The Influence Factors And The Organizational Mechanism Of Community Governance Innovation Competition

In recent years,the functional focus of urban grassroots governments(subdistricts)is increasingly inclined to public service and social governance,which has made governance innovation the work requirement and important performance of grassroots governments.Considering performance competitions or the completion of management tasks,subdistricts usually adopt the strategy of focusing on the construction of a small number of "star communities",resulting in the phenomenon of "similar highlights" of governance innovation.Which is completely different from the author’s observation that the innovation highlights of N Subdistrict are evenly distributed in the subordinate communities and the phenomenon of "scattered highlights".It is also contrary to the original intention of the country to encourage innovation to improve the governance performance.This thesis summarizes this observation phenomenon as "race to the top",which means communities on the same subdistrict compete for projects and pilots to carry out grassroots governance innovation.As a result,innovation highlights are evenly dispersed in different communities,and all communities can develop relatively evenly.Therefore,the research question of this thesis is put forward: What are the behaviors and strategies of community governance innovation competition? What are the influence factors? What is the organizational mechanism behind it?In this thesis,we use the multi-case study method to interview seven secretaries of N Subdistrict,and it is found that communities need to adopt certain behaviors and strategies in order to gain advantages when competing for projects.The behavior mode is described from the level of tasks(top-down arrangement or bottom-up generation)and the motivation of completing community tasks(active or passive)as indicators.In addition to governance innovation,there are also five behavioral modes: ranking competition,community interaction,mutual learning,and greeting and inspection.There are corresponding strategies in the community through these behaviors: motivation transformation strategy,relationship maintenance strategy and resource contention strategy."Making resources" becomes the behavioral logic through the community governance innovation strategies.It is found that the common factors that motivate the community secretaries to compete in community governance innovation are social economic status,actors and institutional conditions.Social economic status factors include the welfare benefits and social status of a secretary;actor factors include the characteristics and relationships of three core actors: street leader,community secretary and community residents;and institutional conditions include cultural ideas and organizational resources.These factors can help grassroots community cadres have the ability and channels to create new knowledge and create new highlights.On this basis,the thesis summarizes the organizational mechanism of the transformation of community governance innovation from the point to the surface as "selection competition".The study not only reveals the internal mechanism of "selection competition",including organizations without threshold,random selection,and equal opportunity.The "selection competition" uses four mechanisms of administrative empowerment,comparative selection,resource attraction and improved training to stimulate communities.At the same time,it also discusses the reasons for the deployment of the "selection competition" mechanism: the cognition of subjects,the pressure to achieve balanced development,the accessibility of goals and the sustainability of innovation,all of which affect the decision-making of subdisricts.This thesis opens the“dark box ” of the organizational mechanism of grassroots governments to encourage governance innovation of communities.The above findings put forward the concept of "race to the top" in urban grassroots governance innovation,described the mechanism of "selection competition",expanded the theoretical discussion of "tournament" mechanism,and developed the incentive theory of public organization.It is of great practical significance to explore ways and methods to motivate grassroots community cadres who lack promotion opportunities and to popularize the innovation of urban grassroots.