Archive for 16 April 2007
The Excuse Doctrine in Contract Law: Country and Western Edition
| Peter Klein |
Tom Bell entertains his contract law class with a country-and-western song illustrating the excuse doctrine. Tom says he performs the song every year wearing cowboy boots and a bolo tie, then makes the students take a not-so-fun quiz to make sure they got the point. Not at the level of the Glenn Hubbard music video, but still pretty good for a stodgy law professor.
Promises, promises, I made to you,
And you, Darlin’, promised right back at me, too.
But my commitment is over. I’m cuttin’ you loose.
I owe you nothin’! Here’s my excuse:(refrain 1:)
Mistake, frustration, impratiCAbility:
Thanks to these reasons, I am now are free.
Mistake, frustration, impratiCAbility!
The whole deal is OFF, between you and me.
Org Bloggers Peace Summit
| Peter Klein |
Helsinki, 1969. Camp David, 1978. Oslo, 1993. To this list of historic summits we can add “Columbia, Missouri, 2007.” That’s the year my home institution, the University of Missouri, hosted orgtheory.net bloggers Brayden King, Fabio Rojas, and Teppo Felin, as well as my co-blogger Nicolai Foss. Well, not all at the same time. But still: Brayden presented his paper on “Contracts as Organizations” at last week’s CORI seminar series, and today Fabio discussed his work on Black Studies programs in a seminar jointly sponsored by the Division of Applied Social Sciences and McCEL. Teppo will visit McCEL in May to present his paper “The Political Economy of Entrepreneuring.” And Nicolai will be here in May as well. Who says economists and sociologists can’t work together for a better world?
Interview with Bill Starbuck
| Peter Klein |
The March 2007 Academy of Management Learning & Education features Michael Barnett’s interview with William H. Starbuck, recently retired as ITT Professor of Creative Management at NYU. (SSRN version of the interview here.) Topics: statistical significance versus “substantive importance” (à la McCloskey — but see Siegler and Hoover 2005); complex versus simple forecasting techniques; keys to organizational learning (and “unlearning”); organizational design as process, not outcome; the relationship between management research and social issues more broadly; and more. A good read.
Organizations and Markets 
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