Reasearch On The Mechanism Of Joint-Functioning Welfare Of Rural Elderly Organizations

Solving the crack problem of supporting the rural old people is not only urgent but also important because of intertwined challenges on population aging,rural hollowing,decline of traditional family's function,collapse of the collective welfare as well as withering of rural public space.A possible way is developing the elderly organization so as to promote it to create public space and produce elderly welfare.The elderly organization of G village in middle Hubei province is a good example.However,from the purpose of understanding China broadly,this thesis chooses S village in Sichuan province and H village in Zhejiang province as typical cases to be studied based on the academic standards for the village category.As for the theory,Giddens' structuration theory is selected as macro-level theoretical perspective to illustrate the driving forces and effect of joint-functioning welfare.Besides,the formal support promoting the development of informal support as medium perspective is also applied to explore the operating path and dependent resources on which joint-functioning welfare generated.The aim of it is to integrate the interaction between the elderly organization's external social system and internal welfare provision and to build an analytic framework.In addition,state-society interaction and empowerment is introduced as criteria to classify government-empowerment organization and dual empowerment organization,which make a foundation to further analyze the differentiation mechanism of joint-functioning welfare.As for the research methods,field investigation and document analysis are applied to collect empirical data.Mutual constructed perspective of structure-action is to study the operation of elderly organizations.The comparison method is also used to study the differences of 2 organizations' joint-functioning welfare.Lastly an expanded case method is used not only to understand various modes of rural elderly pension governance from the wider region but also to extract the joint-functioning welfare mechanisms from the deeper theoretical structure.Empirically,elderly organization in S village is a government-empowered one.However,the elderly organization in H village is from dual empowerment both government and society.In the normal process of producing elderly welfare,the operations of 2 organizations both reflect mutual empowerment of government and society.That means the mutual complement,interdependent and mutually reinforcing relationship have been built up owing to their own different resources.During playing a preset welfare function,the elderly organization also consequently mobilize family,community and charitable elements to produce welfare supports.However,compared with that in the S village,the elderly organization in H village generates more joint-functioning welfares especially on social charitable elements and village organization'supports.As for the conclusion,the common operation mechanism of joint-functioning welfare is conveyed as follows.The driving force of the operation are on the basis that elderly organizations play a preset function.It is also capable of transforming the rules and resources,and then increase its dominating and appealing ability to other subjects.The path of operation is the emergence of formal support to promote the increase of the informal support.The consequences function reflects that the support network is intensive and number of welfare is increased.It also reflects a significant overlap feature of manifest functions and latent functions.The moral resources such as filial piety,feelings,trust and charitable spirit are potential resources for other rural subjects produce joint-functioning welfare.The interpretation to differences of joint-functioning welfare can be attributed to three aspects.The first One is an external perspective of structure that united type village can produce a strong sense of identity for their villagers because of its powerful clan social cohesion.Still the degree of association which catalyzes them to donate financial and other charitable way plays a critical role too.The second one is the organization's own acting ability.The number of elderly elites determines the amount of joint-functioning and the ability of elderly organizations participating into village governance,which influences the village's support for the elderly organizations in turn.The third one is interaction of structure and acting ability.On the one hand the structure of village influences the type of elderly organizations and then affects its autonomy.On the other hand elderly organizations' autonomy especially its social protest also impacts government's empowerment or disempowerment and further the production of joint-functioning welfare.This thesis points out the organization of disempowerment can get more charity projects.It also reveals that if opportunity structure to participate in village governance is open,village organizations will shift their welfare support to the elderly organization.The main innovation of this doctorate dissertation can be concluded as 2 ponits.Firstly it proposes the concept of joint-functioning welfare and bulid up an explanatory framework of its operation,potential resources as well as differential mechanisms.It helps provide a new perspective of understanding dynamic welfare.On the other hand,it points out that state,village organizations and elderly organizations will convey different modes of operation and interaction mechanisms because of different social forces and village structures.