Absorptive Cooperation Of Urban Community Governance

The current Chinese urban community presents great complexity,reflecting the diversity of living patterns and the complexity of community organization networks within a particular community.At the same time,segregation,fragmentation and heterogeneity of community,as well as social mobility,have increased the difficulty of community governance.There is a complex problem regarding organization,mobilization and governance within the urban community.Effective integrated governance has become the natural choice for community governance.This integrated governance coud be achieved through institutional and organizational means.The organization and institution theory believes that the influence of institutional factors on organizations and individuals becomes more and more prominent.It not only determines the structure of the organization,but also regulates the behavior of individuals.To a certain extent,the process of urban community governance is the process in which different actors in specific institutions and organizational structures achieve their goals.Based on the above analysis,this paper focuses on the institutional and organizational means of urban community governance based on analyzing the case community,trying to present the dynamic process of these governance means how to shape the interaction behavior of multiple actors,and to extract the overall logic behind the behavior.The study attempts to prove the fact that grassroots party and government organizations in urban communities reproduce its power in the new type of social space of transitional urban community through a series of institutional and organizational means,reshaping its legitimacy and core leadership position.The process of institutionalization and organization of community governance is essentially the process of organizational absorption of grassroots party and government forces,that is,the mechanism of “absorption cooperation” with other governance subjects is constructed by organizational absorption.Cases show that this cooperation mechanism has played a role in regulating organizational behaviors,integrating community interests,and enhancing community participation.However,the mechanism has also shown obvious vulnerability,especially in the commercial housing community where the Owners' Committee is absent.In the specific situation,the conflicts between the Residents' Committee and the Property Company lead to the failure of the absorption cooperation mechanism in the governance practice.In summary,this paper puts the focus on that how grassroots party and government organizations in urban communities use institutional and organizational means to reproduce administrative power,why actively cooperate with the market and social forces,and how the absorption cooperation mechanism between them be constructed,why this mechanism goed into failure in a specific community governance context?This paper bases on the traditional research paradigm of “state-society” theory and governance theory,and constructs an analytical framework of“institution-organization-actor”.First,the institution is a set of rules and governance systems.Institutionalization means the continuous improvement of legal,policy,and institutional carriers.Secondly,the organization is an aggregation that seeks specific goals and has a highly formalized social structure.Organizational process means individuals' association.The actors are active organizations and individuals whose behaviors are subject to institutional and non-institutional factors.As far as the relationship between the three is concerned,the institution is the source of legitimacy of the organization,and provides a legitimate basis for social organization.The society is organized and the collective action needs to rely on the organizational channels.The formal and informal institution jointly regulate and guide the behavior of the actors.The institutionalized operation of urban community governance falls into two levels: institutionalized management and institutionalized coordination.They correspond to two types of institutional settings,namely,“management-type” and“linkage-type”.The former manifests itself as a Street Community Institution with involution and a hierarchical Target Management Responsibility System.Its essence is a vertical administrative institution design;the latter includes various institutional forms,such as “Three Society Linkage”,“Three Party Cooperation”,consultation and co-construction and so on.Its essence is a horizontal and socialized institutional design.The instrumental value of institutionalized governance lies in its functions of spatial reconstruction,organizational regulation and political integration.The organizational operation of urban community governance involves many aspects.Based on the experience of S community governance,this paper explores the logic of the organizational operation from four aspects.They are gridding organization under the organizational expansion,the grass-roots party construction under the organizational embeddedness,the community social organization governance under the organizational empowerment and the construction of the homeowner's autonomous organization under the organizational substitution.Specifically,grid management is actually a dual organizational expansion model of grass-roots organizations in the field of party and government.Grass-roots party organization embeds into social governance in an organizational way,and becomes the bond between state and society through top-down organizational penetration.Organizational empowerment increases the number and scale of community social organizations,and gradually confirms the subjective status of self-generated social forces in the community.Organizational substitution is a way for grassroot organizations to strengthen administrative embeddedness into commercial houses communities.The establishment of the Property Management Committee realizes a certain degree of homeowner autonomy,while compresses the space of owner autonomy.As far as the actor logic of urban community governance is concerned,actors have subjective consciousness,which includes both the grasp of institutional texts and spaces,the effective use of organizational tools,and the selective use of non-institutionalized tools.The behavior of the actor is not only institutional,also