Social Exclusion And The Reconstruction Of Self-identity Of Individual

In the course of China's urbanization, the author chooses the foreign informal employee in Shanghai as a study case and tries to describe social exclusion's influences and the process of the reconstruction of self-identity through in-depth interview. The author states that the foreign informal employees play an important role in the development of the city, but they are not provided the treatment of citizenship. On the reverse side, they encounter much exclusion from the city. Foreign informal employees constantly adjust their mentality and reconstruct their self-identity in the face of the exclusion.The paper is composed of five parts, the first part is introduction. After reviewing the theory of social exclusion and the theory of self-identity, the author raises the academic hypothesis of the paper, that is, social exclusion influences and reconstructs the self-identity of individual, with an intention to explain the influences and the process of the reconstruction through this research. In the second part, the facts of social exclusion from Shanghai are described, according to the investigation date and historical materials. The exclusion includes three levels, including system arrangement, social resources distribution and culture perception. In the layer of system arrangement, the foreign employees are segregated and labeled by China's household registration system and social security system. As a result of social resources distribution, the social resources, educational resources and rights resource are hedged and in the layer of culture perception, individual encounters prejudice and discrimination. The third part is concerned about the social exclusion's impacts on foreign informal employees. In the author' opinion the impacts can be divided into three dimensions, that is identity, sense of ascription to community and future attachment. In this part, the author demonstrates that the foreign informal employee intensify their identity of household registration, lack the sense of ascription to the urban community and finally choose to return to their homeland. The forth part discusses the reconstruction of self-identity. In this part, the author tries to describe and outline the changing process of reconstruction of self-identity from such aspects as identity and community. The fifth part is the conclusion and discussion. The author summarizes this research and point out the shortcomings of this paper.