Interdisciplinary challenges in company law research

Abstract

This article discusses issues related to the interdisciplinary research in law. In particular, the article focuses on interdisciplinary challenges related to research methods and concepts developed in economic science and used by company law scholars. In the scholarship of company law it has become traditional to combine comparative method (the main purpose of which is to compare the laws of different countries) and company law theory (explaining or providing arguments why certain relationships should be regulated in a particular way). However, the theoretical scholarship in the field of company law is usually based on the insights of other disciplines, for example, economics, sociology, philosophy, political science, etc. Despite the fact that interdisciplinary research (at least to some degree) seems to be inevitable in company law scholarship, combining different social sciences and methods developed in other sciences immediately causes various challenges. One of the most frequent challenges is that the same concepts have different meanings in each of the discipline. This raises a question, whether these different concepts can be reconciled or transferred from one field to another without losing their initial purpose and meaning. Considering the above, this article argues that (i) insights provided by other social sciences are essential to the scholarship of company law, however, (ii) the incompatibility between law and other sciences raises a lot of challenges. The main examples provided in the article are based on interrelations between company law and economics. In addition, different legal and economic concepts are presented in the article with the explanation on how they interact with one another. The article concludes by commenting on implications of challenges posed by the inevitable interdisciplinary research in company law.