Telling Stories Beautifully: Hybrid Legal Forms in the New Economy

This article explores the expressive and constitutive dimensions of hybrid legal forms emerging as vehicles for grass‐roots innovations that seek to forge renewed economic trajectories. Drawing on a relational perspective, it analyses company constitutions, and crowdfunding offers based on them. It explores the ways in which the practices of forming a legal entity and raising finance to support its growth relate to a broader narrative of creating initiatives for a sustainable economy, one that radically reworks the priority of social and environmental objectives in economic organizations. A closer examination of three specific initiatives from Australia illustrates the ways in which dynamic engagement with legal form can enable, loosen or magnify relationality. This approach helps illuminate the ways in which formal legal structure for economic enterprise is both an inherently regulatory vehicle, but also a site for the mediation and stabilization of patterns of exchange.