地方公共サービス革新プロセスの視座の構築

　When local governments develop public services, they often experience innovation processes. More often, the innovation processes referred to here seem to be the perceived needs for transformation faced with external pressures and the purposive responses to them. This article tries to depict this discourse from a different viewpoint. One of the perspectives that has been proposed so far is that the external environments are made up of multiple actors, and that the historical backgrounds and the relationships between these actors affect the structure of administrative organizations and the methods of providing public services. The transformation processes could be one-time events no matter how long the processes may take, but this article tries to argue they may connote a circular mechanism where both of the administrative organizations and the external actors feedback to each other. In order to elaborate this direction of theorizing, three steps are employed by applying existent literature of various types developed in rather a broader context of social sciences. First, if one of the goals of postmodern theorization is liberating the psychological energies of actors from the cramped social reality that structuralists postulated, then Actor-Network-Theory may be useful. Second, according to Sarasbathy’s research on entrepreneurial behaviors, the view that we effectuate our future through what we can do now is attractive in order to create a new discourse of social innovations, where we appreciate them as not springing out of nowhere all of sudden. Third, once this article accepts polyphonic views on social realities where congested discourses interact during abovementioned process, the role of civic entrepreneurs on the frontline can never be overstated enough. This is because such civic entrepreneurs could cooperate with minority opinions and raise them into broader contexts of dialogues within societies.

論説 (Articles)