Neijuan: An Investigation of Overtime Work Among Chinese Urban White-Collar Employees

This paper focuses on the issue of overtime work among Chinese urban white-collar employees and aims to explain why employees are willing to work overtime and why the Red Queen Effect phenomenon (neijuan) has become so common in the Chinese workplace, from employees’ subjective perspective. Through a review of prior research on overtime, we identified problems in the logic of supply and demand that has often been employed, and introduce Baudrillard’s logic of social differentiation as an alternative. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data about work, overtime, and daily life conditions from 22 white-collar participants from diverse backgrounds, who routinely work overtime despite relative material affluence. Our analysis of the data revealed the source of overtime work in a context of material affluence to be social differentiation processes constructed by signs with strong relevance with overtime activity including consumption, career ethic, interpersonal relationship, job keeping, and company market position improvement. Differentiation of professional capability was shown, on the other hand, to be an inadequate explanation for overtime work. Our findings are summarized in a conceptual framework describing the relationships between overtime and multiple forms of social differentiation.