Contractual Governance: Managing Goals and Values in Inter-organizational Relationships

In this paper, I will discuss how my ongoing research on inter-organizational relationships in the biotech industry can help us understand the management and government of the middle. Inter-organizational relationships, in particular public-private, academic-industry partnerships, are associated with a significant potential for creating value, both economic and social. Often, they are seen as the best way of solving complex societal problems because they combine different logics and expertise that would lead to innovative solutions. Yet they are also characterized by substantial challenge in terms of managing across sometimes incompatible logics, cultures and management practices, and often they fail. The literature on inter-organizational relationships has previously considered contracts and trust prevalent mechanisms for thinking about the government of these relationships. Yet neither of these strands have considered contracting a dynamic process that evolves over time. Based on an extensive qualitative study of an academic-industry collaboration and a critical account of attempts in the STS literature to describe inter-organizational networks in terms of ‘infrastructures’, this paper suggests a new approach to studying contractual governance and proposes that contracts are dynamically involved in governing incompatible logics and create value in inter-organizational relationships.