Abstract: Taking the community governance of S city as the object of observation, and through a case interview of 11 community secretaries, this paper aims to explore the institutional root of the plight of community governance in the context of social transformation. Theoretically speaking, the community secretary should meet the requirements of national institutionalization from the higher levels in the community governance process, and guarantee the effectiveness of community governance objectives to the lower levels. However, the study found that there were structure contradictions between the unreasonable design of the formal system, one-dimensionality of community governance and the non-professional community governance ability, and it was difficult to realize the effectiveness of community governance. On such a basis, the article explores the effective way of community governance in the process of institutionalization from two aspects:negotiation with the upper and lower levels together with the internal and external governance, in order to move towards an effective institutional governance model.

Key words: formal system, effectiveness, specialization, community governance, practice strategy