Ming-cheng Lo

Research Interests

• Civil society and political cultures
• Health and illness experiences
• Sociology of culture
• Comparative-historical sociology

Current Research Projects

• “Cultures of Civil Society”: This research project builds upon my earlier works on China and Japan. This study of civil societies focuses on how political cultures develop in two marginalized, newly democratized societies in East Asia: Hong Kong and Taiwan. Based on a dataset of 376 political cartoons that my co-authors and I collected, this project has generated several articles. Beyond reporting empirical findings about these two places, this project engages with the theoretical literature on the paths of young, non-Western civil societies.
  
• “Immigrant Patients and Culturally Competent Healthcare”: Drawing on in-depth interviews with policy makers, primary care physicians, and Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants in California, I examine how policy makers and healthcare professionals construct notions of “culturally competent healthcare.” The study further analyzes how the state’s and professions’ categories of cultural competence are operationalized and transformed by front-line healthcare professionals. In addition, I trace how immigrant patients resort to their own conceptual categories to make sense of clinical encounters. At a theoretical level, the project addresses two broad issues. It offers an understanding of the everyday “medical consciousness” of ordinary people. The project also contributes to understandings of “immigrant habitus.” (Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the ASA/NSF Advancement of the Discipline Grant.)
• “Handbook of Cultural Sociology”: I am currently co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology (with John R. Hall and Laura Grindstaff). The Handbook will contain about 70 chapters that address various topics on the cultures in and of the transnational lifeworlds. 

Selected Publications

• Ming-Cheng M. Lo and Yun Fan. "Hybrid Cultural Codes in Non-Western Civil Society: Images of Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong." Sociological Theory, forthcoming.
  
• Ming-Cheng M. Lo. "Cultural Brokerage: Creating Linkages between Voices of Lifeworld and Medicine in Cross-Cultural Clinical Settings." Health, forthcoming.
• Ming-Cheng M. Lo and Christopher P. Bettigner. "Civic Solidarity in Hong Kong and Taiwan." The China Quarterly 197: 183-203, 2009.
• Ming-Cheng M. Lo, Clare L. stacey. "Beyond Cultural Competency: Bourdieu, Patients, and Clinical Encounters." Sociology of Health and Illness 30 (5): 741-755, 2008.
• Ming-Cheng M. Lo, Christopher P. Bettigner, and Yun Fan. “Deploying Weapons of the Weak in Civil Society: Political Culture in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” Social Justice 32 (2): 77-104, 2006.
• Ming-Cheng M. Lo. “Professions: Prodigal Daughter of Modernity,” pp. 381-406 in Remaking Modernity: Politics, Processes and History in Sociology, eds. Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens and Ann Shola Orloff, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Ming-Cheng M. Lo. Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

• Ming-Cheng M. Lo and Christopher P. Bettinger. “The Historical Emergence of a ‘Familial Society’ in Japan,” Theory and Society 30 (2): 237-279, 2001.