Matthew M Chew | Hong Kong Baptist University (original) (raw)

Papers by Matthew M Chew

Games and Culture, 2022

Few studies explore the progressive sociopolitical relevance of gamers. This study contributes to... more Few studies explore the progressive sociopolitical relevance of gamers. This study contributes to this exploration by investigating a common yet neglected type of gamer activism: struggles against the exploitation and control of game-worlds by game publishers. I analyze it with anti-corporate Chinese gamer activism between 2003 and 2010. I found seven recurring battlefronts on which gamers carried out violent protests, clicktivism, media campaigns, connective action, political consumerism, and litigation. They involved technical problems, publisher staff’s rent-seeking, termination of game-worlds, abusive game design, and the mishandling of the problems of duping, bots, and virtual property theft. Numerous groups including gold farmers and consumer associations were involved in these complex struggles. This study’s core dataset was collected between 2007 and 2011 from media reports on gamer activism, game industry reports, in-game observation, and documentary and video records of ga...

The Global South as a critical concept has three primary definitions. First, it has traditionally... more The Global South as a critical concept has three primary definitions. First, it has traditionally been used within intergovernmental development organizations-primarily those that originated in the Non-Aligned Movement-to refer to economically disadvantaged nation-states and as a post-cold war alternative to "Third World." However, in recent years and within a variety of fields, the Global South is employed in a post-national sense to address spaces and peoples negatively impacted by contemporary capitalist globalization.

Memory Studies, 2021

Remembering the War of Resistance against Japan is central to China’s memory and identity politic... more Remembering the War of Resistance against Japan is central to China’s memory and identity politics. By focusing on the production of China’s War of Resistance television dramas, this study analyzes how collective memory is shaped by market actors and their interactions with the state. The first substantive section investigates how commercial media and the state cooperate in the production of War of Resistance television dramas. The second explicates how market actors undermine the state’s ideological imperatives by adding entertainment content to repackage war memory, which then conflicts with the propagandistic task. This study contributes to introducing the market factor to research on the remembering of War of Resistance in China and enriching the political economy of memory approach by examining an authoritarian state-capitalist case, which is centrally characterized by these cooperative and conflictual relations between the state and the market.

International Journal of Comic Art, 2010

Chinese Sociological Review, 2019

There are powerful symbolic boundaries in urban China that exclude rural migrants. This study ide... more There are powerful symbolic boundaries in urban China that exclude rural migrants. This study identifies and analyzes the new boundary work that aims at remaking these rural-urban boundaries. Based on data on previous cohorts of rural migrants in China and elsewhere, current studies argue that the predominant type of boundary work is personal assimilation. I challenge this finding by documenting how the most recent cohort of young rural migrants develop a broad variety of "normative inversion," "reclassification," and "universalistic blurring" types of boundary work. Although this study does not conclusively prove that the new boundary work has already successfully remade rural-urban boundaries, it illustrates that new potential paths to remaking them are opened. Data were mainly collected between 2014 and 2017 through participant observation in dance clubs in Beijing and interviews with fifty-seven dance club service workers.

The China Quarterly, 2018

Games and Culture, 2016

This study critically assesses the Chinese online games industry through problematizing the creat... more This study critically assesses the Chinese online games industry through problematizing the creativity of Chinese games. I find that between 1995 and 2001, Chinese online games were mostly developed by amateurs, noncommercial, and considerably creative. Between 2002 and 2005, industrial growth allowed some room for local creativity despite commercialization and dominance of imported games. Current scholarly, business, and media discourses unfairly ignore creativity in these first two periods and yet praise the Chinese game industry’s commercial success since the late 2000s. I challenge these discourses by illustrating that between 2006 and early 2009, a new, ethically dubious, and uniquely Chinese business model emerged, became domestically dominant, and quietly and profoundly impacted on global online game design. From mid-2009 to 2015, there is ongoing corporatization based on the dubious Chinese business model on the one hand, and a reemphasis on creativity motivated by browser a...

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 2017

Studies of social media and its uses have focused on how it shapes behavior but less so with emot... more Studies of social media and its uses have focused on how it shapes behavior but less so with emotion. Overcoming this limitation, this article investigates the role of emotion in understanding and shaping actions online, and how, conversely, different uses of social media are leveraged to manage and express emotions, focusing on Facebook and Instagram. To this end, this article draws on 24 in-depth interviews with youth users in Hong Kong to excavate practices of emotional labor and management online, which reveal (1) strategies to manage emotional reactions, centering on critical distance; (2) strategies to manage emotional conveyance by manipulating the temporality of the content they produce; and (3) the creation of a digital blasé that consisted of the atmosphere of Facebook and Instagram, sustained by general emotional detachment, the perceived need to detach, and a sense of “watchedness”. Throughout, emotional detachment was the default state that users entered into when using...

Global Game Industries and Cultural Policy, 2016

Chew conducts a sociological interpretation of the North American game industry, with attention o... more Chew conducts a sociological interpretation of the North American game industry, with attention on free-to-play games. While the North American game industry is widely discussed in various literatures, this chapter not only summarizes the major trends but also, by focusing on the production aspect of games, offers a critical interpretation of the production context and environment. The author finds that top-level management in game corporations as well as many game design professionals are willing to give free-to-play a try. This trend is expected to benefit not only the oligopolistic corporations, but also midsize and indie game companies.

