A road map for big society research and impact

“大社会研究”是一个网络项目，汇集了来自多个学科的学者以及政府、慈善机构和私营部门的个人，讨论与“大社会”相关的现有研究，找出研究差距，并集思广益地讨论未来的研究方向。该项目举办了四个跨学科研讨会，每个研讨会都围绕一个与“大社会”相关的中心主题。查明的主要差距是：(1)缺乏规划和衡量社会创新干预措施的评价框架。尽管在公民主导的社会变革方面进行了数百个案例研究，但没有一个单一的经验教训储存库，也很少有未来倡议的指导方针；(2)缺乏对支持地方主义的体制结构的研究。大学和组织的结构往往与公民主导的倡议相冲突(参见博士学习的个性)。应该进行研究，以建议新的组织结构；(3)更多地研究“倾听”的概念。任何以地方为导向的倡议的一个大问题是是否有能力听取社会各阶层的声音；(4)需要一个结构性宏观经济模型来分析当前体制中的缺陷，并从经济角度评估地方主义的价值。

"Big Society Research"(www.bigsocietyresearch.com) was a networking project that brought together academics from multiple disciplines as well as governmental, charity and private sector individuals to discuss existing research relevant to the 'big society', to identify research gaps, and to brainstorm future research directions.The project ran four interdisciplinary workshops, each based around a central theme relevant to 'big society'. Key gaps identified were: (1) Lack of an evaluation framework for planning and measuring social innovation interventions. Despite hundreds of case studies in citizen-led societal change, there is no single repository for lessons learned and few guidelines for future initiatives; (2) Lack of research into institutional structures that support localism. Universities and organisations are often structured in a way that is in conflict with citizen-led initiatives (cf. the individuality of PhD study). Research should be undertaken to suggest new organisational structures; (3) More research into the concept of 'listening'. A big issue in any locally-oriented initiative is the ability to listen to a full cross section of community voices; (4) There is a need for a structural macroeconomic model to analyse the current faults in the system and to evaluate from an economic perspective the value of localism.