go unexamined, while the question of how media actors might resemble or differ from others who exert themselves mentally for a living goes unaddressed. Additionally, the specific empirical focus is not on publishing workers generally, but on mid- and low-level book editors in publishing houses, with the most textured information coming from fewer than 20 editors at two particular Shanghai publishing companies. This strategy of focusing the lens ever more microscopically, as the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz advocated, is commendable in itself. But the original research here is never satisfactorily reconnected back to the broader field of media production, let alone placed in the larger landscape of knowledge work.

Furthermore, while this study brings together a great deal of information on media changes during the post-Mao reform era, the material on the “resistance” side is meagre and tenuous. In a work that explicitly aims not only to analyse how people who labour in the field of knowledge production are faring, but also to help improve their labouring conditions, the minimal research yield fails to support bigger claims about class consciousness, labour empowerment and worker advocacy. The preponderance of contextual material on labour conflict and organizing comes from very different fields, such as electronics manufacturing, while the examples drawn from publishing trade organizations that serve largely ceremonial functions make for strained analogies. In short, the book does not deliver on the exceedingly large theoretical, empirical and pragmatic scope it sets out to cover.

So what contributions emerge? Most obviously, drawing on statistics and documentation from Chinese-language sources as well as from the original survey and interviews, this study indeed provides useful information about changes in the configuration of Chinese book production and fairly drastic transformations in the nature of editorial work during the reform period. At the institutional level, the changes in publishing include the supplanting of public agencies by market-driven companies, the formation of large conglomerates, and the supposedly cautious but remarkably rampant admission of both domestic and foreign private investment. In the editorial workplace, contingent contracts have supplanted lifetime tenure, social benefits have been slashed, working pressures have multiplied and intensified, pay is low and dissatisfaction is high. None of these findings are surprising, but cumulatively they serve to reinforce a familiar picture.

Acknowledging the work of his mentor, media studies scholar Vincent Mosco, the author also highlights the important observation that communication scholarship has not done justice to questions of media labour. He applies a tri-partite theoretical framework of commodification, structuration and spatialization to analyse the situation of Chinese book editors that is admirable in its ambitions, if not in its results. The issues raised through this approach – tensions between state and market, the interplay of structure and agency, the human ramifications of globalization – are significant, even if the discussion more often confuses than clarifies. Finally, although the evidence and examples brought to bear in this work are weak and unconvincing, the author's interests in class definitions and labour conflict and solidarity in the context of knowledge work, and his concern for the potential of trade and employee organizations to benefit intellectual as well as industrial workers, take us into terrain worth exploring.