Review of European Studies, 2009

The quandary of subjectivity -how to square the irreducible qualities of the subjectivity categor... more The quandary of subjectivity -how to square the irreducible qualities of the subjectivity category with the need for objective accessibility and scientific universality -was raised by Max Weber in his action theory. Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz, the most prominent action theorists after Weber, are said to have dealt with the quandary in very different ways. This intellectual historical note investigates the two theorists in terms of how they dealt with the subjectivity quandary. I will show that because of their different intellectual backgrounds, they mobilized different intellectual tools in the face of the quandary. But their differences are not as significant as assumed. Additionally, their difference cannot be adequately summarized as that of a phenomenological subjectivist solution (Schutz) versus a scientistic objectivist one (Parsons). I will show that the theoretical weaknesses and outcomes of their theories are in effect not very different. I find that both Schutz and Parsons were limited by a philosophy of consciousness paradigm. Under the paradigm, both tried to deal with the subjectivity quandary by insisting on the primacy of an irreducible subjective category on the one hand and subtly re-molding that subjective category into something accessible to the objective observer on the other. In this theorizing process, Schutz was actually pressured to weaken the subjective category almost as much as Parson did. Both ended up failing to square the irreducible qualities of the subjectivity category with the need for objective accessibility and scientific universality.

Asian Culture and History, 2012

This study analyzes and evaluates the social thought of Dai Zhen. It interprets Dai's thought in ... more This study analyzes and evaluates the social thought of Dai Zhen. It interprets Dai's thought in terms of a critique of ideology that problematizes Song dynasty Neo-Confucian moral vocabulary. Dai thinks that social critique is the ultimate goal of scholarship and he was explicit about this belief. This study will show that he analyzes the negative social consequences of Song Neo-Confucian moral discourse in sociologically sophisticated ways, and that he has developed this understanding through a series of works that began with Yuanshan (The Origin of Goodness) and ended with Mengzi Ziyi Suzheng (Commentaries on the Meaning of Terms in Mencius). Contemporary social theorist and cultural critics should find Dai's work relevant because his deconstruction of the reified moral vocabulary of his times is postmodern in spirit and he elucidated how discourses can concretely impact on society.

International Education Studies, 2008

Sociologists of knowledge find that academic stratification is present among individual scholars,... more Sociologists of knowledge find that academic stratification is present among individual scholars, genders, networks, fields, and all kinds of scientific organizations, while communications scholars have been studying global cultural asymmetry for a long time. Yet few researchers have explored the global dimension of academic stratification. In this essay, I approach global academic stratification through examining one of its major negative impacts on academies in culturally peripheral countries. I investigate how the inflated function of foreign knowledge reception in peripheral academies leads to distorted academic organizational developments. I draw on historical data on the philosophy discipline in modern Japan to illustrate this negative impact. I find that academic publishers in modern Japan exploited the inflated function of knowledge reception, enriching and empowering themselves to the point that they became a major network base, sponsor, and decision-maker of the discipline.

International Journal of Business and Management, 2009

This study investigates the characteristics of retailer-supplier relationship in Hong Kong, ident... more This study investigates the characteristics of retailer-supplier relationship in Hong Kong, identify problems in it, and suggest ways to remedy them. We will demonstrate that Hong Kong's retail industry was and is dominated by small and medium sized retailers. However, small retailers in Hong Kong have not sufficiently adopted new retail technologies to manage their supply chains. This situation is undermining the efficiency of Hong Kong's retail industry. We recommend information systems providers, the management of small retailers, and suppliers to take steps to improve supply chain efficiency for small retailers. Information systems providers can help through designing affordable implementation and common modules. Suppliers in Hong Kong can actively build network, cultivate trust, and equip themselves with advanced information systems. Small and medium sized retailers in Hong Kong need to invest sufficient resources to implement retail information systems.

International Business Research, 2009

As a declining retail format, how is the department store managing to survive in Hong Kong? How h... more As a declining retail format, how is the department store managing to survive in Hong Kong? How has it transformed itself in response to contemporary retail environments? Are these institutional transformations different from those observed in the US and Europe? In what ways are they different and how have they shaped local department stores? This essay explores these questions through examining recent institutional changes of department stores in Hong Kong. Data for this study were collected through qualitative observation, documentary analysis, and in-depth interviews of department store managers and consultants. I find that Hong Kong's department stores have pursued a major and successful institutional transformation between 1998 and the present: they strategically abandon the conventional department store format and develop a concession-oriented one. I illustrate the special characteristics, structural benefits, and potentials problems of the concession-oriented department store format through analyses of the power relationship between concessionaire and department stores, the changing work processes in department stores, and the cost and risk implications of concessions in the contemporary retail context of Hong Kong.

New Media & Society, 2011

Journal of Sustainable Development, 2009

This study contributes to the debate on tourism and local development through evaluating an ambiv... more This study contributes to the debate on tourism and local development through evaluating an ambivalent case of traditional festival revival and tourism development in Hong Kong: Bun Festival tourism in Cheung Chau Island. The significance of this case is that it will put into relief the significance of 'cultural sustainability'-an evaluative factor that is very insufficiently emphasized and theorized in current critical studies of tourism development. I will show although the most often mobilized critiques against heritage tourism development -including cultural inauthenticity, commercialization, lack of local economic development, and local disempowerment -can be applied to the case of the Bun Festival tourism, particular social circumstances weaken the force of these critiques in the Hong Kong case. Many local residents of the Cheung Chau Island approve the neoliberal direction of current tourist development and derive economic benefits from it. Even critical commentators in Hong Kong are not entirely against it. This study will point to evidence and arguments that uncover a serious and neglected problem in Bun Festival tourism: that neoliberal exploitation of heritage tourism resources threatens the cultural sustainability of historically rooted local practices of the Bun Festival and in turn threatens the viability of Bun Festival tourism in the long run.