Urban Community Building: A Perspective Of Social Capital

Urban community building, as an important part of China social transformation, has been developing from 1980's. Though this research area has been focused by social sciences for many years, there is always a theoretical dilemma implicated within it. That is, the two opposed approach, cultivating social capacity of self-government and establishing national government on society, are unable to be perfectly integrated into one explanation. However, when social capital perspective is applied especially taking the holism methodology to research Community Social Capital (CSC), this theoretical dilemma can be solved creatively. In addition, it's meaningful and operable for evaluating the effect of urban community building in the practice.CSC is a kind of resource consisted of community network, historical culture, value ideology and behavior norm, which is generated from the community agencies' interaction based on social trust and reciprocity. There are four aspects for evaluating CSC: neighborhood relationship, residential organization, economic-social environment and governance efficiency. In the questionnaire employed to investigate community residents, they are transferred into an indexes that is consisted of 3 first-level indexes (community trust, community network and community norm), 9 second-level indexes (community satisfaction, community sense of trust, community evaluation, community participation, community organization, community relationship, community identification, community value and community caring) and 51 third-level indexes. The average of community residents' total score is the reflection of CSC, and comparison between different communities can be implemented on the basis of it.Using a database collected from three communities in Shanghai City with the method of random sampling, the above indexes effect is empirically examined. The result is, the third-level indexes are commendably integrated into the second-level indexes, but the logical structure of second-level indexes is along "acknowledge-action-tendency" rather than "trust-norm-network". When comparing the three communities, what can be fund is that they have different feature of CSC and there is distinguished difference of CSC stocking within them, though their evaluating score is close. Statistical analysis also shows that one's CSC score is only infirmly interrelated with variables of community, gender and age (divided by 60 years old), and there is not distinguished difference between working and non-working people, owning estate and non- owning estate persons, CCPC members and non-CCPC members. Because these findings don't support some customary hypothesis in the research on community building, it's necessary for in-depth discussion.After portraying practice for direct election, association activity and common affairs, how CSC plays an important role in community building is discovered. The stock and confirmation of CSC is shaped through triangle interaction among administrative power, community tradition and elicit participation based on the principle of trust, norm and network, which finally influence the process and direction of community building or community development. In other words, when administrative power goes through community network weaved by various community agencies, it is combined with community tradition (trust and norm principally) and transferred to be CSC. So community building can be observed and interpreted from the angle of social government as well as social autonomy, if the perspective of social capital is adopted.