Actor-Network Theory Contract Theory

Abstract

Abstract Firms increasingly use complex hybrid governance structures to manage value generation networks. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the structures contain soft, “enforcement-challenged” contractual devices. Existing contract theories, however, fail to recognize and explain how these soft contract devices work as legal devices. The article seeks to address this failure. The article uses a conceptual innovation by Schepker et al to construct an actor-network theory (ANT) inspired contract theory. Schepker et al argued that contracts are best understood as often concurrently serving safeguarding, coordination, and adaptation goals. The article argues that combined with ANT the functional contracting frame allows us to recognize that contracts work and gain efficacy in multiple ways. To understand how the soft, “enforcement-challenged” contract devices work, the article traces the efficacy mechanisms the devices perform and enact. The tracings lead the article to propose an ANT contract theory that builds on three intertwined ideas: 1) contract devices have no core efficacy networks but multiple parallel efficacies, 2) contracts should be understood as bricolage collages of small-scale contractual point intervention devices that each deploy and rely on their own efficacy mechanisms and patterns, and 3) the force of contract resides in the socio-material assemblages contracts are capable of creating and sustaining.