Abstract

The influence of social constructions on the policy-making process of any system of government is determined by how deeply valued those constructions have become for the policy decision makers. Considering the social construction of target groups in a Fiji society, this research endeavoured to evaluate whether the presence of such constructions continues to prevail in the current governments’ responsiveness to citizen participation in administration. The study utilised a social construction framework as a tool to analyse whose voices are more heard by the government via a citizenry participation policy—the open-door policy at the Office of the Prime Minister in Fiji. As a result of connecting the social construction framework to citizen participation in administration, the research categorized the participants in the open-door policy into four target groups—advantaged, contenders, dependents, and deviants—and pairwise comparisons among the four groups indicated that specific target groups’ requests are more greatly taken into account by the government than others’.

摘要

社会建构对任何政府制度的决策过程的影响，取决于这些建构对决策者的重视程度。考虑到斐济社会中目标群体的社会建构，本研究试图评估这种建构的存在是否在当前政府对公民参与行政的响应中继续占主导地位。该研究利用社会建设框架作为工具，通过公民参与政策（斐济总理办公室的开放政策）分析政府更能听到谁的声音。由于将社会建设框架与公民参与行政联系起来，