Engaging the creativity of law for organisational knowledge creation

ABSTRACT Economic organisations rely on processes of organisational knowledge creation in order to gain strategic intelligence, namely the ability to master their chaotic, complex reality. These processes depend critically upon the enactment of organisational models. The article argues that it is precisely from the perspective of knowledge creation that the function of the law of the economic organisation can be understood, leaving room for a reconsideration of the ‘the human problem of corporate (ir)responsibility’. Legal knowledge creation supports its organisational counter-part by supplying legal concepts from which organisational models can be unravelled. In the context of a legal analysis of networks, the legal knowledge creation consists in evolutionary processes that transform the legal concepts of juridical personhood and contract in the ‘light of the network context’. In identifying constellations of a co-extensiveness of organisational and legal knowledge creation the theoretical framework demonstrates the possibility for legal modulation of organisational knowledge creation.