This thesis examines the antecedents of the performance of Chinese Science Associations (CSAs) as a case of social organizations in contemporary China. Science associations have had a long history in China, with early developments since the turn of the twentieth century. More recently, they have been the subject of reform and many resources have been invested in expanding their role and operation, in order to improve their capacity to benefit innovation in science and technology. Results so far have been lackluster, however. Existing studies on CSAs and on the performance of social organizations in China have offered varied explanations, with some stressing the impact of historical factors or resource allocation, and others government relations and privatization reforms. The lack of an agreement on what went wrong makes it difficult to design the next step of actions to improve CSAs performance. In three essays, this thesis aims at re-examining the issues through an empirical study to identify the key determinants of the effective improvements of the CSA performance, thereafter, shedding light on improving the performance of social organizations.

Essay 1 reviews the evolving mission, role and relationship of the CSAs with the government over time, from the early twentieth century to the present time. Essay 2 develops an integrated model to analyze organizational and individual-level factors that influence the performance of CSAs of the present day. Essay 3 explains how several characteristics of social organization-government relations have impacted on the CSA performance in public service delivery. These include recently implemented government function transfer and outsourcing reforms, the organizational type of the CSAs, and the level of government intervention. The methods of analytic narrative, hypothesis testing, and a structural equation model are employed to analyze the data obtained from documents, participant observation, interviews and surveys.

The findings suggest that the weight of government influence has led to a tendency of “mission drift” among CSAs. Better financial conditions have been linked to the provision of more, but not necessarily better, services. Motivated leaders, the availability of information and human resources, and institutional and managerial autonomy are found to have played a positive role.