Borrowed legitimacy and beseeched resources: How competing professionals negotiate identities and forge symbiosis within Chinese community corrections

Abstract

The recent formalization of Chinese community corrections (CCC), with its explicit emphasis on the professional provision of rehabilitative services to offenders, signals Chinese policymakers striving to create a penal modernist project. It also instigates antagonism between justice and service-oriented professionals, who seek to assert and carve out respective jurisdictions over rehabilitative work. There is a dearth of research touching on the ways in which potential tensions, or contractionary professional identities, are managed in practice. Drawing on a set of ethnographic and interview data gleaned from a large Chinese city, which pioneered and implemented the professional model of community corrections, this study examines the negotiation of professional power and interprofessional dynamics in rehabilitative work. The analysis suggests that during professional contestation, CCC actors deploy strategies to maintain identity boundaries, while making compromises and ceding jurisdictional authority to the opposing group. The negotiated order is accomplished in this hybridized institutional field, primarily through variegated demands of professionals involved for capacity enhancement, legitimacy reinforcement, or pragmatic survival. A symbiotic, but continually fractious, configuration is thus forged, blurring professional boundaries and breeding reciprocal benefits that sustain collaboration. Implications for ameliorating CCC's rehabilitative work are discussed.