LIST OF PANELS

The concepts of policy entrepreneurship and the political entrepreneurs, first explored by Ostrom (1965) and further integrated in the policy process theory of multiple streams by Kingdon (1984/2003) and Zahariadis (see, for example, 2007 and 2014) is not new. In a seminal article published 10 year prior to ICPP4 convening, Mintrom and Norman (2009) outlined a set of directions for the scholarship of policy entrepreneurship, noting that “[f]urther work to integrate policy entrepreneurship into mainstream theorizations of policy change holds the potential of changing our notions of the mainstream itself” (p. 663

A lot has happened since then. Petridou (2014) concluded that policy entrepreneurship is a stand-alone lens which can be used to understand policy change. It has been used in various policy sectors (see for example, David, 2015; Olsson and Hysing, 2012; Petridou and Sparf, 2018) in non-western environments (Hammond, 2013; Meydani, 2015) and in conjunction with social network analysis (Christopoulos, 2006; Christopoulos and Ingold, 2015).

The advancement and maturity of the literature on policy entrepreneurship, ten years after the publication of the Mintrom and Norman article, necessitates taking stock and setting an updated research agenda for the future. First, perhaps more attention to policy entrepreneurship as a theoretical framework rather vis-à-vis the policy entrepreneur is needed. Additionally, the conceptual interrelations of entrepreneurship and leadership are not yet exhaustively theorized. What is more, more theoretical work is needed to integrate theories of leadership with those of policy entrepreneurship. A fruitful trajectory along these lines is work on entrepreneurial teams. Making use of formal social network analysis would go a long way towards this especially if the team were large enough spanning a number of organizations.

A related trajectory is that of the relationship between policy entrepreneurship on the one hand and power and legitimacy on the other. In conjunction with research at the micro level in the motives of policy entrepreneurs and the kind of profit they seek we stand to gain normative insights the role of entrepreneurial agency as an instrument of political power.

What is more, though there has been research regarding supra-national organizations, how can we better understand collective actors as entrepreneurs and what are the mechanisms that foster policy entrepreneurship at the supra-national level?

Additionally, the call by Mintrom and Norman (2009) for cross-country research is still relevant. However, what kind of methodological hurdles does this entail?

Finally, so far research on entrepreneurship has been gender blind. A particularly fruitful future research agenda would be to interrogate gender aspects of policy entrepreneurship. A few questions that emerge are: are women as likely to behave entrepreneurially as men? Are there certain contextual factors that might hinder or foster policy entrepreneurship among women? Do women policy entrepreneurs employ different strategies, behave differently in networks or have different positions than their male counterparts? What is more, there is room for a feminist analysis of political entrepreneurship. So far and on the face of it, the discourse is quite masculine, especially earlier research of the lone entrepreneur, the larger-than-life figure. How would a gender angle influence the discussion on entrepreneurship and leadership?

To paraphrase Mintrom and Norman (2009), if you want to make a splash in the study of policy entrepreneurship, innovative work in the fields of leadership, power, legitimacy and gender would be a great place to continue (Petridou, 2017).

See the General Objectives

The topics listed above exemplify papers sought in the context of this panel, though the list is merely indicative.

Papers that further the policy entrepreneurship scholarship from a theoretical or empirical perspective, comparative research as well as research into innovative methodologies are particularly welcome.