Abstract
This study focuses on the bureaucratic reforms in Sweden which resulted in the creation of the Secretariat for Crisis Management and the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency. We investigate the mechanisms that lead to divergent change through the critical juncture analytical approach. The study’s findings suggest that the bureaucratic reforms were the result of the critical juncture between 2001 and 2009, which included, inter alia, the release of a commission of inquiry report, a major political crisis and a national election. Moreover, we situate entrepreneurial agency in this analysis while we contribute to the theorization of institutional entrepreneurship by focusing on the implementation stage of institutional change. In order to overcome the institutional resistance stemming from an attempt to preserve the existing power structures, institutional entrepreneurs use the following three strategies: (i) the strategy of listening; (ii) the strategy of advertising early success and (iii) the strategy of picking up the phone.
Highlights
Crises, that is, jarring events that disrupt the way we understand the world and our place in it, are part of our everyday-ness – populating our twitter feeds, making headlines in print media and breaking news on popular news channels
This study focuses on the bureaucratic reforms in Sweden which resulted in the creation of the Secretariat for Crisis Management and the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency
We set out to understand the shift in crisis management policy and practice that occurred in Sweden during the 00s
Summary
That is, jarring events that disrupt the way we understand the world and our place in it, are part of our everyday-ness – populating our twitter feeds, making headlines in print media and breaking news on popular news channels. The ideational shift in the thinking about crisis management that took place in Sweden was embedded in the new bureaucratic organizations and they are the subject of our investigation In this analysis, we narrow the focus of entrepreneurial agency to the strategies of institutional entrepreneurs. The critical junctures framework within historical institutionalism is used to analyze a series of events, which when considered together, produce a certain result at a specific point in time by setting off processes of institutional or policy change (Donnelly & Hogan, 2012). In the background of the critical antecedent, a set of permissive conditions emerge These are identified as ‘factors or conditions that change the underlying context to increase the causal power or contingency and the prospects for divergence’ This resistance is a direct result of shifting power relationships (Lowndes, 2005; see Olsson, 2016), which civil servants have to navigate
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