Journal of East China Normal University (Philosoph ›› 2019, Vol. 51 ›› Issue (5): 24-32.doi: 10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5579.2019.05.003

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Gendered Accumulation of Social Capital in Community

LIU Jian-jun1, ZHANG Lan2   

  • Online:2019-09-15 Published:2019-09-24

Abstract: A community is an important cell of the national governance, a cornerstone and basic unit of the national governance system. Community governance has its own operation logic and realization path. As the condensation of small politics, weak politics and low politics, a community has its basic orientation of emotional politics and life politics. Therefore, this paper puts forward a proposition that a community is a feminine governance space. Feminization has two meanings. First, from the perspective of social attributes, a community is a flat, anti-bureaucratic governance field, so that the fact that community governance relies on process-orientation, emotion-orientation and participation-orientation directly leads to the warmth of a community. Second, from the perspective of natural attributes, community governance is mainly carried out by women due to their advantages in character and communication. The social and natural attributes of community governance directly contribute to the continuous accumulation of social capital along the gendered path in a community. This paper answers the question why the community governance is dominated by women and analyzes the gendered characteristics. In the feminine space, social capital has achieved continuous accumulation by the ways of institutionalization, beneficence and socialization. However, the emergence of beneficial politics in the housing-rights society has made the accumulation mechanism face the challenge of weakening even interrupting. How to combine the emotional politics and beneficial politics in community governance and explore the sustainable dynamics of community development has become important mission for social governance at China's urban grassroots.

Key words: social capital, feminine community space, gendered accumulation, emotional politics