Probe into the “Mania for School District Houses”——Research into the Motivations for Purchasing School District Houses from the Perspective of Cultural Capital

In recent years,the"mania for school district houses"has disrupted the housing market and undermined education equity and class mobility,thus becoming a common concern.Most existing research focus on market motivations for purchasing school district houses while neglecting the connections between school district houses and cultural and social elements in the process of class reproduction.To make up for this deficiency this article introduces the neighborhood-based cultural capital theory to explore the diversified motivations,the processes of motivation formation,and the determining factors in purchasing school district houses.Reviews and analysis of interview materials revealed that while theories based on western experience can explain the basic purchasing motivations and their formation processes,there are distinct and varied purchasing motivations in China,more comprehensive and complex forms of capital exchange,and more dynamic factors that impact purchases of school district houses.Suggestions on solving the"mania for school district houses"are also presented.

Theorizing Belt and Road construction mode from institutional and cultural perspectives

There is a gap between the great vision and high-quality targets of the Belt and Road Initiative(BRI) and Western recognition of them, which challenges Chinese and Western scholars. This gap should be narrowed by conducting in-depth case studies and comparative studies at the project level. In recent years, the international academic community has paid increasing attention to Chinese outward foreign direct investment(FDI), but Belt and Road construction is much broader in scope, comprising not only FDI projects but also China-financed projects and emerging mixed projects. Our investigation, observation, and examination of the BRI projects find that compared to their Western counterparts, Chinese enterprises have less experience in doing business in other countries and often pay less attention to institutional and cultural differences between China and the host countries. Thus, revisiting the institutional and cultural turn in economic geography and employing its ideas to analyze the BRI projects and summarize their construction modes may contribute to the development of both economic geography and the BRI. This paper first briefly reviews the background and research trends of the institutional and cultural turn and then summarizes three major modes of Belt and Road construction, namely, EPC(Engineering Procurement Construction)-based projects, concession-based projects, and FDI;finally, it draws on the institutional and cultural turn to classify the BRI projects according to the two indicators of "Breadth and Depth of Territorial Embeddedness" and "Destructive Effect of a Project and/or Technology" into four types: transformative, supportive, ordinary projects and overseas industrial cooperation parks. Different institutional and cultural sensitivity can be observed for each type of project. The preliminary theorization proposed in this paper may offer a potential framework for further research on the BRI.