Expedient Hybridization: A Case Study of Corporate Professionalization of Maternal and Newborn Care in China

This article examines the corporate professionalization of care work in China's maternal and newborn care industry—a traditionally low‐status domain employing primarily women. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with managers, care workers, and clients, this article introduces the concept of “expedient hybridization”—a pragmatic and ethically ambivalent blending of culturally valued, masculinized attributes (such as abstract knowledge) with devalued feminized elements (such as emotional labor) in the corporate professional project aimed at achieving market value and client satisfaction. Although this approach incorporates feminized labor that is often marginalized in professionalization processes, it ultimately reinforces gender hierarchies by prioritizing masculinized traits for market appeal and exploiting feminized labor as a tool of discipline. The study offers new insights into emerging forms of professionalism among a lower‐educated female workforce in a cross‐cultural context, and it extends scholarship on both corporate professionalism and the professionalization of care work.