Policy Entrepreneurship and Institutional Work in Government: Explaining Policy and Administrative Change

Research on policy entrepreneurship has generated a substantial body of scholarship on how purposive actors promote policy ideas, frame problems, mobilize resources and coalitions, and exploit opportunities for policy change. Institutional theory has developed a related literature on institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work, focusing on how actors create, maintain and disrupt institutions. Despite their common concern with purposive agency and change, however, these two research strands have largely developed separately. We still know relatively little about where policy entrepreneurship ends and institutional work begins, whether they represent different forms of strategic action, and under what conditions one produces the other.
This panel addresses these questions with special reference to public policy and administration. It starts from a simple distinction. Policy entrepreneurs seek to influence the policy process and its outcomes. Institutional entrepreneurs seek to create, maintain or disrupt the formal and informal institutions that structure political and administrative action. The distinction is analytically useful, but empirically less clear. A bureaucrat seeking adoption of a new policy may also have to change established administrative practices. A political executive attempting major policy change may first need to weaken or replace institutional constraints. Conversely, institutional work that changes authority relations, organizational routines or professional norms may alter subsequent policy processes without being initiated as policy entrepreneurship.
How do the actions of policy entrepreneurs differ from and overlap with the institutional work of institutional entrepreneurs? When does policy entrepreneurship require institutional change, and when does institutional work generate policy change? What structural and institutional conditions motivate and empower actors to undertake one or both forms of purposive action?
Papers may examine politicians, bureaucrats, policy advisers, experts, interest groups or organizations across different policy sectors and political systems. Attention is given to the mechanisms through which actors pursue change, including framing, coalition building, resource mobilization, creation of new practices, disruption of existing arrangements and institutional maintenance. Rather than assuming that policy and institutional entrepreneurs constitute distinct categories of actors, the panel considers whether the same actor may perform different forms of entrepreneurial and institutional work across stages of the policy process and over time.