ABSTRACT

How do laws change? The paper argues that under certain historical conditions ‘Schumpeterian rule-breaking’ has played a crucial role for understanding such change. If legal change is welcomed by large parts of society but the political system produces a stalemate, individual actors breaking the rules are able to change them at least in the long run. The paper explores the case study of ‘Blue Laws’ in the United States to discuss relevant factors for why these laws were abolished between the 1950s and 1980s. In contrast to established historical narratives it stresses the role of individual retailers. By doing so, the paper more generally proposes an alternative perspective to entrepreneurship and theories of institutional change. First, it departs from the concept of ‘evasive entrepreneurship’ by stressing contingent factors rather than calculative behavior on the part of entrepreneurs thus showing the possibility of legal rule-breaking being less instrumental than assumed. Second, it argues that entrepreneurial actions are an important supplement to ‘framing strategies’ and ‘collective action’ which figure prominently in the literature on institutional change.

摘要

法律如何变化？该论文认为，在某些历史条件下，“熊彼特式的违反规则”对于理解这种变化起了至关重要的作用。如果法律变革受到社会上大多数人的欢迎，但政治制度陷入僵局，那么违反规则的个人行为者至少可以在长期内改变规则。本文探讨了美国“蓝色法律”的案例研究，以探讨导致1950年代至1980年代废除了这些法律的相关因素。与既定的历史叙述相反，它强调了个体零售商的作用。通过这样做，本文更普遍地提出了企业家精神和制度变迁理论的另一种观点。第一，它通过强调或有因素而不是企业家的计算行为而偏离了“规避企业家精神”的概念，从而表明了违反法律规则的作用不如设想的可能性大。其次，它认为企业家行为是对“框架策略”和“集体行为”的重要补充，而“框架策略”和“集体行为”在有关制度变迁的文献中占有重要地位。