A Study On The Mechanism Of Migrant Workers' Stigma From The Perspective Of Media Sociology

In the late 1970 s, China took itself to the way of transition from agricultural society to industrial society, from traditional society to modern society. Under this circumstance, thousands of surplus rural labor started to rush into cities in large scale. Therefore, a “Migratory birds” group--migrant workers, wandering between city and country side, emerged. With the socialization of this group and advancement of integration into city life, stigmatization of migrant workers become increasingly visible.Currently, most communication science scholars deem the stigmatization of migrant workers as a communication science phenomena basing on media representation bias. They think that, mass media might consciously or unconsciously distort their reappearance of migrant workers while reflecting the social miniature of them, and make public to form stiff cognition for migrant workers with their strong power of creating recognition. However, in the field of media sociology, stigmatization of migrant workers is a complicated social mechanism conditioned by certain social and historical factors and practiced by multiple action subjects such as mass media.Given this, this study will apply media sociology perspective instead of pure communication science perspective. It will combine the social power institutions with media symbolization such as social common sense, official explanation, role allocation and “Myths” inserted in the stigmatization texts, relate media context with social and historical context, to demonstrate the history and power mechanism, to expose action subjects which hide behind the media, and finally to achieve the result of “demystifying”.This paper consists of five parts: introduction mainly focuses on the reason, meaning, documentation, methods and theory concept definition of the study. Chapter two takes the perspective of social history, put stigmatization of migrant workers in the background of “society—history” for observation, analyze the social and historical context of migrant workers’ stigma. Chapter three explores why the stigma flew from social context to media context in the perspective of media’s dual purposes. Chapter four uses News reports as research blueprint, analyzes how the media reappearance generalized migrant workers’ stigma through three ways, namely stiff impression under label strategy, habituated citizen perspective and “not-present” theme under deletion strategy. Chapter five uses social psychological model of stigmatization as research model, starting from three levels, self-recognition, subjective mental experience and social behavior pattern of migrant workers, to reveal the inner influence of stigmatization for migrant workers, and briefly summarizes the social impact of stigmatization.It is indicated in the conclusion that, the stigmatization of migrant workers is actually a complicated social mechanism, a reproduction strategy of asymmetrical power relationship, a social crisis hidden behind modernization. Therefore, the author advocates that, in order to solve the stigmatization problem, academia can’t just stick to rethinking media representation in the perspective of communication science, but also needs to explore the structure mechanism of the transforming society under the giant society system.