Research On The Interaction Between Social Work Agencies And The Government In Government Purchased Services

Under the dual background of social governance system innovation and government function transformation,government purchase of social services has gradually become a highly respected institutional innovation and policy tool.Meanwhile,social organizations have gradually become the main body of social governance.However,in the process of government purchase of social organizations’ services,it still presents the constraints and restrictions of the powerful government on social organizations,and the control is more flexible and implicit;in addition,the problems of relational purchase,lack of autonomy of social organizations and formalization of purchase appear,which lead to the damage of the effectiveness of government purchase of social services.In this context,exploring the interaction between the government and social work organizations in the process of government purchase of services is conducive to clarifying the division of labor between the two sides in the process of purchasing services and promoting the construction of a benign relationship between them,so as to develop and improve the system of government purchase of public services.Based on resource dependency theory,this paper explores the interaction process between social work agencies and the government in the government purchase of services from three dimensions:project contracting,project implementation and project establishment,taking the Shanghai Jiayuan Agency Autonomy Grant Project as an example.The study used the case interview method to conduct in-depth interviews with 10 relevant staff members from social work agencies,district civil affairs bureau,street self-government office,and neighborhood committee who participated in the autonomy grant project,and also used the participant observation method to participate in the daily work of social work agencies.Through the analysis of the interview data,we extracted and summarized the multiple interactions and the patterns of interactions formed by the social work organizations in the process of cooperation with the district civil affairs bureaus,township self-government offices and neighborhood committees.The study found that,in this paper,social work agencies and government resources are interdependent at the project contracting stage,and social organizations depend on the political and administrative legitimacy resources and social legitimacy resources of the district civil affairs bureau,while they depend on the economic resources of the neighborhood self-governance office,and the district civil affairs bureau and neighborhood self-governance office depend on social work agencies for professional services and path dependence based on cooperation habits.In the process of project implementation,there is an asymmetrical dependence in stages,as social work agencies have irreplaceable professional resources,thus forming a strong dependence on social work agencies.In the project closing stage,since the government’s evaluation of social organizations may determine whether the project can be renewed,social work organizations are forced to show a relationship of dependence on the government due to the pressure of economic resources.On this basis,the interaction between social work organizations and the government is divided into partnership and buddy relationship,which is formed due to the government’s "official" governance philosophy and the difference of interest demands,and partnership due to the interdependence of resources and the governance philosophy of government-society cooperation.Based on the above discussion,this paper argues that in the purchase of project services,both sides can benefit from the interaction between the government and social work organizations,but only the people who are the target of the project may not maximize their interests.There are rational reasons behind this for each party.Governments at all levels are often constrained by top-down mandates and resource allocations that do not match,as is often said in the civil affairs industry:"A needle in a thousand threads from above".Therefore,there is a need to have available and useful social work agencies as "partners" or "buddies" to help smooth out the fluctuations of their assigned resources and to be able to accomplish the tasks assigned by their superiors in both the peaks and valleys of resources.In such a context,the rational choice of the lower level government is to "complete the task without problems"rather than to "achieve quality results".Therefore,the rational choice of social work organizations as project implementers is to survive and then seek development,to survive by gaining relationship with loss-making projects and to develop by recruiting social workers with profitable projects.