This article aims at elucidating the character of the "publicness of urban communities" at the turn of the century with a case study on the development of unemployment insurance in the German "social city." The "social city" is determined here as the phase in which the social security of the central government had not yet been completely formed and municipalities were obliged to develop their own social policies. It was the municipalization of public services since the 1870s that brought the "social city" into being in Germany. It contributed to the bureaucratization of municipalities, with the result that the senior municipal officials took control of the "publicness of urban communities." In addition, the Social Democrats, who had been increasing their seats in communal councils since the 1890s, gained the bridgehead to exert an influence on the "publicness of urban communities." Although their presence was limited, the bourgeois regarded it as a great threat and formulated the "social tasks of municipalities" as the political norm for integrating the urban society in opposition to the Social Democrats. This norm permitted municipal governments to take interventional policies and directed the bourgeois' attention to the protection of workers with unemployment insurance. German municipalities had developed since the 1890s their own unemployment insurance, especially the Genter System, with which the municipalities paid subsidies to the trade unions that provided their out-of-work members with unemployment benefits. This made unemployment insurance a leading topic in a nationwide discussion about social policies. Despite the efforts of municipalities, however, the central and state governments gave up introducing the national unemployment insurance and shifted their responsibility onto municipalities. Therefore, the third German Communal Conference in 1911 adopted the "statement on the problem of unemployment insurance" which demanded that the central government should introduce the national unemployment insurance instead of the Genter System. Nevertheless, the position of municipalities was not monolithic. The majority of the Communal Conference was against the system because the Free Trade Union under the Social Democratic Party enjoyed the most benefit of it, whereas those who approved the system considered the Social Democrats as reliable partners to relieve the unemployed. Thus, the attitude of those approving the system corresponded well with the intention of the Free Trade Union to win social recognition. This made it possible for unemployment insurance to establish itself as an important component of the "publicness of urban communities."

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The concept "Daseinsvorsorge" was first suggested in 1938 by the German jurist Ernst Forsthoff. It signifies the duty and responsibility that the public administration, and municipal government in particular, accepted to provide the resources necessary for urban life, such as energy supply and public transportation, to all urban residents in the course of 19th century industrialization and urbanization. As Daseinsvorsorge is independent of poverty and applied also to the rich, it is distinguished from 'social assistance'. First of all, the municipal government was responsible for Daseinsvorsorge, and continued to hold the sphere of its activity in the course of centralization. Meanwhile, the concept 'Sozialpolitische Stadtpolitik' was suggested in 2002 by the German sociologist Jurgen Kramer. In contrast with 'urban social policy', such as poor relief, Sozialpolitische Stadtpolitik provides all urban residents with public services, utilities and opportunities for direct communication for the purpose of the integration of urban society. Among various facilities, Kramer values hospitals, nursing homes and open spaces, and views such measures as the historical origin of the 'social city' program in contemporary Germany. Using these two overlapping concepts, this paper aims to clarify the implications of fare-paying urban public services in terms of social policy. The specific case study is public transportation at the turn of the 20th century in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, when the municipalization and electrification of tramway was implemented, and the municipal government planned to reduce fares and to open up the service to new passengers. In particular the introduction of the weekly-ticket for working people was significant. At first the municipal government intended, for technical and financial reasons, to introduce a weekly-ticket with which working people could take the tram only once a day. A special city council committee made a counterproposal of a weekly-ticket which was applicable to a wider range of the urban population and permitted them to take the tram twice a day, a proposal which the municipal government accepted in the end. Though fare-paying, this policy aimed at facilitating tramway use, and could be considered as typical example of Daseinsvorsorge. It signifies that such municipal government activities continued to play a role in integrating urban society in the historical development from the 'social city' via the 'social state' and back to the 'social city' again.

