Wu Chaojin and Zhang Jinrong on Goofing Off

Wu Chaojin and Zhang Jinrong, “A Sociological Interpretation of ‘Goofing Off:’ Where Did This Online Youth Dilemma Come From?”[1]

Introduction by David Ownby

Introduction

Wu Chaolin and Zhang Jinrong are both at the School of Philosophy and Sociology at Jilin University in Changchun. The text translated here examines the phenomenon of young people goofing off at work, generally by finding an online distraction so that it looks like they are working when they are actually playing the latest version of Angry Birds (I know that reference dates me…). The text is part of a larger discussion of youth issues, an increasingly important theme in China, where youth unemployment has reached 20% and gap years are becoming popular as anxious college graduates and parents find that good jobs are few and far between.

My impression is that this is the kind of text that circulates widely online in China (the same text, or almost the same text, often appears on various websites under slightly different titles—I have no idea how copyrights and money work in this context), although I have no idea how much impact it has. The argument is quite scholarly, placing goofing off in the larger context of the historical evolution of work environments. The authors’ central point is that the advent of the online world has largely destroyed the boundary between public and private. Employers pile on the work because employees are always available; employees fight back by goofing off at work.

The authors thus have considerable sympathy for the young people who are goofing off. It is not a moral flaw on their part, but rather a natural reaction to a changing world in which they cannot always get the job or the future that has been promised to them. In their somewhat tired conclusion, however, they call for young people to overcome their current malaise, just as they call on the government to provide affordable housing and on companies to respect the labor laws. Easier said than done.

Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby

Translation

The “Goofing Off” Phenomenon Has People Worried

The expression “goofing off 摸鱼[lit., “fishing”]” comes from another expression - “fishing in troubled waters 浑水摸鱼” – the original meaning of which is to find a way to exploit some problematic situation for your own profit. By now it has come to mean playing around while on the job, going online to do things unrelated to work. At first it basically had to do with the work world, but the term became popular online and now also is used to refer to students who use their smartphones and computers to do things that that have nothing to do with class.

Recently, goofing off seems to be everywhere. In November of 2021, GOME Retail carried out an investigation and found that a certain number of their employees were spending their time at work chatting online, playing online games, and listening to music, and they punished those employees. This news rippled out, and goofing off became a hot online search item. Even earlier, there had been news reports that certain companies had installed surveillance cameras in work areas to keep employees from goofing off, which led to worker disaffection. As companies took up such measures, workers honed their strategies, and tips on “how to goof off in peace”, “techniques for goofing off”, and “shortcuts for changing computer screens” made the rounds. Goofing off has become part of the workplace furniture that cannot be ignored.

Having grown up online, young people are Internet natives and have been deeply influenced by online life. Surveys have shown that young people are also the “chief offenders” in terms of goofing off. At the same time, young people are the leading force in promoting social development, and the healthy development of young people has always been the focus of attention across society. As a result, the phenomenon of goofing off in the workplace has sparked public concern and discussion.

Why should young people, who should be working hard, instead be goofing off? What kind of values does goofing off reflect? How should society lead young people away from their addition to goofing off? The answers to these questions have not only great practical significance in leading young people out of their current “ideological muddle,” but also have considerable theoretical significance as sociology attempts to understand the blurring of the boundary between work and leisure in the Internet age.

What Is Goofing Off All About?

While goofing off has attracted widespread attention from society, academic studies are rare; taking the comprehensive CNKI database as an example, there is very little research on goofing off in the Internet era (although there is some discussion of “fishing” as one form of lyric verse in traditional Chinese poetry) The existing literature is mostly made up of news reports, lacking in both breadth and depth, most of which suggest that goofing off is a moral issue because young people are using the Internet to avoid work. However, looking at interviews, research, and news reports, it seems that goofing off is not necessarily related to individual moral choices but instead sometimes has to do with a lack of choice, as when, for instance, people have to work such long hours that they can only chat with family members while they are at work.

Moreover, even managers have different attitudes toward employees' goofing off. Tesla founder Elon Musk has publicly supported employees’ listening to music at work, and ByteDance chairman Zhang Yiming left an employee chat group on his own initiative after having been called out for criticizing employees for chatting. So managers are also inconsistent in their views of goofing off. Simply viewing goofing off as a moral issue does not help the public understand the phenomenon or resolve the labor-management conflicts it causes. According to our research, goofing off has a rich sociological meaning, closely related to changes in the nature of work, labor relations, and survival anxieties of employees with the advent of the Internet era.

