Towards a socio-legal theory of contractual risk

Journal title SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO
Author/s Volkmar Gessner
Publishing Year 2009 Issue 2009/2 Language English
Pages 10 P. 83-92 File size 285 KB
DOI 10.3280/SD2009-002006
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

<em>Towards a Socio-Legal Theory of Contractual Risk </em> - This paper deals with the risk of opportunism the usual risk in economic exchanges. Breach of contract is probably the most common event in daily life and has therefore attracted research and debates in many disciplines of the social sciences. This discussion deals with the current knowledge of the ways in which societies are coping with the risk of opportunism, distinguishing between three approaches with ascending degrees of complexity: theories of institutional support of contractual exchanges, theories of relational trust and theories of social systems of trust. As demonstrated in Fig. 1 these theories are chosen among many other competing approaches. Rather than being replaced by institutional economics or economic sociology, socio-legal knowledge is a necessary and valuable ingredient for theories of contractual risk. Without our knowledge of the protection of property rights in a particular society, of choices between formal and informal modes of conflict resolution made by business people or consumers, of obstacles in court proceedings and of problems when a lawyer is consulted, our neighbour disciplines come to either over-optimistic conclusions as regards institutional trust or to oversimplified models as regards personal trust and relationships.

  • Contractual Management Ralph Schuhmann, Bert Eichhorn, pp.3 (ISBN:978-3-662-58481-1)

Volkmar Gessner, Towards a socio-legal theory of contractual risk in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 2/2009, pp 83-92, DOI: 10.3280/SD2009-002006