Cai, Jingjing

This article identifies multiple roles that "bridging organizations" play to promote the co-production of public services: an institutional system embedder that implements multi-dimensional empowerment, a socially skilled agent that carries out institutional production, and a social network actor that stimulates individual motivation. It examines the mechanisms of how bridging organizations promote co-production: hierarchical nested capability mechanism, the capital conversion mechanism, and the socio-psychological mechanism. This paper argues that, at macro level, social organizations need to be integrated into the system of institutional relations and jointly promote the multi-level capability enhancement of multiple stakeholders in public services. At meso level, social organizations are in a unique ecological niche in the entire social network and contribute to the reproduction of the institution through the circulation of resources, knowledge, and information. At micro level, the co-production of public services emphasizes the role of informal systems to activate social norms and create new values.