Special Issue of Management and Organizational History: Business and the Law. Historical Perspectives on Legal Change
Firms act in tightly regulated legal environments. Yet as new products, production processes, and economic practices emerged that environment has been constantly questioned, undermined, and rebuilt. At the same time, legal innovations challenged established economic practices like the ban on child labor or new cartel laws. Assuming that innovations were always in line with the legal system or that firms simply complied with new laws is misleading. Usually, the more accurate picture was that of a highly contingent process of negotiation and rule breaking. In the long term, firms needed to succeed in positioning their products and services as legitimate and inside the law. To see this process as a one way street of political primacy would be historically incorrect and a bad assumption to solve current problems of regulation. Given the fundamental importance of the alignment, legal change figures as a central explanatory problem for understanding the course of economic development.
The aim of the SI is to understand legal change as a contingent change in routines that affected the way businesses and courts interpreted the “rules of the game”. Such a change could manifest itself in written law or lead to a fundamentally different way of interpreting it. In both cases the focus of the papers should be on economic and legal practices, i.e. on the question what the law meant in its historical context and how it actually affected economic actions. We are looking for theoretical work as well as empirical case studies that help to shed light on the historical transformations of legal institutions at the intersection of businesses and the law. Specifically, we are looking for papers that address at least one of the following research questions.
1. The Relation of Firm Behavior and the Law: Conceptual Clarifications and Historical Perspectives
2. Direct Intervention: The Practice of Political Entrepreneurship and Its Effects
3. Subtle Evasion: The Stubbornness of Business Routines in the Face of Legal Change
4. Legal Provocations: Schumpeterian “Rule Breaking” and Business Scandals
Each submission will initially be reviewed by the guest editors to determine its suitability for the special issue. Before final acceptance papers will also be double-blind reviewed. Publication of the special issue is planned for the year 2019.
For further information, please contact sebastian.teupe@uni-bayreuth.de
The deadline for submissions is 31 October 2018.
Editorial information
Guest Editor: Sebastian Teupe, University of Bayreuth, Germany (Sebastian.teupe@uni-bayreuth.de)
Guest Editor: Louis Pahlow, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main, Germany (Pahlow@jur.uni-frankfurt.de)
Organizational History Network 