Taking the rise of the Internet as a starting point, this article combines semi-structured in-depth interviews and questionnaire surveys to explore the motivation behind young people's goofing off from the perspective of the relationship between work and leisure. As an exploratory study, we mainly selected interview subjects through networks of relatives and classmates, all of whom were office workers. “Youth” were defined as being between the ages of 14 and 35 (following the Chinese Medium and Long-Term Youth Development Plan, 2016-2025). A total of 12 young office workers were interviewed, and all interviewees gave their informed consent.

How Goofing Off Came to Be, From the Perspective of the Relationship Between Work and Leisure

The evolution of the work-leisure relationship

From a manager’s perspective, goofing off means that workers are mixing work and leisure, and especially that they are spending work on leisure activities, which affects labor productivity, which is why managers are happy to see their employees devote leisure time to work. Therefore, understanding the relationship between work and leisure is a precondition for understanding goofing off.

Leisure, as the opposite to work, was not taken seriously by the public until the rise of the tertiary industry in modern times. In slave society, slaves were the private property of their owners and could be bought and sold. Slaves lost their personal freedom and were forced to work, while the fruits of their labor were consumed by slave owners, whose main activity was leisure. In essence, slave society was divided into two groups, slave owners and slaves, whose lives were defined by leisure and work, respectively. During this period, however, productivity was low, and even slave owners did not have much entertainment to fill their leisure time. Similarly, leisure was not understood in distinction to work, and both were seen as part of a “destiny” that defined daily life.

With the arrival of agrarian civilization, people's productive lives were greatly influenced by natural conditions, and “eating according to nature’s provisions” meant that people had little choice in terms of when and where they worked to feed themselves, which of course also meant that they were unable to choose their moments of leisure or what that leisure consisted of. In short, in agricultural society, most people had no choice but to follow the laws of nature, thus working from “sunup to sundown,” as the expression has it, in which work and leisure were mingled together and not distinguished one from the other. Or as the poem put it, "Although the children could not plow and weave, they nonetheless learned to plant melons under the shade of the mulberry tree," where rural children appear to view farm work as a kind of entertainment. During this era, managers, be they the government or landlords, did not engage in much supervision of agricultural production, which had a strongly private nature. For this reason, goofing off was rarely punished directly, but instead was regulated more by the moral force of public opinion in rural society.

In the industrial age, with the emergence of big machines and industrial factories, people overcame the constraints of natural conditions to a certain extent, gaining more control over labor production. At the same time, the capitalist employment relationship gradually matured, and as workers increasingly entered the factories, their production performance was linked to personal income, and more importantly, the profit of the enterprise, and the enterprise began to manage labor production. Subsequently, a series of management theories and practices, represented by Taylor's scientific management method and the Ford assembly line came into being, aimed at improving production efficiency.

Assembly lines greatly improved labor productivity, but at the same time, workers were bound to the assembly line, just like in the scene from Chaplain’s "Modern Times" – the individual could not escape from the assembly line, which resulted in the division of leisure and work and led to human alienation. As Marx put it, "Labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”[2] In this harsh work environment, laborers often view work as a burden, and leisure activities become a way for masses to seek release from work fatigue.

With the improvement of production efficiency and the implementation of the policies of the welfare state, workers' leisure time increased, and people began to pay attention to leisure activities, as reflected in the publication of Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899. In this era, leisure and work were seen as divided - both in terms of time itself, the omnipresent factory clocks marking a clear division between working and leisure hours - but also in terms of content, the factory and the home being separate, work and leisure activities being in different spheres. This was equally true on the cognitive level, in the sense that people drew clear distinctions between work and leisure.

With the rapid development of online technology and the spread and popularization of various kinds of smart devices, disruptive changes occurred in traditional forms of production and lifestyles, and the industrial technology grounded in factory production gradually gave way to online technologies such as data acquisition, e-commerce, cloud computing, remote control, artificial intelligence, etc. Computers, mobile phones, and other smart devices have replaced industrial assembly lines to become the most popular production tools for workers.

