Abstract

A new form of contracts has emerged between public administration and the single citizen within the last 15 years. The present article will attempt to situate citizens' contracts in a larger systemic framework, in order to understand more fully an increasingly complex public administration that is making new and contradictory demands on public managers. Citizens' contracts emerge naturally as a form in which the individual can undertake a reconnaissance of communication. The contracts are able to connect the codes of law, care, and economy because they can be constructed differently from the perspective of their different codes without losing its character of unity. The semantic incommensurability of the systems of communication that are coupled through the contract is constitutive for the test of will of the single citizen which function a premise making machine of help and support decisions.