ABSTRACT
By examining how emerging market institutions and the state construct the reward mechanisms for different groups of the middle classes, this chapter reveals how their elite status produced by employment goes beyond economic advantages to include other social privileges. The comparisons highlight that employment with a resource-rich work unit helps to get larger-quantity and better-quality rewards, which, in turn, contributes to privileged social status. Reward distribution, especially non-income rewards and opportunities, across workplaces clearly identifies the distinction between the middle class “within the system” and their “outside the system” counterparts. The structural dependence of “within the system” employees is inherited from socialist paternalistic relations between individuals and the state/work unit, and continues to maximize the collective benefits of the redistribution-based social group under a socialist market economy.
