| This study develops and applies an institutionalist approach to legal transformations. I analyze changes in the organizational practices and legal ideology used by states during the Progressive era to deal with industrial accidents. This shift resulted in the establishment of workmen's compensation, a set of administrative law procedures based upon social insurance/actuarial principles, in the place of a system consisting of court proceedings and tort doctrines. Relying on textual, quantitative, and historical data, I argue that three factors were critical in shaping the timing and content of this transformation. First, the preexisting legal remedy lost support from labor and business elites and its ideological foundation was eroded. Thus, it was vulnerable to change. Second, a network of experts emerged, mobilized resources and, more importantly, created discursive "arenas" in which reform models were constructed and diffused. Finally, reformers' imaginations were fueled by emergent discourses of social work and antiformalist jurisprudence and more long-standing cultural constructions of the market and law and society relations. To negotiate the impediments they confronted, reformers assembled a remarkable range of cultural elements to create a uniquely American form of compensation. In elaborating this model, I address a central issue in current debates within both institutionalist and socio-legal theory, namely the relationship between culture and the dynamics of collective action in the creation of legal institutions and legal ideology. |
