Sociology has been an important component of my interdisciplinary research for more than two decades. My particular interests lie in social institutions, culture, religion, social networks, identity and the relationship between society and formal institutions. I am interested in the ways in which socially embedded values, relationships and expectations affect behaviour towards law, government, economic institutions and political authority.
My pathway into sociology has been interdisciplinary rather than through a conventional Sociology Department. It developed initially through Asian Studies, Chinese social history, economics, business and law, and became increasingly explicit in my research into Chinese society and institutions. My subsequent work has drawn upon economic sociology, institutional sociology, social psychology, anthropology and comparative historical analysis.
This has produced a substantial body of sociologically informed theoretical and empirical research. I have undertaken extended fieldwork in China, including research with government officials across different locations; used qualitative and ethnographic approaches to understand institutional behaviour; supervised empirical doctoral research into culture, religion, trust and attitudes towards government and taxation; and published work examining how social institutions affect economic, legal and governmental systems.
More recently I have extended these interests into comparative European research concerning religion, historical institutions, political culture, identity, democracy and attitudes towards government.
Social Institutions
The concept of the social institution lies at the centre of much of my sociological work.
My PhD, Social Institutions and Tax Design: The Case of Income Tax and Chinese Society, examined the proposition that human economic and legal behaviour cannot adequately be understood independently of the social environment within which it occurs. It drew particularly upon Mark Granovetter’s work on the social embeddedness of economic behaviour and Douglass North’s institutional analysis, while also engaging extensively with scholarship on Chinese society, family, kinship, guanxi, networks, government and social organisation.
The thesis challenged approaches that implicitly treat individuals as socially isolated actors. Instead, I examined individuals as participants in families, networks, communities and systems of reciprocal obligation. This changes the way apparently individual actions involving property, income, business, law and government need to be understood.
One consequence is that the same formal institution can operate differently in different societies. Law does not encounter an institutional vacuum. It encounters existing norms, relationships, expectations, identities and distributions of social authority.
This remains one of the central propositions underlying my work: formal institutions operate within social institutions rather than independently of them.
Chinese Society and Social Change
China has provided the most sustained empirical setting for my sociological research.
My initial academic training in Asian Studies included Chinese social history, contemporary China and Chinese politics. From the late 1990s I became particularly interested in overseas Chinese business networks and the capacity of Chinese social and commercial relationships to operate across formal organisational and national boundaries.
My later research examined Chinese families, guanxi relationships, business networks, informal property relationships, attitudes towards government, localism, administrative relationships and the interaction between traditional social institutions, communist experience and post-1978 economic transformation.
One of my early publications, Tax Reform in the China Context: The Corporate Tax Unit and Chinese Enterprise, began from research into relationships between people and organisations that structure Chinese social behaviour. It considered networked private enterprise and guanxi and argued that legal reform could not sensibly proceed without understanding the structure of the society within which the law was expected to operate.
My work therefore differs from approaches that explain contemporary Chinese society either as the straightforward survival of an ancient culture or simply as a product of Communist Party institutions. I have been interested in the interaction among historical social institutions, revolutionary transformation, communist institutions, marketisation, migration, globalisation and economic development.
Social institutions are persistent, but they are not static.
Ethnographic and Field Research
An important component of this research has involved direct empirical investigation in China.
Between 2005 and 2007, for example, I conducted extensive fieldwork involving discussions with tax and other government officials in twelve cities and counties across Fujian and neighbouring Guangdong. The project was designed in part to investigate the extent of administrative and institutional variation within what was formally a unitary governmental system. This included approximately eight weeks of field research supported by Chinese governmental and academic institutions.
Further fieldwork followed in Fujian, Zhejiang and Taiwan. This research examined informal and localised governance and involved engagement with officials operating within the institutions being studied rather than reliance solely upon formal legal texts or central-government descriptions.
Some of the initial findings were published in my work on tax evasion and administrative realities in Fujian. The sociological significance of the fieldwork was broader. It allowed me to examine discrepancies between formal institutional structures and lived institutional practice: how officials understood their roles, how administration varied geographically, how relationships affected governmental processes and how ostensibly national institutions were adapted locally.
My PhD combined this empirical material with extensive analysis of Chinese social organisation and comparative research on Chinese communities outside mainland China.
My approach has consequently incorporated elements of ethnographic observation, qualitative interviewing and comparative institutional fieldwork, alongside doctrinal, historical and theoretical research.
Social Networks, Guanxi and Economic Sociology
A particularly important strand of my work concerns social networks.
Chinese guanxi provides an unusually valuable setting in which to investigate the relationship between interpersonal relationships and apparently impersonal economic institutions. Guanxi networks can perform functions otherwise associated with contracts, organisations, markets and formal legal institutions. They can facilitate trust, transmit information, organise resources and reduce some forms of transaction cost.
