Abstract: The academic discussion on the administrative nature of autonomous organizations mostly focuses on its number of tasks and its administrative attributes. From the perspective of residual control rights, this article elaborates on the characteristics and task processes of three models: bureaucratic system, political and social cooperation, autonomy and multi-center governance. It attempts to gain a more comprehensive understanding of different community governance models. The article, with an analysis framework of “task specialization-task quantity”, divides the autonomous organizations into four types: hierarchical type, service purchase, subsidy, and resident autonomy. It further adopts a multi-case comparative analysis method to present and analyze the differences in different organizational structures. The results show that 1) autonomous organizations, in order to complete specialized tasks, will rely on external resources, while the trend of internal system stratification is obvious; 2) the hierarchical structure of autonomous organizations, in coping with tasks with a high degree of specialization, has become a reasonable choice. Both “bureaucracy” and “autonomy” are only the operational methods and attributes of autonomous organizations in the primary-level governance; administerization is not the result of simply assigning administrative tasks by the government; “bureaucracy” should not be seen as a negative phenomenon that must be removed. A hierarchical organizational structure is inherently more efficient, especially in the context of specialized multitasking governance.

Key words: autonomous organizations, residual control rights, specialization, bureaucracy