Contracting for the Company's Culture

Abstract

Company culture is not a new phenomenon. A company's culture has always been relevant to employee retention and financial success, but recently its importance cannot be understated. Companies are not immune from the culture wars that divide the United States and countries across the globe. Increasingly, companies have become participants-willingly or not-in a wide range of social and political controversies. A company's stakeholders in these ongoing culture wars include their employees, investors, and consumers. And those stakeholders make choices about which companies they want to work for, invest in, purchase from, and even boycott, based in part on a company's beliefs and behaviors surrounding a variety of social issues like gender equality, diversity, and sustainability. These stakeholders are growing more critical of companies’ performative attempts to pacify them and often characterize such attempts as greenwashing or blackwashing. They expect companies to embrace these issues and incorporate their values into the way the company operates, both internally and externally. While contract drafting is rarely seen as an avenue for developing and communicating company culture, let alone as a vehicle for social change, in this article we propose that contract drafting can be used to achieve both goals. By incorporating narrative techniques and impactful language, companies can use their contracts to tell the stories of the company culture that has become so important to their success, which can in turn lead to broader social change.

Keywords: Corporate culture, Contract drafting, Contracts, Private law, Applied legal storytelling