A Study On The Action Logic Of Urban "Community Activists"

Resident participation is the basis of community governance,which is not only conducive to the supply of community public goods,but also conducive to the occurrence of community collective action.Community involvement in good urban communities,activists play a key role and are the "backbone" of community governance.This study focuses on urban community activists and tries to answer why community activists are active and what is the specific action logic of their continuous participation in community governance.This paper takes the activist group in A community of H University in Wuhan as the research object,integrates Olson’s selective incentive mechanism and Becker’s "subutility" preference function as the theoretical framework,analyzes the action logic and prerequisite of community participation of community activists,so as to promote residents’ participation.Improve the effectiveness of community governance to provide reference.It is found that the actions of urban community activists can generate positive externalities,which not only contributes to the realization of their personal utility,but also brings the overall welfare increment of the community.The action logic of community activists conforms to the general law of collective action,which is a kind of behavior based on selective motivation.Compared with the colloective action that can be realized by the one-off interest game analyzed by Olson,community participation is a long-term process with changing behavioral preferences and goals.First of all,neighborhood committees use selective incentives strategically to effectively mobilize community activists.Community activists act as intermediaries and Bridges for neighborhood committees to cooperate with their work,so as to satisfy different economic and social preferences.Both sides reach reciprocal cooperation through the selective incentive mechanism,forming one-to-one vertical interaction;Then,in the continuous participation process,community activists gain a certain degree of community power,a sense of community authority,residents’ recognition and positive and healthy life experience and other unexpected participation harvest,which strengthens their active participation psychology and arouses their confidence and expectation for further participation.Finally,in the deep participation,the participation effect obtained by community activists stimulates their spirit of ownership and community public consciousness,and the accumulated social capital stimulates their new needs.Community activists are no longer satisfied with obtaining "unique rewards",but focus their attention on preference satisfaction of community public interests,and independently lead community residents to safeguard their own and community public interests through collective actions with group power.Based on the case study,this paper argues that community workers should respect and attach importance to the behavioral preferences of different participants in the process of mobilizing and transforming community activists to participate in community governance,and appropriate and timely incentives are crucial,including but not limited to economic incentives.At the same time,we should pay attention to the cultivation and training of residents’ participation ability,give full play to the connecting and bonding role of "key residents" in the community,avoid the passive participation of residents caused by traditional mobilization path,so as to realize the effective participation of residents in community governance.