Rethinking the Nature of the Firm: The Corporation as a Governance Object
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article attempts to bridge two discourses — corporate governance and contract governance. Regarding the latter, a group of scholars has recently set out to develop a more comprehensive research agenda to explore the governance dimensions of contractual relations, highlighting the potential of contract theory to develop a more encompassing theory of social and economic transactions. While a renewed interest in the contribution of economic theory for a concept of contract governance drives one dimension of this research, another part of this undertaking has been to move contract theory closer to theories of social organization. Here, these scholars emphasize the “social” or “public” nature of contracts to return to a critical reflection on the classical model of one-off, spot contracts for an exchange of goods or services. The inspiration for this enterprise comes from corporate governance debates over the last two decades, which focused on competing claims of “convergence” versus “divergence” as part of an ambitious investigation into universal standards, the “end of history,” and the underlying “varieties of capitalism.” Meanwhile, the fundamental transformation of the state, which domestically and transnationally forms the background of the growing prominence of contract as a governance tool, must be seen as the other dimension of a renewed interest in “governing contracts.” This article places the corporation at the intersection of these contentions by drawing out the promise of rereading the nexus-of-contract model of the corporation from the perspective of relational contract theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".