At the same time, the Internet also created new leisure spaces, such as social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat, or video platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, and apps such as Douyu and Huaya are found on nearly all new mobile phones. Such apps have penetrated and transformed people’s leisure time, the most obvious result being that once the workers have received their instructions from their company on their computers, they can stay there and readily order whatever kind of food they want from an app without shopping or cooking. In other words, the boundary between production and life, work and leisure is now fuzzy, which has given birth to goofing off.

Two Features of Goofing Off

Although there are differences in the existing literature as to how goofing off is defined, what behaviors fall into the category, and how we should think about such behaviors, most people acknowledge two key characteristics of goofing off:

The first is its online nature, which is the biggest difference between what we are talking about now and similar behaviors in the past. In concrete terms, in online society, people’s work and play both occur on the Internet, and switching from one to the other only requires only a few strokes on the keyboard.

“Sometimes when I'm tired, I just browse Weibo, and my boss usually doesn't notice, and as long as my colleagues don’t say anything, my boss doesn’t find out. Of course, sometimes I just look at the news, which my boss has seen me doing, but he didn’t say anything.” (XZ, female, employee in a household appliance company).

“When I was an undergraduate, I took a lot of courses in computers, and I still remember how to switch in and out of different programs. Sometimes I get tired, and I’ll just play a little game on WeChat. It is not time consuming, and you can quit the game just like that.” (ZZ, male, civil servant).

Previously, work and leisure were kept separate, especially in the traditional industrial model where production was tightly organized around assembly lines, which meant that the actions of employees could be easily observed with the naked eye. Today, it is very easy to goof off and not get caught, unless management uses special tools for this. These tools are themselves part of Internet technology as well and include measures of data traffic as well as video surveillance. In other words, people are trapped in the iron cage of online technology, whether they are aware of it or not.

The second characteristic of goofing off is that it is engaged with things that have nothing to do with work, mainly personal leisure activities, which also marks the difference between goofing off and working. Being at work combines work time and work content, while goofing off combines work time and leisure content, and working overtime is the mirror image of goofing off, meaning that you are working in a time that should be devoted to leisure. At present, the popularity of both goofing off and working overtime in the workplace reflects the erosion of the traditional labor production process by online technology, that is, blurring the boundary between work and leisure.

“I work in customer service and often need to communicate with buyers on Ali Want and Wechat. If I’m not busy, I will listen to music, chat with my brother, or browse TikTok.” (LS, female, Taobao customer service).

“There are a lot of home decoration videos on TikTok. Sometimes when I’m not working, I browse TikTok to see other people’s projects, which can also help me learn something.” (ZBG, male, decoration worker).

How We Got Here: The Rise of Online Society and the Dilemma of Youth Development

As a common group behavior found in companies, schools, and other organizations, goofing off has a social existence that goes beyond individual morality and is intimately related to the rise of online society and the development dilemma encountered by young people in this period of social transition.

Technological Colonization Brought about by the Rise of Online Society

With the development of online technology and its widespread application to all kinds of networks, humanity has begun to enter online society, which has had a comprehensive and profound impact on individual behavior and social structure. As the sociologist Manuel Castells (b. 1942) puts it, "As a historical trend, the dominant functions and processes of the information age are increasingly organized in networks that serve as the new social forms of our society, and the diffusion of networked logic substantially changes the operations and outcomes of production, experience, power, and cultural processes." Specifically, as a "mobile force," network technology not only changes the traditional industrial structure but also erases the boundary between work and leisure, leading to the “colonization of the life world" and giving rise to the phenomenon of goofing off.

To be more specific, the wide application of Internet technology not only improves production efficiency but also changes lifestyles. The Internet system, which is composed of online technology and products derived therefrom, has the dual attributes of authenticity and virtuality. Its authenticity consists of mechanical equipment that is independent of human society, such as computers, mobile phones, and virtual reality, which exist in the form of tools. Its virtuality is derived from reality and is a part of human social life. As Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) put it, "the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." In other words, networks have their own operating logic and react to human society, and have blurred the boundary between work and leisure at both the practical and cognitive levels.

