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Research Interests: Economic and Political Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology, Sociology of Development

Yingyao Wang is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She works at the intersection of economic sociology, political sociology, and development. The core questions she explores concern the role of political institutions and social networks in economic development. Her book, Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State, provides a fresh account of China’s economic reform, highlighting the pivotal role of mid-level bureaucrats in shaping the trajectory of the country’s development and global ambition. She has published articles on corruption, taxation, and China’s industrial policy and financial market development. Currently, she is working on projects related to China’s outward foreign direct investment, its knowledge structure of the world, and the relationship between corruption, finance, and the making of market frontiers. Besides her empirical work, she also writes about social and organizational theory. 

Selected Publications

Book Project:

Yingyao Wang. 2024. Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State. Columbia University Press (forthcoming)

Published Articles:

Yingyao Wang. 2019. “Policy Articulation and Paradigm Change: The Bureaucratic Origin of China’s Industrial Policy.” Review of International Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2019.1679222

Yingyao Wang. 2019. “A Network-Exchange Approach to Corruption: Brokers and Institution Spanning in A Chinese Corruption Network.” Deviant Behavior. Online first at https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2019.1640525

Yingyao Wang. 2019. “Financialization and State Transformations.” The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization. Edited by Philip Mader, Daniel Mertens, Natascha van der Zwan. Routledge.  

Yingyao Wang. 2017. “Why Tax Policy is not Politics in China: Public Finance and China’s Changing State-Society Relations.” Politics & Policy. 45(2):194-223.

Yingyao Wang. 2016. “Homology and Isomorphism: Bourdieu in Conversation with New Institutionalism."  British Journal of Sociology 67(2): 348-370.

Yingyao Wang (first author, with Simone Polillo). 2016. “Power in Organizational Society: Macro, Meso and Micro.” in Seth Abrutyn (eds) 2016 The Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory (second edition). New York: Springer. pp43-61.

Yingyao Wang. 2015. “The Rise of the Shareholding State: Financialization of Economic Management in China.” Socio-Economic Review 13(3): 603-625.
       
          [Best Paper Award on Asian Capitalism, 2014 Annual Meeting of
           the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE)]