I am Wei Luo, a sociologist and Assistant Professor at the School of Government, Peking University. Working across contemporary and historical China, I bring organization theory into conversation with public administration, economic sociology, and comparative historical sociology.

How organizations are built, and how they reach beyond themselves

Organizations depend on more than formal rules, structures, and authority. I study how they draw on social relationships to become capable of acting.

I first pursued this question historically. My book project traces the parallel development of family and banking practices in inland China from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. It examines how modern financial organizations were assembled through existing social relations, rather than emerging only by replacing them.

My later research moved from how organizations emerge to how they operate within complex environments. Studying civic organizations in contemporary urban China led me to examine how organizations navigate relationships among the state, market, and communities. My current work goes further inside these processes, asking how public agencies and civic organizations mobilize people, relationships, and technologies beyond their formal boundaries, and how doing so redistributes labor, authority, risk, and responsibility.

Across historical and contemporary settings, my research examines how organizations acquire capacities that their formal structures alone cannot provide.