Partnerships have been discussed as a form of contract. Here, the studies are taken one step further and there is a discussion of whether the displacement of the form has consequences for a contract as a structural coupling between function systems. The argument is that partnerships not only presuppose the coupling of a greater number of function systems than traditional contracts, they also change the way in which couplings are established.

As mentioned in Chapter Five, a contract does not represent an independent system of communication but a coupling between different systems of communication. A contract has to presuppose the freedom of the systems of communication as outside obligation, but it cannot be the same obligation for different systems of communication, since each system has its own meaning boundary and has to therefore assign meaning to obligation in its communication in its own way. At the same time, however, the obligation has to be the same since there would otherwise be no connection. Teubner summarises it as follows: ‘The unity of contract today is fractured in the endless play of discourses. It sounds paradoxical, but one contract is in reality broken into a multiplicity of contracts’ (Teubner, 2000, p 403).

So which function systems are coupled with partnerships and with the possibility of constructing the partnership as an internal systemic commitment? Which form does this commitment take in different function systems? And which freedom and hence mutual indifference between function systems are defined with partnerships?

As mentioned in Chapter Five, the traditional contract couples the legal function system and the economic function system in that the form of contract allows for a simultaneous different construction of the contract in the two systems: as a promise in the legal perspective and as an exchange in the economic perspective. Moreover, law and the economy give meaning to each other's contractual constructions. The construction of contract as a promise in law can be seen in the economy as a transactional cost. The construction of a contract in the economy as an exchange can be seen in legal terms as an exchange of binding promises.