IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/26700.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The place of contract in organizational awareness: deconstructing process, market and connectedness

Author

Listed:
  • Scott, Susan V.
  • Paris, Carolyn

Abstract

Throughout modern business history, contract has been used as an organizational technology that holds counterparties in formal or legally binding agreements. The proliferation of contract prompted the emergence of professional contract managers who played an important but relatively peripheral role applying situations awareness to the practice of compliance and business relationship management. As more complex organizational forms emerge (outsourcing, supply chains and enterprise IS), contract has come to be seen as a standard coordination device whose foundational assumptions are taken for granted. In this study, we draw attention to two different ways of designing the organizational technology of contract: a process-oriented approach and a market-based valuation of contract. Both approaches promise to provide management information by offering a form of calculability but we argue distort organizational awareness. Our conclusion is that a more developed notion of organizational awareness is needed supported by an alternative conceptualization of contract as a technology or connectedness.

Suggested Citation

  • Scott, Susan V. & Paris, Carolyn, 2010. "The place of contract in organizational awareness: deconstructing process, market and connectedness," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 26700, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:26700
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/26700/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Donald Mackenzie & Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu, 2007. "Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics," Post-Print halshs-00149145, HAL.
    2. Donald MacKenzie, 2006. "An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262134608, April.
    3. Caglio, Ariela & Ditillo, Angelo, 2008. "A review and discussion of management control in inter-firm relationships: Achievements and future directions," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 33(7-8), pages 865-898.
    4. Power, Michael & Laughlin, Richard, 1996. "Habermas, law and accounting," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 21(5), pages 441-465, July.
    5. Unknown, 2003. "Competing in the 21st Century," Amber Waves:The Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources, and Rural America, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, pages 1-2, April.
    6. Bernstein, Lisa, 1992. "Opting Out of the Legal System: Extralegal Contractual Relations in the Diamond Industry," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 21(1), pages 115-157, January.
    7. Jannis Kallinikos, 2006. "The Consequences of Information," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 3814.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Scott, Susan V. & Paris, Carolyn, 2009. "Transactionalizing technologies versus performing contracts: from ERP to credit default swaps at AIG," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 26701, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Aspers, Patrik, 2009. "How are markets made?," MPIfG Working Paper 09/2, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    3. Pierpaolo Andriani & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, 2015. "Transactional innovation as performative action: transforming comparative advantage in the global coffee business," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 25(2), pages 371-400, April.
    4. Katrin Hirte, 2020. "Das doppelte Reflexionsproblem in der Oekonomik," ICAE Working Papers 115, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.
    5. Walter, Christian, 2016. "The financial Logos: The framing of financial decision-making by mathematical modelling," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 597-604.
    6. Teppo Felin & Nicolai J. Foss, 2009. "Social Reality, the Boundaries of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and Economics," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 20(3), pages 654-668, June.
    7. Andriani, Pierpaolo & Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten, 2011. "Performing comparative advantage: The case of the global coffee business," Frankfurt School - Working Paper Series 167, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.
    8. Roberts, John & Jones, Megan, 2009. "Accounting for self interest in the credit crisis," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 34(6-7), pages 856-867, August.
    9. Sander Merkus & Marcel Veenswijk, 2017. "Turning New Public Management theory into reality: Performative struggle during a large scale planning process," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 35(7), pages 1264-1284, November.
    10. Christian Walter, 2020. "Sustainable Financial Risk Modelling Fitting the SDGs: Some Reflections," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(18), pages 1-28, September.
    11. Aligica, Paul Dragos, 2013. "Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199843909.
    12. Aaron Z. Pitluck & Fabio Mattioli & Daniel Souleles, 2018. "Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(2), pages 157-171, June.
    13. Chris Clarke, 2012. "Financial Engineering, Not Economic Photography," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 5(3), pages 261-278, January.
    14. Francesco GUALA, 2015. "Performativity Rationalized," Departmental Working Papers 2015-07, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    15. Cochrane, David Troy, 2020. "Disobedient Things: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Accounting for Disaster," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 7(1), pages 3-32.
    16. Loconto, Allison & Rajão, Raoni, 2020. "Governing by models: Exploring the technopolitics of the (in)visilibities of land," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    17. Peter Miller, 2008. "Calculating Economic Life," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(1), pages 51-64, March.
    18. Horacio Ortiz, 2012. "Anthropology – of the Financial Crisis," Chapters, in: James G. Carrier (ed.), A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, Second Edition, chapter 35, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    19. Iain White, 2020. "Rigour and rigour mortis? Planning, calculative rationality, and forces of stability and change," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(14), pages 2885-2900, November.
    20. Okamoto, Noriaki, 2022. "Financialisation in the context of cross-shareholding in Japan: the performative pursuit of better corporate governance," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 117994, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    contract; organizations; organization awareness; financial markets; financial innovation; networks; design;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:26700. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.