Description: 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.
Brief description: Peng Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of The Chinese Mafia: Organized Crime, Corruption and Extralegal Protection (2017). His research interests include organized crime, illegal markets, corruption, economic sociology, bureaucracy, and governance.