Abstract Compared with the traditional research approaches, which focus on alumni donations and alumni resources in the past, the university-alumni relation should be a new perspective. Not only can it contribute to slipping the leash from the original research framework, and alumni issues including alumni donations, extended from single subject (academy or alumni) to two or more subjects (academy, alumni associations, alumni, teachers, students and so on) , but also be beneficial to decoding the intrinsic mechanism of alumni donation or the development of alumni resources. Meanwhile, it can provide some different ideas for the improvement of university alumni work in reality. However, it is necessary to turn to the relational study of the relationship between university and alumni, if you want to clarify the operating mechanism and internal rules. For the special social relationship of university-alumni relations, educational relationship is the most intuitive and the most pictorial description. But educational relationship is mostly psychological level, just offering a kind of emotional connection for the production of the Alma Mater nostalgia and consciousness with the consequent behaviors; it means that Alma Mater nostalgia and consciousness are hidden in the bottom of the heart ordinarily, usually not spontaneously. Only in a certain external incentive conditions can they be germinated or touched off. The university-alumni relations are also characterized by the structural relationship which consists of interactions about two types of subjects (institutional subjects and life subjects). These two types of subjects are composed of actors with different characteristics, action logic and action mode, such as alumni affairs managers, alumni, university students, teachers, etc. The direct expression of the process of university-alumni relations is the continuous interaction between different actors. Whether they are educational relationship, the mutual support behavior or Alma Mater nostalgia or alumni consciousness caused by educational relationship, or the mutual support behavior triggered off by the Alma Mater nostalgia or alumni consciousness, they are produced in this subject interactive structural relationship. University-alumni relationship is also a kind of institutionalized structural relation which requires practical operations. On the one hand, the need for resources provides the most primitive driving force for the construction of relationships among actors. On the other hand, the different occupancy of resources also provides feasibility for all actors to construct relations. Therefore, as for the construction of the relationship between the university and the alumni, it can be expressed as an interactive process, in which actors with certain relationship cognition are relying on a relationship structure to obtain resources in a certain environment situation. And the acquisition of resources in turn affects relational cognition, relational structure and relational context. This sustainable interaction process will ultimately produce and reproduce the resources needed by all parties. To sum up, university-alumni relationship is not only a structural relationship, but also a constructive one. In other words, the resources contained in this relationship are both structural and constructive. The significance of this relationship attributing to the realistic work of college alumni lies in the long-term benign relationship construction practice between the University and the alumni. In this way, the university and the alumni can continue to obtain the resources needed for survival and development in order to improve the quality of the relationship and can eventually share a more promising prospect.
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