Dissertation Title: The Price of Conformity: Cooperative Rivalry and Organizational Infighting in Chinese Professional Basketball

Committee: Kimberly Hoang (Co-Chair), Dingxin Zhao (Co-Chair), Andrew Abbott

How do organizations fail to produce coordinated teamwork and achieve desired outcomes despite emphasizing collectivity and conformity? My dissertation aims to provide at least a partial and provincial answer to this question by examining the interpersonal, organizational, and macro-structural conditions under which divergent team members could collaborate with each other (or not) in hyper-competitive industries. Using a comparative ethnographic analysis of basketball players at a professional basketball club in China, I study how the teams of the basketball club were able to maintain a high winning percentage in national and international basketball competitions during the pandemic, but not before and after the pandemic. By comparing the clubs’ training regiments across the three different phases, I explore the organizational conditions under which the conflict between players was strengthened or weakened. My dissertation contributes to the literature in the sociology of culture and relational sociology by revealing the intra-organizational dynamics and mechanisms that contribute to teamwork and organizational performance.