Description

The Centre for Law & Society is pleased to announce the establishment of an interdisciplinary and international network to study practices of business-to-business contracting, particularly large scale, complex and/or long-term contract relations, bringing together, especially, the disciplines of law and of marketing.

The participants in the network are Dr Richard Austen-Baker (Lancaster University Law School Centre for Law & Society), Professor Luis Araujo (Lancaster University Management School, Department of Marketing), Professor Massimiliano Granieri (University of Foggia, Law School), Professor Geraint Howells (University of Manchester, Law School), Dr Stefan Huber (Heidelberg University, Institute for International and Comparative Private Law), Dr Stefanos Mouzas (LUMS, Marketing), Professor Soile Pohjonen (University of Helsinki, Law School), Professor Asta Salmi (Helsinki School of Economics), and Dr Martin Spring (LUMS, Department of Management Science).

The network intends to examine the creation, maintenance and implementation of business deals between businesses, particularly UK and Finnish corporations (and also with German and Italian corporations), including the role of professional actors including lawyers and managers, through a long-term rich case study with a theoretical grounding in proactive and relational contract approaches.

Dr Austen-Baker brings to the network considerable expertise in relational contract theory from a law perspective. He has given conference papers and published a number of articles in this area and has developed a new version of relational theory, which he calls "comprehensive contract theory",based around four "universal contract norms". His work on this will be published in the Journal of Contract Law in 2009.

Co-ordination at the Lancaster end will be handled by the Centre for Law and Society, and enquires may be directed to Dr Austen-Baker: r.austen-baker@lancaster.ac.uk