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Negotiating and enacting contracts for business networks

Abstract

Flexibility is a major issue in business today and one answer to that is to organize work in networks of companies rather than within a single business. Cooperation between organizations is more easily established and adapted than reorganization of internal company structures. But how do we manage flexibility in such a network without sacrificing the minimum stability that is required for economic success? We suggest a method for coordinating interaction in a business network that provides three levels of flexibility: local ad-hoc change, global negotiated change and planned change. This method is based on the negotiation and enactment of process-based interorganizational contracts.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Rittgen, P. Negotiating and enacting contracts for business networks. J Braz Comp Soc 13, 7–26 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192542

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