Interest And Identity: Action Logic Of Urban Residents Participating In Community Governance

Community governance has always been one of the major social issues that have attracted much attention.For a long time,both the government and the academic circles have made in-depth exploration and research.The reason why the state pays attention to grass-roots governance is that after the rapid development of social pluralism since the reform and opening up,the national management system which is completely led by the government in the traditional sense can no longer keep up with the needs of community development,and it has been proved in many aspects that it is difficult to really solve the problem of grass-roots governance units only by relying on the power of the government.Scholars in social sciences are also actively studying how to build our "living community" from a theoretical perspective.In this situation,it has been pointed out that attaching importance to the role of residents’ participation in community governance and actively guiding residents to participate in community governance can solve these problems to a certain extent.In this paper,the Lijie Road community is selected as the research field,and the specific forms of residents’ participation in Lijie Road community are studied by means of participation observation and in-depth investigation.Based on the background of the "Three-Society Linkage" project in Lijie Road Community,the author has personally realized how community residents take action under the different mobilization strategies of community neighborhood committees and social workers,how community residents express their interest demands during the process of community residents’ participation,how collective identity in the "living community" is reflected,and why different types of residents adopt different action strategies when facing the mobilization of community activities.Among the activity groups in Lijie Road Community,after careful cultivation and development,there are many distinctive resident groups,such as "Cultural Federation","Neighborhood Help Team" and "Residents’ Council".Through the understanding of these residents’ groups,we can clearly understand the whole process of Merton’s adopting institutionalized means to achieve cultural goals in exploring the factors that influence actions under the social structure.Then,this paper divides the residents participating in community governance into active actors,passive actors,bystanders and absentees from two dimensions: whether they can reflect community identity and whether they can obtain public benefits.Through the investigation of different types of residents,the detailed action logic of community residents’ participation is summarized.First of all,residents’ participation takes place under a positive institutional background.The reason why community residents can participate in community governance and have an impact on it is inseparable from a good institutional environment.Secondly,the organization and mobilization ability of community neighborhood committees and social work organizations can affect residents’ participation.Thirdly,residents’ participation in community governance is mostly linked with the public issues within the community,which just contains the public interests that community residents care about.Finally,community residents’ community identity and pursuit of their own interests can lead residents to participate in the process of community governance consciously.