Who Will Survive in a Long Run: A Case Study of Social Welfare Service Contracting Program in China

Background and Purpose: Responding to the Chinese central government's advocating ‘socialization of social welfare’, Guangzhou, one of most developed city in China, has been developing a social welfare service contracting program for six years. And currently, the cumulative invested capital has reached a billion RMB. Such program encourages the establishing and developing of social work service organizations(SWOs) in Guangzhou. And the number of social work service organization increased from 6 in 2008 to 217 in 2014.However, many existing studies focus on characteristics of the NGOs in China and their relations with government, without looking into the social work service organization specifically. The rapidly increasing SWOs calls more in-depth investigation into their emergence and development paths.

This paper aims to fill the gap by examining SWOs in the Guangzhou government's purchase of social service programs. This study explores how the SWOs got involved in such collaboration and how they have been differed in their development paths over the past six years. Based on the resource dependence theory and the institutional theory, this paper gives explanations to such differentiation in the development of the social work service organizations.

Methods:The data came from two parts: the documentary review and semi-structure interviews. The documents concerning the bidding and evaluations, the overall contract information, the background information of the contractors are collected, reviewed, and analyzed.17 social work organization managers were approached and interviewed. Those participants came from four types of social work organizations, college-based, enterprise-based, and government-related and the grassroots-based social work organizations (almost covering all typical organizations in the contracting program). These interviews last about one and a half hours. The questions include the organizations' development goals; the managers' attitudes towards different types of contractors, issues on bidding and evaluations; their experiences of collaborating with governments

Findings:We find that (1) among the four types of contractors, the college-based and government-related ones participated early in this program. However, the college-based social work organizations seems to prosper afterwards while the government-related ones seem to decline. Such differentiation seems to imply that the legitimacy may be very crucial to the survival of a social service organization.(2) Some of the enterprise-based social work organizations are more likely to receive more contracts and have relatively large scale of organizational size. The vitality of the enterprise-based organizations which have capital resources and the assistance from the government, lends some support to the resource dependence theory.(3) The new grassroots-based social work organizations are relatively uncompetitive in the bidding and received small number of contracts. After several years' development, among those social work organizations, some have become more influential; and they play a more important role in the regulation formulation in bidding and evaluation.

Conclusion and implications:The findings indicate legitimacy seems to explain the high competitiveness of the college-based organizations in the contracting program. And the enterprise-based ones are advantageous in the capital resources, but still need to submit to the professional institutional requirements. Considering the professional development of the social work service organizations, the potential monopoly is worthy of attention.