The Construction Of Service Government In China And The Development Of Social Capital

As an academic concept, social capital can trace bake to the late 1970s. Social capital discussed as a kind of theoretical form commenced from 1980s. Until 1990s academic circles began to take it seriously and regard it as a new explanative paradigm to analyze all sorts of social problems. Robert Putnam, an American scholar, firstly introduced this concept to the field of political development, democratic governance and public policy. He defines social capital as social organizations features such as trust, norms and network which can improve efficiency through promoting the cooperation. So having more generalized meaning as a new explanative paradigm, social capital has entered mainstream political discourse system and been accepted widely.In the aspect of formation and development of social capital, Putnam stressed the role of the voluntary societies in particular and explained the voluntary societies as the only resource of social capital. The view that self-organized activities resulted in social capital basically has become the most influential .But ignoring even excluding the role of the quality system design of government is not comprehensive. In fact, the influence of the quality system design of government on social capital is equally important and even more important than the voluntary community groups. So it is necessary to construct a government which can design quality system to promote the formation and development of social capital from top to bottom. Service government characterized by democracy, ruled by law, limitation, public interest is the right one. The theoretical foundation of service government rooted in western society, but constructing service government is necessary for government self-development and perfection considering Chinese socialist society. So Service government is the ideal path to construct social capital from theoretical and realistic perspective.With the deepening of reform and opening-up, service government has become an important subject of government reform that academic circles discussed .Local governments has launched movement of constructing social government and achieved good results .Government management has made great progress in the aspect of staff configuration ,functional disposition , mechanism operation and organization construction .The scope and the way of the government management have become more and more scientific . But because of the inertia of the system and the lack of the theoretical preparations our government has not realized the transformation from controlling government to service government completely and even deviated from its purpose .And the abnormal development prevent the formation and development of social government. So it has great significance for us to take measures to strengthen the building service government, and then social capital can achieve great progress.