The Research Of The Urban-Rural Laborer's Social Support Network

Began with the early 1980s, the undertaking of reform and opening-up of ourcountry entered a brand-new developing stage. Since then, the industrializationurbanization process of the Chinese society rapidly opened the prelude of itsdevelopment. Accompanied with this historical process, there was the largestpopulation migration in scaled since the dawn of human civilization on the Chineseterritory, with hundreds of millions of surplus rural labor forces migrating to cities.The peasants for one whole can not get back to the countryside but work and live incities and thus become a part of cities, which will be an irreversible course in thesocialist modernization drive of our countries and the key to realize the goal of theoverall well-to-do level in our countries as well. Urban-rural labors is a special groupduring the process of urbanization and modernization in our countries, the question ofpeasant workers has already become the focal point that the society must especiallypay close attention to. Some Urban-rural labors float into cities, their social supportnetwork is transplanted and constructed. There has been a great improvement inmaterial and spiritual lives. Instead some migrant workers, due to some reasons, thesocial support network is no significant changed. This seriously limits theirdevelopment in the city.This paper pays attention to the urban-rural laborer's social support network,tries using the network analysis method of the Western sociology to answer thisquestion. Through investigating some urban-rural laborers in Guangzhou, analyzesthe type and Scale of the urban-rural laborer's social support network. At the sametime, in the view of the change of the urban-rural laborer's social support network andthe factors of affecting the urban-rural laborer's social support network to construct,the author also analyzes them. This paper is composed by six parts altogether.The first part elaborates the background of the research, explains some relevantproblems about the theory of social supports, narrates the meaning of this research,the thinking and method in details. The second part mainly analyzes the characteristic of the urban-rural laborer'ssocial support network. Based on data from questionnaire, the author carries out anempirical study on the social support network. The research content includes thenetwork scale, the network type, convergence, heterogeneity. The research discovers:the average of the urban-rural laborer's social support network is small. It proposesthat the individual support based on blood relationship and geo- relation is the mostimportant support subject. The convergence of the urban-rural laborer's social supportnetwork is very strong and the heterogeneity is weak.The third part focuses on the analysis of the change of the urban-rural laborer'ssocial support network. The urban-rural laborer's flowing especially in the first flowmainly depends on primary-local relation, which is very rational choice.Accompanied with the urban-rural laborer's further development, it begins to extendand re-establish in the direction of instrumental logos. The extension of the peasantworkers' social relation network is the enlargement of the network with theprimary-local relation's dominant status, in the same time, the network's diversityincreases. The basic forms of the extension are "transfer" and "graft". Subsequentlythe dominant relation style changes from the primary-local relation to the sub-localrelation or non-local relation, so it leads to the relation network's re-establishment.The fourth part analyzes the factors of affecting the urban-rural labor's socialsupport network to construct from three perspectives including the individual, cultureand system.The fifth part analyzes the relation between the urban-rural labors' social supportnetwork and the urban-rural laborers' adaptation to city life. It also provides somesuggestions to construct the urban-rural labors' social support network.In the end, the author makes the summary of the paper.