Beijing State-owned Professional And Technical Personnel And Administration Of Upward Mobility

Taking a group of professional and technical personnel of a state-owned enterprise inBeijing for example, this paper tries to describe the living status quo, social status, income,promotion methods of this group, aiming to show that the technical white-collar group thatengaged in the field of technical support have relatively fixed salary, usually have difficulties inpromotion and are with lower-value titles compared to the those engaged in other careers. Andas a result, the opportunity for upward mobility is inhibited. After the market-oriented reform,the service-oriented professional and technical posts gradually occupy a larger proportion in thegroup of technical white-collar. Although they belong to the white-collar and the middle class,they are lack of the apparent features that the typical white-collars are equipped with, whichresult in the lack of self-identity. An important social characteristics of the middle class is aclear channel of upward mobility, if which is blocked, they are bound to seek opportunities forupward mobility in the none-professional fields, which can be named administration. In orderto solve the problem, a state-owned enterprise in Beijing have taken some measures to dubbedadministrative job titles for the technical staff, such as managers, senior managers and otheradministrative titles to improve their prestige,level of salary and income within the enterpriseso as to guarantee their completed life career.However, it is only a temporary way to alleviate the pains that caused by promotion style.On one hand, there exists no standard regulations that measure the levels and technicalqualifications of the technical white collars within the industry. On the other hand, the lack ofstandard salary institutions to define the title values and the fixed salary within the enterpriselimit the promotion room for the technical white collars, what is more, there have noadministrative job titles dubbed to the technical staff, so gradually this special group begin totransform from professional and technical occupational categories to administrative jobcategories. However, what happened as we stated will inevitably lead to the unclearness of theroles of the technical white collars, which will also create paradox that those engaged inprofessional and technical work have no way but by administrative titles to show theirself-values. All of this will lead to a gradual loss of our technical staff and lag of professionalR&D industries.