My research has also resisted a simple developmental assumption that such networks exist only because formal institutions are weak and will disappear when those institutions become stronger.
My 2008 article, The Economic Benefits of the Use of Guanxi and Business Networks in a Jurisdiction with Strong Formal Institutions, argued that network participation can continue to generate economic advantages even where strong formal institutions are available.
This places the research within the tradition of economic sociology. Markets and formal organisations do not eliminate social relationships. Economic actors remain socially embedded, and their differential access to networks can itself become an economic resource.
Culture and Institutional Behaviour
Culture has been another recurring concern, although I approach cultural explanation cautiously.
I do not regard cultures as fixed collections of characteristics that mechanically determine behaviour. Culture operates through social institutions, historical experience, narratives, relationships and expectations, all of which change over time.
Nevertheless, ignoring cultural and social variation can be as misleading as treating culture as deterministic.
My work has repeatedly examined situations in which legal and economic models developed within one social environment are applied within another. This raises a fundamentally sociological question: to what extent do theories implicitly contain assumptions about the society from which they originated?
My research on Chinese institutions has shown that concepts such as the individual, family, enterprise, property, obligation, governmental authority and legal entitlement can be socially situated. Their formal legal definition does not necessarily tell us how people understand or use them.
This interest has also taken my research beyond mainland China. My work on Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and other jurisdictions examines what happens when related social institutions operate within very different formal legal and political environments.
Religion, Values and Behaviour
Religion provides another important means through which social institutions can influence behaviour.
I have supervised three doctoral projects investigating the effects of social factors—including religion, culture, trust and related social variables—on attitudes towards government, taxation and compliance. These projects involved empirical research using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
This work has allowed me to engage not simply with theoretical claims about culture or religion but with attempts to identify and measure relationships between social characteristics, beliefs and behaviour.
One resulting publication, with Nurul Hidayat, examined Islamic religiosity and the justification of tax evasion in Indonesia. The research used a mixed-method design combining quantitative survey analysis with qualitative analysis of religious discourse. It found a substantially more complicated relationship than the simple proposition that greater religiosity necessarily produces greater compliance. Religious interpretation, attitudes towards the state’s adoption of Islamic law and affiliation with different religious traditions all mattered.
This is representative of my broader sociological interest. Religion matters not simply as individual belief but as a social institution: it creates communities, authorities, interpretative traditions, norms and conceptions of legitimate conduct that can affect relationships with the state.
Government, Legitimacy and Compliance
Tax compliance has provided a particularly useful empirical setting for investigating the sociological relationship between individuals and government.
A purely economic model might conceptualise compliance primarily as a calculation involving probability of detection and expected penalty. Legal analysis might concentrate upon the content and enforcement of formal obligations. Sociology introduces different questions.
Do people regard government as legitimate? Do they trust public institutions? What obligations do they believe they owe the state? What competing obligations do family, religion or community impose? How do people understand fairness? Which authorities are regarded as entitled to define morally acceptable conduct?
My doctoral supervision and collaborative research have examined these questions empirically.
Taxation is therefore useful to me not merely because I am a tax scholar. It creates a particularly clear setting in which to investigate the much larger sociological problem of the relationship between the individual, social groups and the state.
Leadership, Authority and Social Psychology
My research has also crossed from sociology into social psychology in examining leadership and authority.
My work with Ian Murray considered whether administrative leadership could explain the effective operation of institutions in circumstances where conventional formal institutional structures appeared comparatively weak. It drew explicitly upon social-psychological leadership literature and applied it to Chinese administration.
This produced an important sociological problem. Effective personal leadership can potentially substitute for impersonal formal institutions. Yet successful dependence upon personal authority may simultaneously inhibit the development of institutions capable of functioning independently of particular leaders.
The issue is therefore not simply whether leadership is effective. It concerns the social foundations of authority: why people recognise authority, how organisational behaviour is produced, and what happens when institutional order depends upon relationships rather than impersonal rules.
Society and Rule of Law
My sociological work also informs my approach to the rule of law.
A legal system is a formal institution, but its effectiveness depends upon social behaviour. Courts, statutes and enforcement agencies cannot themselves produce a rule-of-law society if the surrounding institutional environment systematically directs behaviour elsewhere.
My comparative work on Australia and China has therefore examined rule of law not simply as a legal doctrine but as an institutional phenomenon.
This raises questions about trust, expectations, administrative culture, informal authority, professional norms and the willingness of both citizens and officials to accept impersonal constraints.
It also helps explain my longstanding interest in the transplantation of law. Reproducing the formal text of an institution does not reproduce the society in which that institution originally developed.
