Wenjuan ZHENG 

Wenjuan Zheng is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before joining HKUST, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, and a MA at Columbia University. Her research interest lies in the intersection of civil society, organizational studies, and technology, focusing on contemporary China. In particular, her research examines organizational resilience in the global context of adversity. She is interested in how nonprofit organizations anticipate and respond to political adversity and market intervention. One of her recent works examines the unintended consequences of platform companies entering into the public sector.

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Socio-Economic Review Cafe: Close Relationships, Trust, and the Economy 

Featuring a conversation with SER authors Wenjuan Zheng (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), David Shulman (Lafayette College), and Kent Grayson (Northwestern University) 

Join us for a discussion of close relationships and the potential and pitfalls of trust in the economy, as well as the ways technology can mediate these dynamics. Shulman and Grayson’s paper “Et Tu, Brute? Unraveling the puzzle of deception and broken trust in close relations” (2023)  discusses why closeness, as with friends or coworkers, is no guarantee of trust, revisiting theoretical discussions of trust to shed light on detection errors and associational dilemmas. Meanwhile, Zheng’s paper “Converting donation to transaction: how platform capitalism exploits relational labor in non-profit fundraising” (2023) investigates what happens when platforms intermediate trusting relationships, demonstrating how they reconfigure charity events and mediate civic interactions through invisible value extraction. 

Together, these papers offer insights into how trust is built, maintained, and challenged in a world increasingly facilitated by technology. 

The event will take place on Thursday, November 16th, at 9AM PST/12PM EST/6PM CET. Register at this link!

As with all SER Cafe events, we will facilitate a dynamic conversation with the authors rather than lengthy talks. Come ready to engage.