At the practical level, compared with traditional society, network society transcends time and space. In terms of work, the popularity of the Internet and the smart devices connected to it make it easier for people to take work home. Working online thus becomes a trend, followed by enterprises assigning more and more urgent tasks to employees. Those tasks that cannot be completed while at work eventually become "homework" for employees. Such "homework" fragments or even shatters what was once completely private leisure time and even subjects it to surveillance, as seen in such practices as "clocking in at home" and "video conferencing" during the pandemic.

The ultimate result is that people's private lives are trapped by the twin forces of technology and work, and workers become victims of overwork and high dependence on technology. The quality of leisure time is greatly reduced, the notion of work-life balance[3] is forgotten, to be replaced by video game ads touting “work while you play and play while you work,” as our previously existing life world is gradually colonized. Moreover, when enterprises use online technology to exploit the surplus value of workers, workers respond by using time at work to pursue leisure activities, and hence the birth of goofing off.

“As part of my school’s participation in the authorities’ call to create a civilized city, I wound up spending all day in the streets, which meant going back to my dorm at night to prepare the next day’s classes. It was too hard.” (QK, female, junior high school teacher).

On the cognitive level, the Internet, as a technological force, has changed popular psychology even as it has transformed our work and lifestyles. Neil Postman (1931-2003), in Amusing Ourselves to Death, expressed his fears following the arrival of the television age: "Television has only one constant voice - the voice of entertainment." He attacked the idea that technology exists as a neutral force in society, saying, "At this point, if you don't realize that technology will inevitably bring about social change, if you still insist that technology is neutral, if you still believe that technology is always the friend of culture, then you are just too stupid."

The Internet, which has replaced television, has had a far greater impact on the popular mind, and has become a part of everyday life. Before the arrival of network society, people had a clear notion of the spatial and temporal boundaries between work and leisure and understood the role of each, which was that public is public and private is private. However, the Internet has given rise to a new kind of mobile work that transcends the limitations of time and space, while a corresponding work ethic has yet to evolve, meaning that roles that were once understood are now ambiguous. While goofing off is seen as loafing on the job by employers, workers see it as a short rest after a busy day at the online office.

2. Ambiguous Roles Mean Ambiguous Norms

The essence of working in a firm is the contract between the laborer and the employer, in which the laborer earns wages and remuneration through work. From this perspective, goofing off at work is clearly unethical. Although employees are happy to share their goofing off skills, this is practiced only by a limited number of young people, and from the larger society’s perspective, goofing off is outside the norms, and the logic behind this judgement is very important.

Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) used Durkheim's concept of "anomie" to analyze the deviant behavior in the society in which he lived. He began by pointing out that deviance is not the same as psychopathy, in that one is not born deviant. He emphasized locating the mechanism of deviant behavior in its roots in society and culture. On this basis, he discussed two important social and cultural elements that work to maintain societal integration, the first being legitimate goals recognized by the public, and the second being the means employed to achieve these goals.

In his view, anomie is the product of a distance between the two. If members of a society cannot achieve their goals through institutionalized means, they will choose deviant behaviors to arrive at such goals. When cultural goals and institutional means are not aligned, members of a society will react differently, some resorting to conformity, others practicing innovation, while ritualism, retreat, and resistance are other possibilities. It goes without saying that among these, conformity leads people to work hard, making it a foundation for social stability. Innovation means that members break through conventions and go in directions different from tradition, even as they continue to hold positive attitudes toward cultural goals. Retreat means that members reject outright both goals and means and "lie flat" as "genuine outsiders." Resistance means that members disagree with existing goals and means and seek to establish a new model of development, leading to "a deeply reformed social structure."

When we look at how it works in real life, goofing off can be seen as a ritualistic adaptation strategy, which "abandons lofty cultural goals of great financial success and rapid social change, or perhaps lowers them to a position where personal aspirations can be satisfied.” Most of those who goof off have given up their grand goals and generally prefer the lives they currently have to striving for something better, which is a kind of passive “Zen” mentality. Why do passionate young people give up ambitious goals and decide to just muddle along? This is obviously closely related to current social pressures.

The first factor here is that, as class structures solidify, young people face more obstacles in their career ambitions. Over the past 40 years of reform and opening, Chinese society has made great achievements, but there are also some social problems that cannot be ignored, such as the widening gap between the rich and the poor and the difficulty for young people to continue to climb the class ladder. Given this class structure, young people born into ordinary families have a hard time with education and employment. The slogan “work hard and you can change your life” resonates less and less with young people and may even arouse aversion and resistance.

