Categories for Generating Middle-Level Propositions Concerning Law’s Underbearer Role

Abstract

As the twentieth century ended, people everywhere demanded changes in the state and the legal order (Evans et al., 1985). Blaming the failure to attain development on bureaucrats’ unwarranted interventions, some called for liberating private entrepreneurship. Others asserted that behind the market’s seemingly impartial facade, entrepreneurs’ powerful ‘invisible’ hands accumulated wealth and privilege. At best, however, these grand theories only pointed at gross behaviors that comprised the state’s counterproductive role. None proposed detailed measures to restructure the political economic institutions that perpetuated poverty and powerlessness. Law-makers needed middle-level propositions, warranted by evidence, to explain particular role occupants’ behaviors. Only then could they design specific laws and regulations to alter them. For that purpose, all three sets of grand theory remained at too high a level of generalization (Tabb, 1990).