Self-survival Political Power Management

It has been well documented in the literature on organization that an organization is shaped by both institutional and technological environment and the two types of environment could lead to serious conflicts in organizational struggle for legitimacy and efficiency. An examination by this research into the relationship of the street agency, the government office of the grass-root level in China, with its affiliated street economic enterprises and neighborhood committees has demonstrated that the tension between the pursuit for legitimacy and that for efficiency might be compromised when the two objectives are redefined by political power.Through an investigation into the financial relations and welfare arrangement among a street agency, the neighborhood committees and street enterprise in its charge in S City, this study has revealed that among the local governmental agencies of three levels, namely, city (district), street, and neighborhood, there has been a change in public administrative resource allocation which leads to the incentive of street agencies for economic efficiency. Such a finding challenges the analytical frameworks such as"local corporatism","profit-seeking political power management"from previous studies on grass-root governmental organizations in rural areas. The transformation of the street welfare enterprise seems to have provided evidence for an argument that the lower the administrative level of the governmental agency, the greater incentive it has for resource mobilization from the enterprises and agencies under its control as a result of insufficient administrative fund, and the less possible for the enterprises under the government control to accumulate resources for development. When political power is taken into consideration, the behavioral patterns of the street agency could be viewed as political power management for survival responding directly to the financial crisis and pressure for legitimacy. Nevertheless, it is in this process of seeking ways of surviving that the street agency as an organization is losing both of its efficiency and legitimacy.Within the organization such as street agency, conflicts between"efficiency"and"legitimacy"are not expressed in the way as expected by the existing theoreticalunderstanding. Instead, there seems to be a state of inter-dependency between the two types of organizational environment in the case of street agency. Moreover, by including a cultural perspective in the examination of the social welfare arrangements, this study also attempted to provide contextual explanations for the economic behavioral patterns of the street agency. It is founded that the restrictive nature of the welfare culture, the marginalized expectation of the handicapped workers of the street enterprise for welfare benefits, and the internalized discrimination of the labor market contributed to the dysfunction of the welfare programs for the vulnerable.