International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business (original) (raw)
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This study aims to elaborate on the meanings of policy entrepreneurs and through the conceptualisation analysing implementation of local municipal contact centres -a Swedish local e-governmental initiative. The paper builds on qualitative case studies including interviews, observations and document analysis, all analysed through the perspective of policy entrepreneurs. Local policies are implemented in relation to local cultures, norms and economic structures. The networked governance structure demands entrepreneurial actors to combine resources and interests into a change. Here we identified both theoretically and practical, two types of such entrepreneurial actors. The issue entrepreneur focuses on the issue as such and focuses on the solution to a single problem. The political entrepreneur, on the other hand, focuses on core values and long term structural changes. The emerging networked governance structure asks for improved knowledge on policy entrepreneurship both for analytical and practical improvements. The findings may provide useful information for municipal e-government planning specifically when planning for implementing contact centres. The study enriches the existing literature on policy entrepreneurs in networks expanding the roles to include also local e-government contexts.
Policy Studies Entrepreneurship in the Swedish municipal polis: the case of Mer [*] Östersund
Scholars in political science and policy studies have been paying increasing attention to a specific kind of actor, the policy entrepreneur, as an agent of change. Less attention has been paid to the contextual factors that may shape entrepreneurial action as most of the extant research is performed in pluralistic systems and in high complexity policy sectors. This is a study of a routine planning process in the municipality of Östersund in Northern Sweden with the purpose of studying the kind of actors that may act entrepreneurially (the who); the kind of strategies they use; and what contextual powers facilitate these strategies (the how). This two-and-a-half-year routine, low-complexity process was analyzed with in-depth interviews and a survey, participant observation, document analysis, and formal social network analysis. Findings suggest that professional administrators acted entrepreneurially by employing a set of six strategies while the members of civil society were central – though not entrepreneurial – participants.
Policy Entrepreneurs in Public Administration: A Social Network Analysis
Politics & Policy
This article examines the role of policy entrepreneurs in promoting change in flood risk mitigation at the local level in Sweden through a comparative study of two Swedish municipalities with different approaches to flood risk governance; as a technical issue or a social issue. The municipality in which flood risk mitigation is addressed as a social issue exhibits a larger size of the network mitigating flood risk, more diverse actors involved, and a more central location of the politicians and senior management. Moreover, the analysis points to the salience of a bureaucratic policy entrepreneur in promoting this shift toward addressing it as a social issue, and shows how they use relational strategies to frame the issue as relating to climate change action. The article operationalizes sociability and credibility, two of the attributes of policy entrepreneurs, and thus, contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion of policy entrepreneurs in general, and as they pertain to environmental policy in particular. Acknowledgements: We would like to extend our thanks to the politicians and civil servants in the municipalities of Lomma and Staffanstorp for their participation in this project. Evangelia Petridou and Jörgen Sparf would like to acknowledge funding from the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB 2017-340: Societal Resilience in Sweden: Governance, Social Networks, and Learning). Per Becker would like to acknowledge funding from FORMAS, Sweden (942-2015-149: Sustainable Urban Flood Management). We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions. All three authors contributed jointly to this article and take joint responsibility for its contents.
Formalized Policy Entrepreneurship as a Governance Tool for Policy Integration
International Journal of Public Administration, 2019
Policy entrepreneurs and their role for policy change, policy integration and cross-cutting governance has been thoroughly investigated. Here, focus is on a previously neglected aspect of policy entrepreneurship: the tendency to employ public bureaucrats with formal positions to act as policy entrepreneurs for policy integration. Based on 34 interviews with these actors in the Swedish local and regional government, three versions of this formalized policy entrepreneurship are identified: Informal compensation for formal vertical flaws, Making others do things and Integration in the vertical formal organization. These versions of formalized policy entrepreneurship brings a deeper understanding to the development of governance for policy integration, and also to the policy entrepreneurial role in the political-administrative organization.
From policy entrepreneurs to policy entrepreneurship: actors and actions in public policy innovation
Policy & Politics, 2020
Policy entrepreneurs are considered key actors in public policy. However, there are so many definitions of what they can do that it is difficult to use this concept in a systematic, analytical way. Starting with a critique of the tendency to overstretch the concept of the policy entrepreneur, we propose a more parsimonious conceptualisation by de-personalising entrepreneurial actions and by focusing on a specific pattern of action whose main task is to promote innovation. Thus, policy entrepreneurship is conceptualised as a pattern of action (involving different types of actors) focused on innovation promotion that is pursued by activities such as framing a problem, developing solutions, building a coalition in support, and seeking opportunities and attention. We also highlight prevalent resources for those activities. We then apply this conceptualisation to two cases of urban planning in Italy to discuss the activities of successful policy entrepreneurship as a collective effort.
