Soft Embedding: Logic of the Fit between Government Behavior and Cultural Communityin Local Governance

For a period of time, the administrative and bureaucratic transformations have occurred in self-governing mass organizations, which play the role of public agents in grassroots society. Due to the institutional inertia left by the administrative reform and the long-term accumulated custom meta-system in local society, non-government organizations still face the problem of embedded tension in the process of social governance. Based on the discussion of "embeddedness" and "soft governance", this article uses the term "soft embeddedness" to summarize the logic of the fit between the cultural community constructed by the New Rural Gentry group and the behavior of grassroots governments. The findings of the study are as follows: loose authoritarian policies provide space for the collective action of the cultural community; the value identity and status identity in the cultural community drive individual subjects to participate in collective action, and affect the political life of grassroots society through the informal cultural value system; the administrative institutions represented by local governments use behavior-oriented and behavior-attributed methods to maintain the new public order formed on the basis of cultural bonds, and then construct a new pattern of grassroots social governance with equal status among subjects, mutual embedding of order norms and diversified evaluation methods for results.