Abstract: This paper investigates why primary-level governments establish organizational structures outside of superior institutional regulations. The operational case of T Town reveals that while maintaining the formal organizational structure stipulated by higher authorities, T Town creates a flexible “work line” system to perform functions originally assigned to the formal structure. Key findings include: The shift from “centralized work” to “multi-centered work” in governance, coupled with the autonomy-constraining effects of a pressure-based system, leads to conflicts between normative institutional isomorphism and performance-oriented technical isomorphism, resulting in organizational decoupling at the primary level; Faced with triple constraints of intense competition, coordination difficulties, and resource scarcity, township governments reshape attention structures through “starting from scratch”; The “work line” system replaces whole-scale mobilization with multi-line coordination and achieves multi-task parallelism and attention synchronization by de-specializing responsibility allocation, de-institutionalizing setup methods, and maintaining a flexible yet permanent organizational structure. The organizational decoupling phenomenon represented by T Town’s “work lines” leads to passive wear-out at the primary level, reflecting enhanced administrative control from higher levels rather than improved local autonomy or innovation capacity.

Key words: primary-level governance, township government, organizational decoupling, work lines