Enablers and Time: How Context Shapes Entrepreneurship in Institutional and Policy Change

Reluctant policy innovation through profit concession and informality tolerance: A strategic relational view of policy entrepreneurship in China's urban redevelopment

“…Studies of the success or failure of policy entrepreneurship within and outside of Western democracies have tended to place their focus on the individual‐level traits, desirable qualities, and entrepreneurial motives of policy entrepreneurs as the main determinants (Kingdon, ; Mintrom & Norman, ). Following Kingdon's multistream model, policy entrepreneurs are portrayed as being simultaneously skillful in advocating their ideas in the political system, framing problems and softening up the process of education, and brokering by negotiating resource exchange with potential allies and building coalition (Kingdon, , p. 192, cited in Galanti, , p. 48). In addition, policy entrepreneurs are argued to share similar motivations in terms of the desire to promote personal/organizational goals and the existence of an opportunity to do so (Cohen, ; Alex, 2018).…”

“…In a framework developed by Mintrom and Norman (), it summarized four major qualities/traits that help to make a policy entrepreneur successful: (a) social acuity in terms of effective understanding of others and the ability to engage in policy conversations; (b) defining problems in novel way to draw the attention of important groups or individuals; (c) building teams in terms of forging coalition with internal and external allies to advance the proposed policy change; and (d) leading by example in order to demonstrate the workability of a new policy proposal. For Galanti (), both institutional entrepreneurship and policy entrepreneurship emphasize the importance of ideas, resources, and coalition building as the defining features characterizing successful entrepreneurship in promoting institutional or policy change.…”

“…Second, the existing literature on the determinant factors of successful policy entrepreneurship has tended to emphasize too much the agential power of policy entrepreneurs and underestimate the significance of context in shaping entrepreneurial behaviors and attitudes (Bakir & Jarvis, ; Galanti). Although some seminar studies have provided a fundamental correction to the context‐free exploration of policy entrepreneurship by demonstrating that context matters to the emergence and success of policy entrepreneurs (Mintrom, ; Schenider & Teske, ), in most cases, context is relegated to “a residual category” (Galanti, , p. 55) of background conditions that are external to the policy process. However, from a critical realistic perspective, context is equally important, if not more so, for explaining a particular policy outcome.…”

Individual agency and socio‐spatial change in regional development: Conceptualizing governance entrepreneurship

“…For instance, policy entrepreneurs that aim for policy change may also simultaneously act as institutional entrepreneurs when they try to manipulate institutions in order to open windows of opportunity to promote policy instruments (Galanti, 2018). By taking multiple roles simultaneously or consecutively, individuals enhance their opportunities and might extend their individual agency.…”

“…Policy and organization sciences, however, delineated the concept of entrepreneurship much more broadly by focusing on changes in the public and political sphere. Among different notions of agency, entrepreneurship is the concept that addresses the personal capabilities and attributes of individuals as well as their embeddedness in environmental contexts and institutional settings (Gailing & Ibert, ; Galanti, ). From this angle, entrepreneurs are characterized by the ability to purposefully alter the structures in which they are embedded.…”