Transnational Societies
My research has also questioned the assumption that society maps neatly onto national territory.
Overseas Chinese communities provide a particularly important example. Migration can move people between states without immediately removing the social relationships, family structures, commercial networks, language and cultural institutions connecting them with communities elsewhere.
Modern communications can actually strengthen some of these transnational relationships.
My research has consequently considered transnational social regions in which economically and sociologically meaningful networks cross political borders. My work on China and Southeast Asia examined these phenomena particularly through Chinese migration, business networks and ASEAN regionalism. My edited book Taxation in ASEAN and China explicitly connected local institutions, regionalism, global systems and economic development.
This interest now informs my comparative work in Europe, where political borders likewise do not necessarily correspond neatly with historical, religious, linguistic and cultural regions.
Historical Sociology and European Social Institutions
My more recent research extends these longstanding interests in social institutions into comparative European historical sociology.
I am particularly interested in the persistence and transformation of social institutions across regions historically associated with Protestantism, especially Calvinism, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The purpose is not to revive a crude Weberian claim that religious affiliation directly determines economic or political behaviour. Contemporary European societies have undergone secularisation, migration, industrialisation, communism, war, democratisation and extensive institutional convergence.
The more interesting sociological question is whether historically different religious and institutional environments have nevertheless left identifiable social legacies.
I am investigating relationships among historical religious traditions, family and community structures, attitudes towards authority, interpersonal and institutional trust, individualism and collective obligation, civic participation, conceptions of government, attitudes towards wealth and work, and expectations concerning the proper relationship between citizen and state.
Eastern Europe provides especially valuable comparative material because Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox historical regions intersect with different imperial inheritances, communist and non-communist experiences, national movements, border changes and sharply different post-communist trajectories.
Religion in this research is therefore one variable within a much larger historical institutional environment, rather than an essential characteristic attributed to contemporary populations.
Identity, Social Conflict and Democracy
My current work on Democracy Dysfunction extends my sociological interests directly into political sociology.
Democratic institutions depend upon social conditions. Elections and constitutions provide formal mechanisms, but their operation depends upon how people understand political identity, membership, authority and opposing social groups.
I am particularly interested in circumstances in which political allegiance becomes attached to a powerful social identity—national, ethnic, religious, ideological or cultural. Under such circumstances, normal mechanisms of democratic accountability may become weaker because changing political allegiance can be experienced not simply as changing one’s assessment of government but as abandoning one’s social group.
This creates a connection between social identity and institutional performance.
The project therefore investigates how social divisions can affect the ability of democratic institutions to discipline political actors, and how political actors can deliberately mobilise or intensify those divisions.
Propaganda, Social Institutions and Political Manipulation
My work on propaganda and political manipulation develops the same proposition from another direction.
Political communication is received by socially situated individuals. The effectiveness of propaganda consequently depends partly upon the identities, historical narratives, social relationships and existing assumptions through which people interpret it.
My developing comparative work on Russia and Ukraine examines how populations sharing substantial elements of Soviet institutional history, language and culture have nevertheless developed different political identities and relationships with state authority.
This leads back to questions that have occupied my work on China for decades. How persistent are social institutions? How are they transformed? How do formal political systems interact with them? And under what circumstances can governments deliberately exploit them?
The contemporary information environment makes these questions particularly significant. Social media, algorithmic targeting, misinformation and artificial intelligence increase the ability of political actors to identify and manipulate social divisions. Understanding the technology therefore requires understanding the society upon which it operates.
Comparative and Interdisciplinary Sociology
I do not regard sociology as isolated from economics, politics, law, psychology, history or anthropology. Many of the most interesting questions occur precisely where those disciplinary boundaries become difficult to maintain.
My work has consequently moved between economic sociology, political sociology, sociology of law, historical sociology, sociology of religion and institutional analysis.
The empirical methods have likewise been varied. They include qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork, engagement and interviews with officials, comparative institutional analysis, historical research, textual and discourse analysis, and supervision and collaboration in mixed-method research incorporating quantitative survey evidence.
What connects these different projects is a recurring question:
How do social institutions shape behaviour, and what happens when formal legal, economic and political institutions encounter the societies within which people actually live?
That question began as a major element of my research into China and Chinese society. It subsequently developed through research on networks, economic behaviour, corruption, rule of law, leadership, religion, trust and compliance. I now apply it comparatively to European social institutions, democracy, national identity, political manipulation and the historical development of different relationships between individuals, communities and the state.
My sociology is therefore fundamentally comparative, institutional and historical. It is concerned with the structures that connect individuals to one another and to economic and political institutions—and with understanding why apparently similar formal systems can produce very different human behaviour in different societies.