By contrast, the opposite slogan – “hard work may not mean success, but working less means much less stress” – has gradually come to influence China’s young people. Constrained both by the pandemic and the transformation of the workplace, they face a dire employment situation of “many monks and little gruel.” Young people faced with this situation have no way to realize their individual ideals and have no choice to but to make compromises and wind up with a job that in no way meets their expectations. For youth like this, goofing off is a choice of desperation when their hard work has yielded few results.

“I came here right after college, and I used to work really hard, but after all these years, my weight has gone up more than my salary, and the new teachers have been promoted over the old ones, so I gave up. So once class lets out, I’m done, and sometimes during classroom breaks I catch up with old friends or watch a series on my cell phone. The school principal worries about spreading the workload, not about raising our salaries.” (QK, female, junior high school teacher).

“I make 3,000-4,000 RMB [approx. 420-560 US$] a month, which keeps me fed. Why do people work so hard, anyway? When I have time, I just go on TikTok, so life’s good.” (LYW, male, barber).

Next, as the involution of society intensifies, the life of young people becomes more difficult. By “involution,” we mean irrational internal competition within a given environment. Young people choose to goof off because of this involution, this irrational competition. The social anthropologist Xiang Biao (b. 1974) describes this as "an endless cycle of self-flagellation" and "a competition that does not allow for failure or withdrawal." Social resources are limited, and acquiring such limited resources requires reasonable competition to finally reach the optimal Pareto state for the entire society. However, given the current state of society, the acquisition of limited resources usually requires disorderly and irrational competition. For young people who have just entered the work force, they face multiple pressures and leisure is the only way they can release the pressure.

“The company assigns us too much work, which means there sometimes meetings on the weekends. I just feel completely burned out, and all I want to do is hide. Sometimes, they’ll be having a meeting up there and I’ll just stay down here and surf the web.” (YR, female, real estate office worker).

So to sum up, constant overtime in the workplace, rampant formalism in the bureaucracy, and stagnation in university curricula all suggest that China’s transition is facing a bottleneck, and when we add to that the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic, people are starting to get anxious. In this context, everyone is goofing off.

Understanding Goofing Off from the Perspective of a Safety Valve

Goofing Off Serves as An Organizational Safety Valve

Goofing off is the product of online society, and its emergence is closely related to the rise of the Internet and the plight of youth development. To some extent, the Internet provides a convenient tool for goofing off, while the social problems in the transition period stimulate people's negative emotions. If the booming Internet economy reflects the positive side of online technology, then goofing off expresses the negative side of the interface of human nature and online life. Currently public opinion is quite divided on the issue of goofing off, as managers try to reduce the scale of the phenomenon while worker bees do their best to hone their goofing off skills, which gives rise to tensions.

Simply viewing goofing off as employees’ anti-company strategy and taking tough countermeasures will certainly not be the solution. Just as in Merton's analysis of ritualistic adaptation strategy, the point of goofing off is to cope with the scaling down of formerly great ambitions. In the context of the enterprise, employees no longer buy into the grand goals of the company, which look to them like irrelevant pie-in-the-sky exercises, so rather than “burning the midnight oil,” they would rather get paid to goof off. It is worth noting that employees’ goofing off is not brazen or out of control, but rather out of sight or under the table. Hence as a form of intra-organizational conflict, it cannot be fully explained by the Marxist view of class conflict, while Lewis Coser's (1913-2003) "safety valve" theory may be more helpful.

Coser believed that conflict has not only negative functions, which include loss of wealth and social unrest, but also positive functions, in that as long as they remain within a certain limit, they serve to release pressures and dissatisfactions felt by group members, which in turn can maintain the stability of the group structure. Coser's discussion on the function of social conflict largely drew on Georg Simmel's (1858-1913) work, and both largely argued that "conflict 'clears the air', or in other words prevents the accumulation of hostility by allowing the free expression of certain behaviors."

Coser argued that Simmel failed to distinguish between conflict behavior and feelings of hostility, thus ignoring the fact that behavior patterns other than conflict can also serve similar functions. Coser himself drew distinctions between three different expressions of hostility: (1) direct hostility towards an individual or group seen as the source of frustration; (2) similar hostility directed towards alternative targets; (3) activities that release tension without requiring direct objects or substitute objects.

