Understand and manage transactions and relationships in a global, truly inter-national context including cross-border negotiations, ethical issues in trading, trade wars, supply disruptions and contract breaches.

If you start to think about all the different organizations involved with the production and delivery of manufactured goods and services, the amount of relationships and interconnections between these organizations becomes overwhelming. Many of these relationships are governed by contractual agreements and purchase orders that describe the terms and conditions of economic transactions. Supply chains are constellations of firms that together form the link between raw materials and the end consumer, including physical product flows but also services, information, and finances. In this course, we study such contractual arrangements using practical cases that focus on intra- and inter-organisational governance. For example, we investigate global trade wars and how they affect decisions in the supply network, we study how supplier contracts can be used to enforce sustainability deep into the supply network, we analyse how conflict and contract breaches affect customers downstream, and we learn about EU tender law and practices of public procurement. Contracts also affect end consumers directly, for example in cases of warranties and quality defects. In addition, we focus on how such contracts are managed in practice, even after contracts are designed and transactions completed.

Cases, academic and practitioner articles.