Chance interventions – on bricolage and the state as an entrepreneur in a declining industry

In this paper, we develop the notion of bricolage by paying attention to the role of chance in the same, rather than approaching it from the perspective of control and agency. We argue that the concept of chance can be used to downplay the common tendency to focus on individual agency in bricolage, proposing an alternative understanding of the latter as constellations of resources coming together in unexpected combinations. We situate our theoretical argument in the for bricolage understudied context of a declining industry, where we focus on the role of chance in how resources are combined and separated in state interventions, connecting to the literature on the ‘state as entrepreneur’. Three episodes from the Swedish state-owned shipping companies Zenit and Uddevalla Shipping during the shipping crisis of the 1970s and 1980s are used to illustrate how state intervention can be imbued with chance and serendipity.