Place Identity and Local Cooperative Behaviors: the Moderating Role of Organizational Identity

Abstract

Administrators, public workers, and researchers are continuously seeking ways to improve cooperative behaviors from citizens. Place identity, or people's identification of belonging to a certain place, is quite important for these cooperative behaviors. However, existing research studies have made inconsistent claims about whether there was an effect of place identity on local cooperative behaviors. In this study, we try to reconcile the ambivalent conclusions by taking organizational identity (i.e., the identity of subsociety closely linked to daily life) into consideration as a moderator. Based on interviews with 320 migrant workers from Dongguan in China, we found that place identity positively predicted local cooperative behaviors only when people had high organizational identity. This moderation effect of organizational identity provides new insights into understanding the relation between place identity and local cooperative behaviors, unearths the importance of subsociety identity, and offers a practical way to improve local cooperative behaviors.