Terry Woronov's ethnography, Class Work, takes the reader on a sobering journey through vocational school classrooms full of sleeping students, who are supposed to study subjects such as computer technology, landscaping, accounting, tourism or construction site management. Its conceptual innovation of “numeric capital” highlights the creation of social value via examination regimes and discourses of cultural norms and social capital. Class Work provides deep and original insights into the “nascent formation of a new urban working class” (p. 8), which are of particular interest for scholars of labour, education, public services and social inequality in China, as well as comparative sociologists focusing on education and social stratification in developing countries.

The book begins with a seemingly simple question: why are the students sleeping through class? Chinese common sense would blame this behaviour on the students' questionable morality, and their lack of diligence, intelligence and “human quality” (suzhi). The vocational education (VE) students end up in VE for failing the High School Entrance Exam (HSEE), one of two high-stakes exams in a student's life which largely determine his or her future position in society. Common sense would stress the role of traditional Confucian values, which promote the love for education and despise VE students who supposedly do not invest sufficient time in building up human capital, and thus deserve their position in the working classes.

Class Work sets out to challenge such discourses. Based on a year of fieldwork, it explores the life of students in two urban vocational schools in the city of Nanjing. The Bridge School was affiliated to the Municipal Engineering Office, whereas the Canal School was set up by a distance-learning university. The Bridge School straddled the fence between socialist legacies and market institutions. A part of its staff still held permanent public service jobs with low salaries and high job security, and the few teachers among them usually did a good job. The majority of Bridge School teachers and all Canal School teachers worked on a flexible basis, most of them being graduate students or retired teachers. The quality of their teaching was rather low, and they frequently did not show up for class or switched jobs. The skills taught in the de-vocationalized curricula were often overly academic, out-dated or simply unrelated to the actual jobs students could hope to get after graduation.

The students originated from families of either the urban working-classes or migrant workers. The schools served as melting pots where students socialized across cleavages such as the hukou system, rather than building identities based on them. Most students also did not engage in systematic and goal-oriented career planning based on a professional identity. Middle-class families usually can and will afford private schools to bring their offspring back on the academic track. In the Bridge School, a small share of the students attended programmes that led them to stable and secure public sector jobs. Some of these students actually passed the HSEE and chose VE to avoid the financial and emotional costs of the academic track. Others had been bribed into special classes for disadvantaged children by their parents. For the majority of the students, family connections (guanxi) were the most important pathway into jobs, which were often unrelated to the nature of their studies. Participating in school-organized internship programmes and searching for a job in Nanjing's vast job fairs appeared to be a strategy of last resort for those whose families lacked social capital. The students largely found their way into precarious jobs at the lower end of Nanjing's service economy, which rarely offered upwards mobility. Horizontal mobility however was intense, and here the contract teachers had been role models for the students. Their position in the labour market was however increasingly exposed to pressures from growing numbers of unemployed university graduates from above, and the inflow of migrant workers from below.

Class Work interprets sleeping through class as a strategy of passive resistance (most notably against teachers), and a seemingly reasonable response to the dysfunctionalities of Chinese VE. Among its few drawbacks are avoidable errors such as misspelled pinyin (p. 56) or references missing in the bibliography (p. 144). Furthermore, the conceptual framework of “numeric capital” is not fully convincing in merging theoretical contributions of Marx and Foucault. Provided the commodity fetish were applicable to human beings rather than commodities only, it would still appear contradictory that numeric capital conceals the labour of the child (p. 14f), and at the same time blames the child and its supposedly insufficient dedication to studies for its entry into VE and the working classes (p. 149). Despite a certain conceptual fuzziness, Class Work remains a captivating and highly recommendable ethnography.