Can Money Buy Mental Health? Marketization in China’s Psychiatric Care
Prof. Siyin CHEN, Assistant Professor, HKUST Business School in Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Date: 22 October 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 15:00-16:30
Venue: E22-G015
Host: Prof. Jacky HONG, Professor in Management
Abstract
This study examines how marketization reshapes psychiatric care in China and challenges the prevailing assumption that protecting professional autonomy reliably protects service quality. Drawing on 28 months of ethnographic fieldwork in public hospitals and two marketized venues (digital platforms and private clinics), enriched by my long-term familiarity with the patient experience, I identify a counter perceptive. I found that market actors preserve psychiatrists’ clinical autonomy to enlist and retain their participation, while simultaneously appropriating that autonomy as symbolic capital to legitimate ancillary, profit-oriented offerings (e.g., AI self-help programs, wellness retreats) reframed as ethical extensions of care. I term this process “authority laundering.” In addition, this reconfiguration shifts patients toward immediate experiential relief and, in the longitudinal sequences I traced, leads to diminished compliance to psychiatrist-prescribed core treatments—an outcome I call “purpose drift.” The findings recast autonomy from a technical safeguard into a resource that market actors can appropriate, offering a client-side account of market encroachment in professional work and extending moral markets scholarship to professional services.
Speaker
Prof. Siyin Chen is an ethnographer and assistant professor at HKUST Business School in Management. She has received her PhD in Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Her research explores how professional workers—whether they are doctors, lawyers or artists—navigate occupational changes while addressing grand challenges such as healthcare disparities, legal injustice, and cultural inequalities, with publications appearing in premier journals in Management, including Administrative Science Quarterly and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
All are welcome!