International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2016
This paper aims to analyse experiences gained by entrepreneurs in small enterprises located in a region undergoing structural change, focusing on networking and e-government for local development. The study is a further development of a study that focused on how municipalities supported entrepreneurship and destination development. In-depth qualitative interviews were made with twelve entrepreneurs from ten small enterprises. Based on a theoretical discussion of networking, e-government and social media marketing, the results indicate that networks and strategic networking were important in order to develop their enterprises, which also contributed to local development. The importance of initial face-to-face contacts in order to build business relationships in networks was stressed. The use of local e-government was hitherto limited to e-services for public procurement, the use of social media marketing was limited due to lack of time, competence and motivation for most of the entrepreneurs.
Political Entrepreneurship in Swedish: Towards a (Re)Theorization of Entrepreneurial Agency
Public policies affect all of us, regardless of who we are or where we live. The study of public policymaking necessarily entails the study of the entire political system and to this end, researchers employ a multitude of frameworks, theories, and models, which tend to be complementary rather than mutually exclusive. The focus of this dissertation is on political entrepreneurship as an actor-based framework to examine and understand policy change. The dissertation’s main aim is to conceptually enhance entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur in the polis by leveraging them in the Swedish political context. In this research, political entrepreneurship and the political entrepreneur are examined in the background of the Swedish corporatist policymaking system with its consensual sensibilities. The five (two theoretical and three empirical) papers as well as the cover essay comprising this dissertation attempt to answer the following questions: first, how do contextual factors inform the realization of entrepreneurial agency? Second, how do contextual factors inform the strategies entrepreneurial actors use to affect change? Third, what is the role of political entrepreneurship and the political entrepreneur in macro-level theories such as critical junctures and policy transfer? Contextual factors here are understood to be the general political system; the level of governance; the substantive policy sector, and the stage of the policy process. Predominantly qualitative methods and a variety of analytical tools, ranging from formal social network analysis (SNA) to process tracing are used to investigate the research questions in the national, regional, and local levels of governance and in the fields of crisis management, risk governance, and economic development respectively. Findings suggest that overwhelmingly, political entrepreneurs come from the ranks of public officials and thus political entrepreneurship is a feature of the policy implementation stage rather than the agenda setting stage of policymaking. There is not a place for the outsider, single issue entrepreneur in the Swedish consensual system, which provides for extensive inclusion, but of actors organized in interest groups. Political entrepreneurs are action-oriented, problem solving doers, characterized by perseverance and resourcefulness and are key in consolidating policy change in the aftermath of a crisis. Though in broad terms the strategies political entrepreneurs use in the Swedish context are concomitant with the ones used in pluralistic contexts, specificities diverge. In the Swedish corporatist consensual system, political entrepreneurship becomes a conduit facilitating interconnections among a multitude of actors; opens up additional channels of communication, while the political entrepreneur is a network maker. Finally, political entrepreneurship is focused on forging a consensus rather than winning the competition: the art of quiet cooperation and collaboration.
E-government and E-governance - Swedish Case Studies with Focus on the Local Level
The concepts of e-government and e-governance are used interchangeably in most research and there is no single definition of these terms. The objective of this licentiate thesis is to provide a deeper understanding of these concepts through empirical studies in a Swedish context. Further, it aims to analyse whether – and if so in what way – the implementation of local contact centres (CC) affect conditions for local planning. This is reported in three articles. In this thesis e-government is defined to as the use of tools and systems by governmental bodies made possible by ICT that affect the organization of public administration. E-governance is defined as the ICT-based networks of services and administration in New Public Management settings including both public and private actors. Case study methodology is used as research method, including interviews, focus group studies, document studies, and some participatory observations. The analysis is partly built on an inductive methodo...
Policy Entrepreneurs: Their Activity Structure and Function in the Policy Process
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
Public entrepreneurship" is the process of introducing innovation-the generation, translation, and implementation of new ideas-into the public sector. The research described here focuses on "policy entrepreneurs." These are public entrepreneurs who, from outside the formal positions of government, introduce, translate, and help implement new ideas into public practice. INTRODUCTION Public policymaking, according to Kingdon, can be conceptualized as a set of processes: (1) setting the agenda; (2) specifying alternatives for the agenda; (3) an authoritative choosing among the alternatives, expressed through legislative enactment or executive decision; and (4) implementing the decision or the law (1984, 3). Polsby adds an additional process prior to agenda setting-"initiation"-and describes it as "the politics of inventing, winnowing, and finding and gaining adherents for policy alternatives before they are made a part of a 'program"' (1984, 3). Although focusing their research attention on different phases, both scholars identify a stratum of actors essential to the process of policymaking. These actors are public entrepreneurs, long recognized as important contributors to the
E-government and E-governance: Local Implementation of E-government Policies in Sweden
It is recognized in international research that the public sector has been transformed into a networked, open and more flexible, informal and interactive governance structure. This is described as a transition from “government to governance”. Sweden is one of the international leaders with regards to e-government development. The objective of this thesis is to provide a deeper understanding of how e-government policies are implemented in an e-governance context, through empirical case studies in Sweden. The focus is on the local level. The overall research question is: How is e-government policy put into practice when focusing on the local level? This is reported in four articles. Case study methodology is used as research method, including interviews, focus group interviews, document studies, and some participatory observations. The analysis is partly based on an inductive methodological approach, since this is a new, emerging field of innovative policy and practice. The analysis a...