Executive Entrepreneurship, Career Mobility and the Transfer of Policy Paradigms

The career mobility of executive entrepreneurs is a rarely discussed mechanism for the transfer of policy paradigms across regions. This study contends that China’s distinctive, geographic approach to vertical and horizontal personnel mobility motivates executive entrepreneurs and energizes transferable learning of specific policy goals and instruments as well as broader paradigms of policy concepts, ideas, principles, and ideologies. A within-case comparative analysis of policy transfer episodes in the career of He Qiu, a controversial proponent of the new public management, shows how China aspires to test the effectiveness of various policy paradigms as laboratories for local governments.