This essay was originally presented at the Conference on American and German Traditions of Sociological Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thought organized by the Center for European Legal Policy, Bremen, Federal Republic of Germany, July 10‐12, 1986. Subsequent versions were discussed at the Department of Sociology, Northwestern University (February 1987) and the Workshop on Legal Theory at the University of Virginia Law School (March 1987). Comments by participants at these events, members of the Amherst Seminar, Boaventura Santos, Kristin Bumiller, and G. Edward White are gratefully acknowledged. An earlier version of the paper appears in Joerges & Trubek, eds., Critical Legal Thought in Germany and America: A German‐American Debate (Baden‐Baden: NOMOS, 1989).
A replication of Macaulay's 1963 study of Wisconsin manufacturers shows that manufacturers are using a new type of contract to govern changed transactions and to establish new form of industrial organization. This article seeks to specify these changes and to demonstrate their theoretical significance by constructing an empirically and theoretically informed analytical framework. This framework establishes relations of meaning between discrete contracts, job shop production, and classical contract law; between openterm contracts, mass production, and neoclassical contract law; and between long‐term agreements, flexible production, and a “shadow” relational contract law. It demonstrates that long‐term agreements constitute a new device for governing exchange, that they are part of a broader change from mass production to flexible production, and that their distinctive features are not recognized by neoclassical contract law.
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