situational,so the actor will choose different action strategies according to their own interests and specific situations.The ritualization of social mobilization,the convention of neighborhood relations and the flexibility of policy implementation have become the main ways of the Residents' Committee as national grass-roots agency to intervent community governance in the non-institutionalized space.As a market-oriented organization,based on the maximization of its own interestst,the Property Company adopts the selective cooperation and conflict game with residential committee.The premise of the cooperation between the two is to achieve a win-win situation.The process of the cooperation is the process of power interaction based on resource exchange.The root of the conflict lies in the economic interests of the Property Company and the political interests of the Residents' Committee.The community residents who are the mainstay of social forces fall into two groups,namely “residents” and “homeowners”.The “residents” of the old community and the “homeowners” of the commercial houses community have different behavioral logic.Among them,the community residents in the old community represented by the floating population are more inclined to strive for as many community public services and social welfare as possible,and to strengthen the sense of community integration.Therefore,they actively participate in the public activities of the community and actively cooperate with the Residents' Committee.The community residents of the commercial houses community represented by the homeowners are more inclined to maintain the property rights and social and economic interests.Institutional pressure and organizational alienation produce a certain space for rights protection while squeezing the owners' autonomy space,creating a political opportunity structure for the owners' activism;the actors use the discourse construction to get legitimacy and to transform political opportunities into a discourse opportunity and advantage.As a result,the owners' actions move toward institutionalized rights protection.Under the harsh conditions of organizing resources,the mobilization structure of the owners' rights protection shows “de-organization”.The characteristics of institutionalization and mobilization seem to be the only way to reflect the growth of the owners' group rights awareness and rule awareness.Based on case analysis,this paper re-examines the logic of urban community governance in the transition period.The behavior and interaction of community organizations displays in a specific institutional space.Institutionalized governance is to shape and expand the institutional space of community organizations and individuals by constructing a sound system of community governance systems.It is a formal system and an informal system.An institutional network that works together and exists in a spatial form.From this,we can simply sum up two sets of causal relationships,namely “institutionalization ? organizationalization” and“non-institutionalization ? individualization”.For the former,the institutional changes and integration of urban communities determine the organizational transformation and the construction of community communities;for the latter,in the non-institutionalized implicit operational space,the behavior of actors shows individualized behavior.Community organizations or individuals based on the specific context of the role of formal institutions will adopt a free and individualized action strategy.If the system,organization and actors are the analytical elements and entry points for the interpretation of the community governance logic,then the “space-action”theory can be regarded as the theoretical foothold of this paper to explore the logic of community governance.In the “space-action” theory,community space is a complex field where multiple forces carry out wrestling.This kind of power competition makes the community space always in the process of adaptation and reconstruction.This is also the social practice process by the purpose and intention of the actor.Actors are counterproductive to institutional space,and good community space production need the continuous and healthy interaction of multiple actors.According to the "space-action" theory,the non-institutionalized space in community governance becomes the main field for actors to demonstrate their individualized behavioral orientation.In the urban communities that inject new institutionalization and organization elements,the multi-actors involved in the Residents' Committee,the Property Company and owners have shown us the changes action logic in political forces,market forces and civil self-government forces on the stage of grassroots community governance.Due to the lack of consciousness or means of self-governance,there are still a large number of commercial housing community in cities where the Owners' Committee is absent,and which makes room for the full operation of the Residents' Committee and the Property Company.In order to ensure the continuous presence of the state power,the Residents' Committee,as the grass-roots agent of the state,will actively seek to establish an “Absorptive Cooperation” with the Property Company through organizational absorption,such as promotion of “Red property” and establishment of Property Management Committee with unclear definition.However,the case of P Community applying for public maintenance funds proves that transferring the right/power supervising Property Company from the Owners' Committee to the Residents' Committee results in a direct conflict between the Residents' Committee and the Property Company,eventually leading to failure in governance practice of the absorptive cooperation characterized by organizational absorption.From the micro action logic in specific situation of the multi-governance subjects,the Residents' Committee represents the political interests guided by the hierarchy,the Property Company represents the economic interests guided by the market,while the interests of the owners become the victims of the bargaining game.It can be seen that the one-way absorptive cooperation in urban community governance is not a long-term solution,while the ideal cooperative mechanism should be based on balance and division among the multi-actors such as the Residents' Committee,the Property Company and the Owners' Committee.