News

Announcement: Call for Papers

Topic: Business and the Law - Historical Perspectives on Legal Change
Deadline for the paper: 31.12.2017
Date of the conference: 21.06.2018 - 23.06.2018

Find more information here.

Short introduction into the topic:
"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 changes 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 practices as legitimate and inside the law (Aldrich and Fiol 1994; Beckert and Wehinger 2012). 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."