Adam Frost

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract: In the early 20th century, Shanghai’s taxi networks were more than the sum of their cars on the streets. Rather, they were systems comprised of human, material, and discursive elements, which existed on a spectrum from the invisible to the spectacular. At the one end, webs of informal labor promoted urban interconnectivity and traversed Shanghai’s administrative divides, while at the other, embedded political symbols reshaped how people consumed transportation services. These dimensions of infrastructure played a critical role in the shaping of this global metropolis. In this study of taxi infrastructure in Republican Shanghai (1911-1949), we retrace the history of the ‘Taxi King’, Zhou Xiangsheng, and the building of his company, Johnson Taxi. Following Zhou’s personal evolution from an illicit taxi operator, to a business owner, to a cross-cultural interlocutor, to a nationalist icon, we demonstrate how entrepreneurs form multiple relations with infrastructure and move fluidly between them. This multipositionality, we argue, provides unique endowments of knowledge, enabling individuals to recombine heterogeneous resources and innovate.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: Chinese society is structured along a historical urban-rural divide. In the early history of the People’s Republic of China (1950s-1980s), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cleaved society into two halves— the rural-agricultural and the urban-industrial— and erected institutional barriers to mobility between them. Rural people were deliberately locked in the resource-poor countryside and institutionally constrained from accessing economic opportunities in the cities. However, as actors developed strategies to navigate these controls, new patterns of informal mobility emerged and gave rise to spontaneous orders. Based on a five-year mixed-method study of begging in contemporary Northwest China, this article explores the begging economy as a spontaneous order that emerged from the behaviors of groups of informal actors but not from their conscious designs. Drawing upon a diverse set of data including ethnographic observations, interviews with more than 200 begging people, and a geospatial survey of begging incomes in the city of Xi’an, the article examines the patterned informal behaviors of marginalized rural citizens who creatively circumvent state control to generate incomes through begging. We show in the article that the economy of begging is a well-coordinated spontaneous order on three different spatial scales: national-level, city-level, and neighborhood-level. At the national-level we draw on demographic survey data to show that the economy of begging consists predominantly of farmers from the most impoverished parts of rural China, who circumvent the household registration system to travel to cities to beg in the agricultural off-season. At the city-level, we use our geospatial survey and interview data to demonstrate that begging involves a daily commute from affordable informal accommodations in the outskirts of the city to the city center, where income-generation potential is highest. At the neighborhood level, we describe through ethnographic observations how begging people periodically relocate themselves to evade police violence and detention.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: China’s economic transformation is a largely story of rural-to-urban migration. Since the end of the Maoist era, successive waves of rural migrants have abandoned the resource-drained countryside to seek better economic opportunities in cities. At the same time though, in a bid to maintain “societal stability,” the Chinese party-state has sought to control and limit this “floating population” through the creation of a web of financial, bureaucratic, and spatial barriers to mobility. In this context, a group of informal entrepreneurs emerged to profit from the circumvention of these barriers by transforming interstitial urban spaces (e.g. unoccupied apartments, urban villages, etc.) into flexible, short-term accommodations for migrant populations. These entrepreneurial practices not only disrupted state control over spatial order but also promoted inclusivity by providing marginalized citizens with access to cities. In this article, we draw upon Henri Lefebvre’s concept of spatial politics to develop the idea of “spatial entrepreneurship,” which we define as creative acts of re-imagining and re-structuring space in ways that purposefully reshape social, political, and economic orders. In detailed ethnographies of two informal spaces— a rooftop enclave atop an office building in Shanghai that accommodated hundreds of underemployed migrant youths and a junkyard shantytown in the outskirts of Xi’an that housed dozens of begging people— we retrace how informal spaces are created, contested, cleansed, and re-built in the urban landscape over time. Through this retracing we explicate how spatial entrepreneurship challenges the administrative ordering of everyday life by creating spaces of opportunity and redefining the “right to the city.” Furthermore, we seek to contribute to the scholarship of entrepreneurship by highlighting spatiality as a dynamic element (rather than a latent context that structures how entrepreneurship unfolds) that interacts with entrepreneurial processes in many different ways.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: This dissertation explores the dynamic interplay between entrepreneurship and economic change in socialist China (1958–1978) by retracing the persistence of private entrepreneurial activity and the Chinese Communist Party’s enduring struggle to suppress it. Through the analyses of official archives, original datasets, interviews, and unconventional sources collected from Chinese flea markets, the dissertation shows how, within the interstitial spaces of society, there existed more dynamic realms of economic activity. Entrepreneurial actors, ranging from ration certificate traders to underground factory owners, circumvented formal institutions and established alternative channels for the flow of labor, goods, capital, and knowledge in the economy. Although these individuals were denigrated as “speculators and profiteers” and, for three decades, made the subjects of intense political struggle, they served productive functions and filled critical voids in the economy. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, their activities became increasingly collusive, ubiquitous, and normalized in local society. When top-down market-oriented reforms were finally introduced in the late 1970s, they were, in many instances, a formalization of informal practices that were already pervasive. This dissertation thus challenges the still-dominant view that entrepreneurship disappeared during “socialist transformation” and reemerged only after Reform and Opening Up. It shows that throughout China’s socialist era, bottom-up entrepreneurial forces continued to operate and reshape how the economy functioned in practice.

2026 London

Abstract:

Organizations often use their pasts as flexible strategic tools, yet these narratives can paradoxically evolve into 'gilded cages' that constrain future adaptation. We challenge the prevailing view of history as an infinitely malleable resource, arguing that successful narratives generate a distinct form of structural rigidity. We conceptualize this process as narrative objectification: the transformation of a flexible strategic story into a binding objective reality. Drawing on a longitudinal study of Huaxi Village and Bourdieu's relational sociology, we identify three mechanisms—materialization, consecration, and ritual enactment—through which narrative becomes inscribed into the built environment, political commitments, and organizational practice. We advance a recursive theory of rhetorical history, demonstrating that narrative success in one era produces the structural constraints of the next, trapping the organization in a performance of a past it can no longer sustain.

KEYWORDS: Rhetorical History; Narrative Objectification; Organizational Habitus; Strategic Change; Path Dependence