Breaking the rules: Schumpeterian entrepreneurship and legal institutional change in the case of ‘Blue Laws’, 1950s-1980s

Abstract

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.