Guilds of tempered radicals: Entrepreneurial learning and transgenerational entrepreneurship in identity-forming organizations of the Singapore public service

Author

• David Zhi Wei BEY, Singapore Management UniversityFollow

Publication Type

PhD Dissertation

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

3-2026

Abstract

While entrepreneurship in the public sector, or public sector entrepreneurship (shortened to public entrepreneurship) has been a field of study since the 1960s with Wagner (1966) and Ostrom’s (1965) pioneering work, it has mostly only grown in attention in the last two decades (Kearney & Meynhardt, 2016) and is now an accepted concept (Dhliwayo, 2017).  Research in the field remains relatively new (Klein et al, 2010; Bernier & Hafsi, 2007) and definitions of public entrepreneurship remain diverse with an agreed-upon definition still elusive (Diefenbach, 2011). Recent reviews indicate that more than 40% of papers remain conceptual and theoretical (Ali et al, 2019), with a need for more empirical studies. Moreover, majority of the studies are European/North American-focused (Ali et al, 2019), with scholars like Van De Waal & Demircioglu (2020) pointing out that the “lack of Asia-Pacific studies is striking given that East Asian countries consistently rank high on public sector innovation”. This study hence aims to fill these lacuna and build on recent work by Audretsch & Fiedler (2023) to look at public entrepreneurship in Singapore - what the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government recently ranked as the “best public service in the world” (Blavatnik School of Government, 2024), and is the only Asian country to feature in the top 10 of the fore-mentioned Blavatnik Index of Public Administration. In this study, we uncover a persistent pattern amongst public entrepreneurs in Singapore - how the most effective public entrepreneurs shape themselves to be societally acceptable, utilize social networks and linkages, and build guilds that last across generations, to innovate around the bureaucracy and bring about change for the nation.

Keywords

entrepreneurship, public sector, guilds, transgenerational, learning, Singapore

Degree Awarded

Business Administration

Discipline

Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations | Strategic Management Policy

Supervisor(s)

TSCHANG, Feichin Ted

First Page

1

Last Page

309

Publisher

Singapore Management University

City or Country

Singapore

Citation

BEY, David Zhi Wei. Guilds of tempered radicals: Entrepreneurial learning and transgenerational entrepreneurship in identity-forming organizations of the Singapore public service. (2026). 1-309.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/860

Copyright Owner and License

Author

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.