Store Wars: The Enactment and Repeal of Anti-Chain Store Legislation

Legal endorsements and barriers are fundamental to the rise and fall of organizational forms, yet, we know little about how organizations affect such institutions.We study the enactment and repeal of laws designed to discourage chain stores. In this instance, competition between organizational forms was manifested in political contention over the law. An anti-chain store movement populated by indepedent retailers and sympathetic others sought to promulgate anti-chain store laws. This movement was opposed by a pro-chain store interest group. We study how their relative strangths and allies of both parties. These factors affected the balance of intra-state power, and influenced the inter-state diffusion of anti-chain store laws. By contrast, the process of repeal was affected by supra-state activity as pro-chain store forces shifted contention to the supreme court and forged alliances with agricultural cooperatives. Thus, we see how the political resources and strategies of both forms interacted with pre-existing institutions and affected the trajectory of institutional change