European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2016 | Page 142

The Role of Theories in Policy Studies and Policy Work

of an “honest broker”, who clarifies the
scientifically warrantable “facts”, and, on
that basis, elaborates on the existing range
of policy options, sometimes identifying
new options, and on the basis of strict
goals–means and other forms of practical
argumentation (Fischer 1980; 1995; Toulmin
1958) integrates stakeholder concerns with
available scientific knowledge.

Policy work as analysis and
bargaining easily fits the hegemonic political
landscape of representative democracy,
interest pluralism or neocorporatism,
bureaucracy, and expert advice. Policy
work as problematization and joint sensemaking, however, institutionally draws on
more participatory and deliberative modes
of democracy. Even though the space for
these modes of democracy seems to become
larger, they sit uneasily in the prevailing
political structures (Hoppe 2010). This
means that there is another possible role
for problematizing policy workers—the
institutional entrepreneur (Garud, Hardy,
and Maguire 2007; e.g., see cf. Sterrenberg
2010; Loeber 2010). When policy workers
feel that most stakeholders are locked in
permanent stalemates and no longer believe
in the problem-solving capacities of existing
organizational
routines,
governance
networks, and decision-making procedures,
they may start pondering the possibility
of “creative institutional destruction”, or
“bricolage” or tinkering with different
elements of the political infrastructure to
cobble together a new governance network,
with (partially) new actors, and thus new
convictions and beliefs, willing to try new
policy instruments and solutions. Using
terminology from punctuated equilibrium
theory, “policy entrepreneurs” become
“institutional entrepreneurs” when they
seriously try to push a policy subsystem
out of its incremental dynamics of gradual
change into the “punctuation” which

marks the transitional dynamics toward
a very different type of equilibrium.
Institutional entrepreneurs normally have
their locus in the margins of or “above”
well-institutionalized policy networks.
Being familiar with more than one policyframing and policy-political logic, they
can think more innovatively and creatively
than network “insiders”. Having access to
financial and communicative resources
unavailable to routine players, they can start
influencing the discourse, composition,
modes, and rules of participation by actors,
and introduce new rules of the game
(Sørensen and Torfing 2005, 202–205).

Conclusion

W

hen, in the aftermath of World
War II, Lasswell reinvented
the policy sciences for the
United States, he distinguished between
knowledge of and knowledge in policy.
In the United States, but in European
countries less so, this apparently logical
practical division of academic labor led to a
sharp demarcation between the academicdisciplinary study of public policymaking
processes and a pragmatic-professional
project to create through the establishment
of schools of policy analysis a community
of “policy analysts”, and to insert them in
the governmental structures of the United
States (deLeon 1989). No doubt, this effort
was successful. Policy “analysis” spread
all over the institutions and levels of the
different branches of US government; and
much of the originally “expert” discourse
on public policy entered everyday political,
administrative, journalistic, and informed
citizens’ talk. But Radin’s (2000; 2013) keen
observation that nowadays many policy
analysts feel a disconnect between their
education and their daily professional

142