{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,5]],"date-time":"2026-10-05T08:55:23Z","timestamp":1791190523254,"version":"4.1.0"},"reference-count":11,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,5]],"date-time":"2026-10-05T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1791158400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Sociol."],"abstract":"<jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Background<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s theory of reification describes a social order in which relations among people appear as relations among things. It offers a productive way to read urban television narratives, where housing, consumption, professional performance, and intimate life regularly become measures of social worth.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Objective<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>This article examines how Chinese television dramas make reification visible through objects, space, and the body. It also asks how people-centered narration is constructed as a textual possibility for questioning those relations.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Methods<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>The study uses qualitative close reading of three urban dramas - Fake It Till You Make It, Nothing But Thirty, and Women in Beijing - and Meet Yourself, a contrastive case that begins with urban workplace pressure before relocating its protagonist to a rural community. Plot events, dialogue, character action, settings, and recurring motifs are examined through object alienation, reified space, the reified body, and dereifying practice.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Results<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>Across the urban cases, luxury goods, exclusive residences, professional schedules, and intimate calculations turn social value into visible and comparable signs. The contrastive case frames a partial interruption of that logic through care, shared activity, and a changed relation to work. These are narrative resolutions, not demonstrations of institutional transformation.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>\n                  <jats:sec>\n                    <jats:title>Conclusion<\/jats:title>\n                    <jats:p>The article connects reification theory to the close analysis of Chinese television narrative. It argues that people-centered narration is most useful as an analytical term when it names concrete formal and relational practices rather than a general moral quality.<\/jats:p>\n                  <\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.3389\/fsoc.2026.1784028","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,5]],"date-time":"2026-10-05T08:30:06Z","timestamp":1791189006000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["The dialectic of human-object relations in Chinese urban television drama: a reification-theoretical reading"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"11","author":[{"given":"Wen","family":"Liang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Yuncheng University","place":["Yuncheng, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,5]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref1","volume-title":"The Consumer Society","author":"Baudrillard","year":"2000"},{"key":"ref2","first-page":"172","volume-title":"Georg Luk\u00e1cs Reconsidered: Essays on Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics","author":"Feenberg","year":"2011"},{"key":"ref3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"13","DOI":"10.1163\/9789004430082_003","volume-title":"Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Luk\u00e1cs's Thought in late Capitalism","author":"Feenberg","year":"2020"},{"key":"ref4","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"506","DOI":"10.1177\/0163443715613637","article-title":"Georg Luk\u00e1cs as a communications scholar: cultural and digital labour in the context of Luk\u00e1cs's ontology of social being","volume":"38","author":"Fuchs","year":"2015","journal-title":"Media Cult. 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Ethnic Liter."},{"key":"ref12","volume-title":"Speech at the Opening Ceremony of the 11th National Congress of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the 10th National Congress of the Chinese Writers Association","author":"Xi","year":"2021"},{"key":"ref13","first-page":"109","article-title":"Warm realism in film and television creation in the new era: taking three popular television dramas as examples","volume":"1","author":"Zheng","year":"2024","journal-title":"Yihai Zongheng"}],"container-title":["Frontiers in Sociology"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.frontiersin.org\/articles\/10.3389\/fsoc.2026.1784028\/full","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,5]],"date-time":"2026-10-05T08:30:08Z","timestamp":1791189008000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.frontiersin.org\/articles\/10.3389\/fsoc.2026.1784028\/full"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,5]]},"references-count":11,"alternative-id":["10.3389\/fsoc.2026.1784028"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/fsoc.2026.1784028","relation":{},"ISSN":["2297-7775"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2297-7775","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,5]]},"article-number":"1784028"}}