When Coser's analysis of antagonism is transposed to a corporate setting, it illustrates that goofing off acts as a “safety valve” by releasing the oppressive emotions of employees trapped in the iron cage of modern technology. It also reveals why many employees see goofing off as a self-regulating strategy and why some high-quality companies take goofing off less seriously. In this regard, it is understandable why measures such as those proposed by GOME to monitor employee behavior ended up fanning employee discontent——it narrowed the window for employees to vent their hostility, which may not necessarily have been directed at the company in the first place.

Goofing Off Is Not a Long-Term Solution

From the perspective of the "safety valve" we can understand the rationality of goofing off, which is that employees can release their repressed emotions through spurts of online leisure, thus maintaining the stability of organizational relations. However, as Coser also pointed out, if safety valves can help to vent hostility, they don't solve problems. In other words, goofing off is not a long-term solution for where China’s youth are heading, and indulging in goofing off will seriously harm the members of an organization and its long-term development. How to help the young people who are currently goofing off put their depression behind them, relocate their passion and vitality, and devote themselves to the construction of society is a focus of discussion throughout society. Research tells us that are both personal reasons and larger social-environmental factors behind goofing off. Hence, society needs to help young workers out of the pit where they find themselves. To be specific, we can start from three angles: the government, work organizations, and the individual.

First, the government should continue to deepen social reform so that young people can have job security, meet their expectations in terms of income, and enjoy a real sense of social fairness and justice, which includes strengthening control at the macro level. "High commodity prices" and "high housing prices" are the problems staring young people directly in the face, and the government must strengthen top-down planning, ensure the stability and continuity of policies designed to regulate the real estate market and price stability in general so that young people can know hope and no longer indulge in the fantasy afforded by goofing off.

Next, while expanding employment, enterprises should implement the labor law, protect the rights and interests of employees, guarantee wage increases, improve the welfare of employees, enhance the sense of belonging and identity of employees to the enterprise, strengthen psychological care for employees, build a healthy and positive corporate culture, and develop an open and transparent management system that will receive and respond to feedback from employees promptly.

Finally, young people should also take a good look at themselves, give full play to their sense of agency, establish lofty ideals, strengthen their sense of responsibility and their sense of mission for their families, their enterprise, and their country. They should constantly improve their overall quality, correctly view the setbacks they experience, and calmly face the pressures reality delivers. At the same time, they should be vigilant regarding online technology and establish a sense of agency through constant reflection, so as to be the master of online technology instead of its slave.

To Ponder: The Challenge Posed by The Disappearance of Borders

With the rapid development of online technology and the corresponding changes in social structure, traditional barriers between family and company, work and leisure, presence and absence, subject and object, noble and vulgar have broken down, and the "fluid modernity" described by Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) is gradually becoming a reality. Goofing off is a product of this reality. Goofing off presages the eclipse of the boundary between work and leisure. Alongside goofing off we find phenomena like that of "tough girls 女汉子," which blurs of the traditional boundary between men and women, as well as that of “Internet celebrities,” which signals the disappearance of the barrier between ordinary people and celebrities.

These new phenomena are all metaphors for people entering a society where the boundaries are disappearing. The disappearance of boundaries means that the explanatory power of traditional social theories based on structural binary opposition declines, just as the eradication of goofing off through enhanced monitoring eventually sparks labor-capital conflict. The disappearance of boundaries not only requires the adjustment of social governance practices, but also requires a new sociological narrative to deal with the ambiguity and disorder brought on by social change. It is worth mentioning that scholars in China prefer to focus on macro issues, and the research on boundary disappearance often focuses on the macro level, such as urban-rural integration and class mobility. This research preference also leads to the uniformity and homogenization of sociological research and also leads to ignore other relatively micro issues as mere details.

Notes

[1]吴朝进, 张金荣, “用社会学解读“摸鱼”：网络时代的青年困境何以形成,” published online on May 14, 2022.

[2]Translator’s note: Taken from Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

[3]Translator’s note: Strangely enough, the metaphor the authors use for “work-life balance” is that of a “dual SIM-card cell phone 双卡双待”where only one card can be used at a time.