Abstract
In the prevailing mechanical-rational view on organisations, business processes and information systems the engineering approach is the road to solutions. A contrasting view can be found in approaches that start from the social character of organisations and/or the role of natural language in information and communication. In this paper I want to examine this discussion from another and perhaps unusual angle: an analysis of the legal contract as representation of a business agreement. Classical contract law considers a contract as a discrete and fully specified business exchange, while Macneil states that such a discrete contract cannot exist and that every contract has relational aspects based on expectations and trust. For Macneil, a contract is not about some fictional discrete exchange, but rather about a mutual agreement of getting things done in a partially undetermined and uncertain future. This debate in law has meaning both for Business Modelling and for Software Design: Business Modelling should be based on how real business is done and not on some rationalistic idealised view on business, and Software Design should not aim at the fictive monolithic integrated system, but on the contrary provide an open structure that allows for human intervention and that allows for integration with other and heterogeneous information flows.
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Suurmond, C. (2018). Business, Contracts, Information. In: Shishkov, B. (eds) Business Modeling and Software Design. BMSD 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 319. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94214-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94214-8_1
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