In the context of China’s community governance, as a result of the insufficient willingness and ability of residents to participate, most communities have formed a “strong political–weak social” governance structure, which limits the effective expansion of social capital. To address this challenge and promote resident participation, achieving a “strong social and political” transformation in governance structure has become a core issue in current research. Meanwhile, “sense of community” serves as a crucial perspective in this research, which remains to be deepened in domestic studies and needs to consider the impact of emerging factors such as smart technologies. This study innovatively introduces affective events theory (AET), constructing a theoretical model and taking Wuhan as an example. By adopting quantitative and case comparison research methods, the paper delves into the factors influencing Wuhan residents’ sense of community in the context of a smart society and the promoting role of smart governance. On the basis of the findings, this paper presents the following conclusions: (1) Communities should attribute equal importance to the construction of both traditional and smart environments while reinforcing the leading and participatory roles of community administrators; (2) In the community’s daily governance processes, equal focus and importance must be attributed to both service delivery and engagement; (3) Communities must acknowledge the individual distinctions among residents and implement tailored governing strategies accordingly; (4) The government should prioritize the research and development of smart applications while boosting financial investments in the creation and operation of smart communities.

As a key market-based instrument for low-carbon transition, China’s national carbon emission trading market facilitates emission abatement and reshapes labor allocation in regulated firms. Based on the task-based framework, a task embedding hypothesis is proposed. Restricted by organizational adjustment costs, firms tend to integrate green compliance tasks into existing roles instead of massively establishing specialized green positions. Using 13 million job postings and matched financial data of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2016 to 2024, this study regards the launch of the national carbon market as a quasi-natural experiment and adopts a difference-in-differences (DID) approach. The results indicate that the carbon market raises the green job share of regulated enterprises by 4.7 percentage points. Such growth is not driven by newly built environmental departments. Management compliance posts decrease markedly, technical posts remain stable, while task-embedding positions combining traditional and green tasks dominate the growth effect. Heterogeneously, private enterprises and eastern China dominate the transformation, while state-owned enterprises lag behind and central and western regions witness a green job share decline. This study enriches task-based theory application in environmental regulation and provides empirical implications for sustainable green talent development and just transition policy design.