Face-to-face encounters, where public administrators and citizens interact, are one of the primary ways the public experiences the state. Recognized as crucial to the relationship between citizens and government for decades, scholarship on public encounters has developed around understanding the legal, organizational, and individual factors that affect the decision making of street-level bureaucrats. Research argues that what happens within public encounters are important contributing factors influencing street-level bureaucrats’ decision-making behaviors. This requires an approach examining the conditions under which encounters come to be, how the encounters are designed, the interpersonal and contingent communicative processes used, and the methods by which they are created and maintained by public administrators and citizens alike. We focus on these aspects through the concept of the in-between: the existential, processual space where interactions happen and produce something. Drawing primarily on Hannah Arendt’s writings on the human effort involved in creation of the in-between space, and Mary Parker Follett’s concepts of interweaving, we add to the conceptual framework of the in-between.

公共行政人员和公民互动的面对面交流是公众体验国家的主要方式之一。几十年来，公众遭遇的学术研究被公认为对公民与政府之间的关系至关重要，它围绕着对影响基层官僚决策的法律、组织和个人因素的理解而发展起来。研究认为，内部发生的事情公众接触是影响街头官僚决策行为的重要因素。这需要一种方法来检查相遇发生的条件、相遇是如何设计的、所使用的人际和偶然的交流过程，以及公共行政人员和公民等创建和维护它们的方法。我们通过中间的概念关注这些方面：存在的、过程的空间，交互发生并产生一些东西。主要借鉴汉娜·阿伦特 (Hannah Arendt) 关于创造中间空间所涉及的人类努力的著作，以及玛丽·帕克·福莱特 (Mary Parker Follett) 的交织概念，我们添加了中间空间的概念框架。