Information Systems Research Forum

Partnership as Second Order Contracts

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen
Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School

1200 - 1330
Thursday 21 January 2010

Room NAB 4.21

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Everyone is talking about partnerships: environmental partnerships, social partnerships, public-private partnerships, school-family partnerships. But what is the social form of a partnership? The following thesis are formulated: Partnerships are an answer to the challenge of stabilizing mutual expectation under the expectation that expectations constantly change. Partnerships are second order contracts.

They are promises about future promises. Partnerships are flexible structural couplings between a numerous of communications systems such a law, care, economy and politics. And finally; where normal contracts are machines of realization, partnerships are machines of possibility.

Partnerships are a fragile machines producing options through a continuous scanning of possible initiations of diverse function system regarding partnership projects.

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen is professor in political management at Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy, CBS.
He has been the manager of the research group "Public & Political Management" at MPP since 2002. The research group has 18 researchers employed. He has among other things written three books: Power at play: The relationships between play, work and governance (2009), Partnerships: Machines of Possibility (2008) and Discursive analytical strategies - Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann (2003).

If you are a visitor from outside LSE, please send a confirmation to b.d.eaton@lse.ac.uk. You will need to sign in at the reception desk of the New Academic Building. Please note places will be available on a first-come-first-serve basis - registration is not required for LSE students and staff.

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For any further queries regarding this seminar or to request information about future events please contact Frances White. Research Coordinator.

page last updated 26 January, 2010

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