Elasticity or Rigidity: Rational Choice and Development of Community Grassroots Organizations in Governance Contexts

Background: Few existing researches have attempted to describe the impact of the rational choices and development evolution of community grassroots organizations on the effectiveness of community self-organizations. From governance practices, it is found that some community grassroots organizations put off long-term projects and focus on short-term governance activities to achieve significant results rigidly.This phenomenon is summarized in this study as "rigidity before elasticity". Based on this phenomenon, this study, guided by the theory of rational choice, compared the development of children's councils in two different communities in Chengdu, focusing on the different choices of community grassroots organizations.It aimed to analyze the mechanism and evolution of the effect of "elasticity or rigidity" selection and reveal the underlying issues behind it.

Methods: This study adopts a comparative case study method to analyze deeply the result differences of children's councils grounding in two different communities in Chengdu. It pays attention to the occurrence and evolution of "rigidity before elasticity" tries. In terms of qualitative data collection, this study mainly uses in-depth interviews and participatory observation. The interviewees mainly include 18 people, such as resident social workers, grassroots organizational staff, social work institution M managers, council members.

Findings: The comparative case study found that the rational choices and development evolution of community grassroots organizations face a structural tension between "instrumental rationality" and "value rationality". This then affects the choice of "elasticity or rigidity". By comparing, Q community chooses the response strategy of "rigidity before elasticity", which has a significant instrumental-ism. In the case of the reversal of instrumental rationality and value rationality, the community chooses to support governance projects with more prominent short-term results, shelving the key development plans of children's councils, and various governance activities gradually slow down or even stagnate resulting in the ineffective governance. L community chooses the response strategy of "elasticity before rigidity",using instrumental rationality for value rationality, adopting a moderate "layered escalation" action strategy, actively breaking down various governance tasks.

Further analysis found that the sustained, in-depth implementation of projects and a single performance supervision method shape the development evolution of the choice of "rigidity before elasticity." Under the continuous influence of project implementation, the pressure-oriented institutionalization gradually extends to community grassroots organizations,and the single supervision mechanism further alienates grassroots organizations into a "disconnection from internal and responsible to the upper level" state, which is not conducive to the healthy development of community governance.

Conclusion and Application: The research findings emphasize the structural significance of rational choices made by grassroots organizations in the development and evolution of children's councils.The critical issue of "production choice" lies behind the choice of "rigidity or elasticity,"Furthermore, it is suggested that grassroots organizations should transform government tasks flexibly, and shift from rigidly obeying governance tasks to flexibly completing them.It also requires continuous optimization of project systems by the government.In addition, multiple evaluation mechanisms should be established to avoid the problem of "braking without accelerating." This will further consider the rational tool and value-based development needs of grassroots organizations.