Research On The Structure Of Urban Communities With Social Network Analysis

With Government's increasing attention to the social public utilities, community has become an important partner of government, and as a basic unit of society, community is supposed to take up more and more social service functions. Community is no longer simply a natural unit. Instead it is becoming an arena for social governance and public governance. Within the arena, the governmental power, social power, civic power represented by government authority, social self-government organizations and citizens respectively, together with political parties' power which has distinct Chinese characteristics perform interactions and relationships to each other in terms of providing public goods. The arena is a platform for network contacts, which has changed the traditional linear model of community governance, that is, the Government is no longer the only body for allocation of community-based resources. The community self-government organizations, other units, voluntary organizations and community residents are all involved in community governance, which forms four community governance networks: political networks, governmental networks, market networks, social networks. These four networks establish a community network governance structure with resources shared and benefit related among the four bodies on the basis of an equal partner relationships.Based on the considerations mentioned above, this paper will use a sociological constructive research method - the social network analysis to study the current status, its context and future trends of community development as well. "Social network analysis" is an important branch of sociology in west countries, which emerged in the late 30's of twentieth century and has gained great development in recent twenty years. It is the latest research method, technique and paradigm focusing on research into social structure. According to social network theory, interpersonal and organizational ties are both objective social structures, and social environment can be described as patterns and rules existing in the interactive relationship among these different subjects. The internal structure of each organization can be seen as a network, thus the whole society becomes a large-scale system consisting of the various cross-cutting or parallel networks. Social network analysis studies the social problems in the framework of the social structure by building a three-level analysis model: accurate analysis of the yuan point, establishment of relationships, and building of a model.When it comes to the framework of this paper, there are five chapters. The first chapter is introduction section, in which the background and significance of the topic, definition of research questions, and the relevant literature review regarding community governance as well as social networks will be given out. In addition, I will also make a brief description about the framework and my innovation points of the article. In chapter two, I will first review the evolution and development of Chinese community to draw out the evolution of community-based governance structure and pointing out the general problems existing in the governance process. Then I will examine the community structure development trends taking into account of the current successful community-based governance model. Chapter three is about the applications of social network analysis in the community governance. Based on social network analysis framework, the operating mechanism of the aforementioned four governance networks in the community governance structure will be formulated through point, line, and structure construction. Following is chapter four where the empirical study becomes the focus. This paper selects community N as a case to investigate its problems of the community governance network structure and the proposed solutions. The final part, which is titled chapter five, is my thoughts about the community governance structure based on social networks. I put forward the community-based governance network strategy with a consideration of current situation of the social network applications in community governance.