Peng LU is a Professor and the Director of Department of Sociology for Economy, Sciences, and Technology at Institute of Sociology of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). He also serves as Executive Dean of Institute of Digital China of University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Executive Director of Research Center for Private Entrepreneurs of CASS.
He earned his Ph.D. degree in sociology at Tsinghua University in 2010, plus a visiting student experience at Yale University from 2007-2008. He worked at New York University Abu Dhabi as a postdoctoral research fellow with Ivan Szelenyi from 2011 to 2012. He has been a visiting scholar in the Institute of Development Research (IDS) in the UK, Sciences Po Bordeaux, and the University of Duisburg.
His main research interests are government-business relations, elite study, social stratification and mobility, corporate social responsibility and social innovation. In recent years, he also put major energy into the studies of digital sociology, platform governance, and computational social sciences. He published three books in Chinese, Transformation of Intimate Relationships: The Birth, Rupture, and Repair of Growth Alliances, Looking for Humpback: How Chinese Enterprises Are Socially Innovating, and Social Stratification Theory. In addition, he translates numerous books and articles including Who Rules America, Making Capitalism without Capitalists, and Social Theory and Postcommunism. He published many papers on top peer-reviewed Chinese journals, and some in English, including British Journal of Sociology, Journal of Chinese Sociology. He has won the “Lu Xueyi Outstanding Achievement Award in Sociology”, one of the highest honors in Chinese sociology for outstanding researches.
To study Chinese elite, he co-founds Chinese Super Rich Persons (CSRP), a data-set collects socio-political info of the visibly richest Chinese private entrepreneurs. The CSRP is now developing into a part for a collective endeavour, the World Elite Database (WED) led by Professor Mike Savage from LSE. He is also the managing director of the renowned Chinese Private Entrepreneur Survey (CPES), a nationwide survey conducted every two years since 1993 (https://cpes.zkey.cc/), cooperated with Chinese authorities. (For more info on the team of elite studies, checkCES)
He is the founder of Baiji (https://www.baiji.org.cn), a lab for empowering corporations to achieve sustainable development under the idea of Corporate Social Innovation. He has created an index to evaluate social value of top Chinese companies, and collected cutting-edge case in which corporations use new technology in platform governance, poverty reduction, and other public affairs for good. The theoretical ambition is to redefine the role of market and technology in a system that traditional civil societal forces fail.
He has provided consulting and services to many well-known Chinese companies including Baidu, Ali, Tencent, ByteDance, Meituan, and Geely. He upholds the concept of “sociological intervention” and uses sociological methods and theories to promote business and technology for good. In addition, he has also consulted for the China Federation of Industry and Commerce, the State Administration of Market Regulation, Shanghai Municipal Government, and the UNESCO.
He estalished the Institute of Digital China of University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is currently working on a large project on “Technology and Digital Society” , which has received Key Discipline Funding from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. This project focuses on the social impact of digital technology and AI, and developes”digital sociology” with Chinese characteristics. Based on a series of previous academic papers, he is organizing team members to write the first textbook introducing digital sociology in China.
He emphasize that technological innovation and social innovation go hand in hand, and the interdisciplinary development of social science and computing science, and put forward the concept of “so-coder”. For two consecutive years from 2020 to 2021, the team and Baidu jointly organized a series of artificial intelligence-related academic training and exchange activities. Based on the course content, the team has fininshed “Introduction to Computational Social Science: The First Artificial Intelligence Class for Social Scientists”, which is expected to become the first relevant textbook led by social scientists in China, and has been scheduled to be published by Tsinghua University Press this year.
Influenced by his mentor Ivan Szelenyi, he has an enduring interest in Central Europe and Russia, and has co-established a research network with colleagues from these regions. He was also in Science Po Bordeaux, Institute of Development Studies in Sussex University, and University of Duisburg-Essen as visiting scholar. In recent years, he is interested exploring new emerging economies and Africa, particularly digitalization of governance and social life by multinational corporations.
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