Collective Action For Community Collective Efficacy: An Empirical Study

As one outcome of the changes in structures of ownership and patterns of management in urban China, collective actions, esp. protests, provoked by community citizens has increased during the last decade. Apart from revealing certain social problems, such collective actions promise the formation and development of the "middle class" and citizen in urban China. Therefore, collective actions, which take place in urban community, indicate some influence on citizens' social psychology. This research picks community collective efficacy as a point to study such kind of influence and its mechanism.Reported by several researches conducted abroad, community collective efficacy functions well as an index of people's living quality and management of community. Also, physical environment, demographic characteristics and people's involvement in community events are said to have impacts on community collective efficacy. However, there is few researches paying attention to the impact on it by collective actions within community. Reviewing the literature of the relationship between collective action and collective efficacy, this research generalizes the mechanism of such impact in two aspects: collective identity building and collective action value building.Based on the sample of fifty communities in Shanghai, the research analyzes the relationship between collective actions within community and community collective efficacy. The conclusion drawn as below: First, collective actions within community do enhance community collective efficacy. Second, the two mechanisms of the relationship show no statistic significance.This research has such shortcomings as below: First, the causality of the relationship between collective actions and collective efficacy need further discussion. Second, volume of the sample hasn't been big enough for entire analysis. Third, research has been located and limited in communities in Shanghai. There can be further study on this subject using qualitative methods to reveal the intricate changing of community collective efficacy during the whole process of a certain collective action.