I think it was on Twitter today that someone said that using a social contract as an argument was a cop-out. But using efficiency as an argument was valid as it required an explanation of how the optimal outcome was being achieved. Somehow efficiency is tied to numbers and not norms, so it’s more difficult to spell out.
If you want to claim a social contract, though, I think you have to show who is involved in the contract and how it’s unfolding. People always talk in broad strokes- crime is up! crime is down! Sweeping statements are not very useful as within the purview of the speaker there are more then likely people who are isolated from crime even if crime is rising, and those who continue to experience crime even when a generalist can legitimately claim crime is down.
So the first hurdle in the usage of social contract as an explanation is to be able to isolate the groups held to the agreement. Who are the givers, and who are the benefactors? And besides the two to the party, there are a more general group of observers, or what I like to call the audience.
The CEO of LuluLemon recently made a show of a social contract when a handful of youths shoplifted from one of the retail stores. The benefactor from this leader’s contract of people of property were the shoplifters who faced no charges of breaking the law. The losers in this arrangement were the employees who lost their jobs as they were fulfilling the social contract they had been raised with, theft is bad and should be reported, instead of the social contract supported in a LuluLemon employee manual. The audience is the rest of us judging these interactions and evaluating how we would act should this scenario present itself.
If one is looking for efficiencies, one would have to take a closer look at the intersection of the employee’s behavior visa vie the CEO’s. If employee policy is so counter-intuitive to pre-existing social arrangements, ones that have been trained and maintained with most people since childhood, will it be efficient to expect the average worker to go against such impulses and look the other way at blatant theft? It seems there will be a brewing of backlash- or those pesky unintended consequenses.
On the other hand, if the store decides to hire a host of people who can easily ignore stealing and have no issues with criminal activity, then perhaps the social contracts between the CEO, gangster youth, and employee will be groovy. Except….if your employees feel it’s legit to operate as crooks, eventually they’ll be stealing from you themselves. And that truly can’t be very efficient.
You see, arguing optimal outcomes using social contracts requires some persuasion.
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