Policy Entrepreneur Research In Policy Change

Policy entrepreneurs refers to those who actively participate in and lead policy changes.They are willing to pay a lot of time,money and other resources to promote policy change.As an important power of a policy change,policy entrepreneurs have been recognized by more and more scholars of public policy.The spirit of innovation and risk awareness of policy entrepreneurs not only help to break many problems during social transformation,but also to lead the direction of social innovation.Policy entrepreneur is a kind of active power of knowing and transforming the world,which reflects the initiative of the individual in the institutional environment.Study on the policy entrepreneurs,improve the understanding and management of special human resources,is of great significance to the practice of public policy in china.In this paper,the author review the application of policy entrepreneurs in the mainstream theory of policy,such as policy streams theory,advocacy coalition theory,punctuated equilibrium theory,new institutional theory,and the theory of policy change.Different policy entrepreneurs display the different entrepreneurial behavior patterns in different scholar's eyes,but they all show some similar characteristics.Policy entrepreneurs have a high sensitivity to social issues,with a certain expertise and superb negotiating skills,and with a sense of innovation and adventure spirit,to keep pushing the policy toward the direction of their own hope to change.In policy change,policy entrepreneurs actively invest time,energy and even money,defining and building policy issues,promoting policy plan to enter the government's policy agenda,and later being responsible for the implementation of public policy evaluation.In order to push the policy to change toward their preferred direction,policy entrepreneurs tend to implement some strategies of action,including softening up policy community,forming supporting alliance,enacting policy experiments and manipulating policy venues,etc.Institutional environment and social environment can promote or inhibit the motivation and behavior of entrepreneurs in the policy change.Sometimes,policy entrepreneurs could transform the environment to change the comparative situation between support and opposition.The paper shows the theoretical improvements of policy entrepreneur,the revelation for the practice of China's public policy and the shortcomings of the study,and points out some research directions in future.In the future research,many aspects of the policy entrepreneur still need to be further explored,such as how to evaluate the performance of the policy entrepreneur in the organization.How to cultivate the policy entrepreneur?How to integrate the research results of policy entrepreneurs into the practice of human resource management in China?...