Abstract: Civil supportive organizations(CSOs) can make an important contribution in social governance. However, academics have primarily focused on their business operations and modes of interaction with the external environment, neglecting the phenomenon of organizational transformation and internal action strategies. This paper takes organization X as a case sample, and analyzes how CSOs respond to external environmental changes and construct survival space via participatory observation and in-depth interviews under the framework of sociological new institutionalism. It is found that these organizations adopt four transformation strategies: business community-shift, re-agency, ecological role positioning and resource structure diversification. The driving force of business transformation of private support organizations comes from the conflict and integration between legitimacy and efficiency, and finally shows the phenomenon of “loose association”. Through the re-agency strategy, private organizations establish a “semi-embedded competitive cooperation” relationship with government-run organizations. This relationship also exists as a ceremonial behavior, thus enhancing the legitimacy of organizations at the official level. In the face of market and technological environments, private organizations build competitiveness by developing ecological roles and expanding their resource structures to achieve stable conditions of survival. The conclusion is that the formation of organizational transformation action strategy is based on the mechanism of legitimacy and efficiency, and is the dynamic result of adaptability and compatibility with the external environment. This shows that legitimacy and efficiency are not necessarily one of the two for social organizations, and can be compatible under the conditions of legalization of “informal means” of organizations. The enlightenment to the transformation practice of social organizations is that we should pay attention to the transformation action strategy of organizations from the perspective of legitimacy and ritual behavior.

Key words: adaptable compatibility, supportive social organizations, new institutionalism, organizational transformation, action strategies