Social Organizations Involved In Rural Community Development Approaches And Mechanisms

In recent years, social organizations have intervened in local community affairsfrequently as part of globalization and played a significant role in local development.Especially after the Great Sichuan Earthquake in2008, social organizations’collective actions surprised native experts and scholars so that they proclaimed theyear of2008as China’s civil society year one. This paper is to discuss the way andmechanism of social organizations’ intervention in rural community development.Social organizations here refer to non-government organizations. Taking a casestudy of a mother support project carried out by social organizations for example,this thesis examines how social organizations use resources and follow rules tointeract with other stakeholders and produced unintended consequences with theview of British sociologist Antony Giddens’ structuration theory.This research argues three points: First, social organizations have to integrateresources, especially through informal relations to get administrative legality andwin the approval and support of local authority so as to carry out practices in thelocal community. Second, during the process of intervention, social organizationshave to interact with other stakeholders by means of communication and changestrategies to obey rules or make compromise. Last, acts of social organizations willresult in intended consequences which will be new conditions to the reproduction ofstructures. In one word, social organizations’ social practice reflects the interactionbetween agency and structure.