The Impact of Citizens ' Knowledge On Public Administration: Exploring the Links in Three Social Movements

The dissertation develops a conceptual framework linking social knowledge and public administration. Social knowledge is understood broadly as the knowledge used by people in various roles, including experts, ordinary citizens, and public officials, to solve social problems. Social movement knowledge is examined as one particular type of social knowledge. The conceptual framework used to study the relationship between social movement knowledge and public administration is a combination of several literatures: citizen participation, civic innovations, community of practice, policy learning, and knowledge production in social movements. The framework connects social movement, policy expert, and administrative knowledge through the processes of social, policy, and organizational learning. This dissertation further illustrates the complex dynamics of the relationship between these elements of the framework by presenting empirical evidence from three cases of social movements. Observations from the three cases make several contributions to public administration scholarship. First, the analysis of the dynamics of movement knowledge production help