互不信任的群体何能产生合作对XW案例的事件史分析

Can Groups without Trust Cooperate with Each Other? AnAnalysis of the Event History of the XW Case

本文的研究主旨与制度规则和社会资本建设的关系有关。与现有研究主要将社会资本视为自变量并论述其对社会发展之作用的视角不同,本文将社会资本视为因变量,追踪具有公共品性质的通用社会资本如何生发,尤其是在不利的群体冲突条件下获得生长的原因。研究发现,通用的社会资本不必然在社会关系中自然出现,它依托于特定的公共社会规则而生长和巩固。XW案例中出现的社会资本扩展———村民合作的广度由宗堂内转化为跨宗堂,明显是公共决策规则革新带来的结果。本文描述了这一通用社会资本的产生机制,以推进对合作行为的改进和社会资本的扩展,展开理论阐释。本文同时提示了有关政策改进的可能性:运用制度规则的突破进行自我改造,有助于打破群体冲突和控制权竞争的循环,提升基层社会治理的品质。

The subject of this study is about the relationship between institutional rules and social capital construction.Unlike the existing research,which mainly regards social capital as an independent variable and explores its role in socialdevelopment, this paper treats social capital as a dependent variable and tracks thedevelopment of public goods type of social capital, especially in the adverseenvironment of group conflict.The paper finds that universal social capital does notnecessarily occur naturally in normal social relations, it needs to rely onspecificpublic social rules to develop and consolidate. The XW case shows that the expansionof social capital,represented by the breadth of villager cooperation moving fromwithin-clans to cross-clans, is clearly the result of somenew innovative publicdecision-making rules.Facingan opportunity for collective asset appreciation and crisismanagement, people in XW responded with creating a set of new rules. A villagecouncil was set up with eighty-five representatives and an open WeChat platform wascreated for proposals and discussions, allowing representatives to deliberate and vote,sign resolutions,publish legal auditions, broadcast videos, and share other onlineinformation. The reconfiguration of the collective asset decision-making powerstructure has established a different public relationship among the villagers andstimulated the growth of general social capital. The study describes the mechanism ofgenerating social capital,offering a theoretical explanation on the limitation of specialsocial capital, the expansion of social capital, and the improvement of cooperativebehavior. At the same time, it is suggested that disrupting the conventional systemrules with innovative reforms could help break the cycle of group conflict and controlcompetition, and improve the quality of grass-roots social governance.