Morita contexts as lax functors (Q2015832)

J. Bénabou observed that specifying a monad on a category is the same as giving a lax functor from the terminal category \(1\) to the 2-category \(Cat\). \textit{R. Street} [Cah. Topologie Géom. Différ. Catégoriques 13, 217--264 (1972; Zbl 0252.18008)] studied lax functors from an arbitrary small category \(X\) to \(Cat\), recovering known results about monads in the case \(X=1\). \textit{T. Brzeziński}, \textit{A. Vazquez Marquez} and \textit{J. Vercruysse} [Appl. Categ. Struct. 19, No. 5, 821--858 (2011; Zbl 1242.18002)] introduced Morita contexts, a categorical structure generalizing the classical Morita contexts for rings. A Morita context consists of two monads on two (different) categories, functors between these categories, and some natural transformations satisfying some compatibility conditions. The key observation of the paper under review is that a Morita context is the same as a lax functor from \(Iso\) to \(Cat\), where \(Iso\) denotes the category consisting of two objects and an isomorphism between them. The author establishes this in Section 2. He then uses the work of R. Street to recover various results about Morita contexts, notably a version of Beck's monadicity theorem in Section 7. In the last two sections, the author proves various generalizations, as he puts it, for ``readers who enjoy the adrenaline rush of extreme 2-category theory''.