The Study Of Social Mobilization Of Young Volunteers From The Perspective Of Social Capital

Voluntary service, at its dawn, was known in the western countries as a group of people who, with the complete willingness, came to provide assistances in the church. A relatively developed system of voluntary service had been founded gradually since the conception of The Third Sector was put forward. However, voluntary service was launched late in China. Consequently, As a matter of the fact, Voluntary service was introduced quite late in China hence the need for establishing a fully worked-out system was crucial for the development of this service, undoubtedly, with the indispensable participation of the youth. Traditionally, the social mobilization was organized by government or affiliated units. Contemporarily, the authorities as well as responsibilities were partly switched to social units by Chinese governments while China had been undergoing the tremendous changes in term of economics, politics and culture. In all, China was undergoing a new era during which voluntary service was transferred from organized mobilization by officials to socialized mobilization.Currently, the studies of young volunteers were abundant while the researches on socialized mobilization were handful. The researches on socialized mobilization that chose young volunteers as research objects were fewer. With the research methods of participative observation and semi-structured interview, this thesis attempted to study the socialized mobilization of young volunteers from the perspective of social capital theory and took Shanghai city for example. The viewpoints about social capital from Pierre Bourdieu and Coleman were referred. The thesis contained five chapters. The first chapter contained the background, research methods and objects, etc. The following three chapters were designed with the four dimension of social capital: social network, channel of information, norms, obligations and expectations. Firstly, social network provided the necessary resources that required by socialized mobilization. Secondly, channel of information played a role as a messenger to guarantee the timely communication between public organizations and young volunteers. Thirdly, the mutual obligations and expectations between public organizations and young volunteers were the momentum to accelerate the socialized mobilization. Lastly, norms ensured that the process of socialized mobilization was carried out in order. The fifth chapter gave a summary.