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This paper aims to explore the tension between integration and autonomy around the state and voluntary associations in civil society, based on empirical research on the subset of an emerging actor, the 'social enterprise', in contemporary British society. 'Social enterprise' is a relatively new concept, drawing on the increasing interest in non-conventional entrepreneurial dynamics addressing present challenges. The social enterprise is not conventional because it acts across three traditional sectors: the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector. Since 1997, the Labour government paved the way for social enterprises to play a significant role in delivering public services. In the contest of the welfare mix, the government saw the social enterprise as a vital actor in renovating public services. The focus of their public service reforms was on tackling the problems of 'social exclusion', as well as on seeking more cost-effective ways to deliver services. One of the culminations of such reforms was the introduction of the Flexible New Deal under the Brown administration. Here, private and voluntary actors were expected to take more responsibility for delivering employment programmes to those who were out of the labour market. Nonetheless, the growing focus on social enterprises by the government had, arguably, accelerated the tension mentioned above. To examine this tension, this paper applies a case study of an organisation called the Wise Group, one of the largest and most successful social enterprises in the UK. The Wise Group has delivered employment programmes in communities for more than 25 years, originally through an Intermediate Labour Market model. While this paper shows some evidence of integration, it also extracts their autonomous activities. The paper concludes that, although tension certainly exists in the quasi-market of public services, the social enterprise has still shown its potential to lay a deep foundation for autonomous civil society through its ability to discover and resolve community problems, and to build social capital in the community.

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This paper examines the publicness of urban communities through the conception of social quality, as explored by some European social policy researchers since the 1990s in relation to the phenomenon of social precarity. To date, publicness has been explored primarily through the Habermasian conception of the term. However, it has become difficult to overcome this issue if, merely elaborating on Habermas's way of speech, we only emphasize arguments without regard to material conditions. In this paper, criticism of Habermas depends primarily on the conception of social recognition of Axel Honneth and the spatial conception of Lefebvre. Lefebvre in particular suggests that there is some possibility of raising separation and conflict in the interrelation among representation of space, spaces of representation and spatial practices, articulating their interconnectedness. His contention was to analyze critically the life space that modernity has generated from the viewpoint of everyday life. This paper is focused on articulating the subjective and objective characters of society to take up various issues of urban communities as life spaces, premised on Lefebvre's concern. If urban issues were a result of the structural nature of society, a key challenge would be to raise the quality of society. Social quality is defined as the extent to which citizens are able to participate in the social and economic life of their communities under conditions which enhance their wellbeing and individual potential. The conception of social quality thinks of this quality from the viewpoint of the ability of people to participate in society. On the other hand, social precarity refers to conditions of exclusion, grounded in the idea that social quality gets increasingly unstable and people do not partake in society. The most important thing is that we understand social precarity as a conflicting conception relating social quality on the whole, that is to say, grasp it as degradation of social quality relating subjective, objective and normative conditions of the social to the whole. Urban problems such as homelessness, unemployment and local economic decline are increasingly serious. Social precarity is a severe issue produced as the result of the breakdown of the conditions of social structure.

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The primary objective of this paper is to clarify the role of governmental research institutes in the industrial policy execution process in 1950s Japan. Numerous attempts have been made by scholars to examine the efficacy of industrial policies and laws in impacting Japanese economic development after World War II. In the last few decades, Calder and Hashimoto have highlighted diversity among government agencies as policymakers. However, what seems to be lacking is a study of diversity among internal subdivisions in those agencies. We are concerned with the role of specialists in the policy process in Japanese government, and especially, we focus on governmental research institutes and the scientists who worked for those institutes. Since governmental research institutes were a bigger part of national innovation system in this period than they are today, this lack of study of those institutes is troubling. The secondary objective of this paper is to demonstrate the hidden relationship between industrial standardization and technological development. First, we examine the restructuring of governmental research institutes after World War II. Some officers of the Allied Forces General Headquarters and the Ministry of Commerce succeeded in establishing the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) as a centralized governance structure for governmental research institutes. The establishment of AIST and introduction of competitive research funding resulted in an increased number of research projects relating to industrial and technological policies. Second, we show that some technological developments were required through the process of establishing Japanese Industrial Standards (JISs). In the late 1950s, technological problems emerged in industrial standardization. JISs were required for features which had to date been evaluated through subjective testing. But without precise measurements it was impossible to establish objective and clear standards for those features. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) decided to mobilize governmental research institutes to solve this problem, and to make grants for research relating to industrial standardization. Finally, we analyze the process of standardization of noise and looseness of ball bearings in the late 1950s. When users of ball bearings in Japan required official standards for these characteristics, there were no sufficently precise measurements, not only in Japan, but globally. The Government Mechanical Laboratory and Japanese bearing makers undertook collaborative research efforts and solved this problem. These results imply that governmental research institutes achieved an important role in the postwar policy process in Japan even if it was not as policy maker.

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