Abstract
Recent research on interorganizational trust has stressed the need to develop a deeper understanding of the multi-level nature of this construct. This article focuses on trust on different analytical levels in an interorganizational context, and on the hitherto underspecified connections between these. Based on an institutionalization approach, it revisits the classic question: (how) can organizations trust each other? To do so, we consider organizations as objects of trust and reappraise the transferral from interpersonal to interorganizational trust in ‘facework’ (Giddens, 1990). We also examine the conflicts and struggles of trust and power that can arise from this process between boundary spanners and their organizational constituents. Next, we consider organizations as subjects of trust in interorganizational relationships. We detail the institutionalization of trust and its reproduction on an organizational level, and how it can be transmitted to new generations of organizational actors, creating path-dependent histories of trust which are truly interorganizational. Taking up the theme of trust and power, we analyse ways in which the institutionalization of trust can entail that of power, too, and examine the implications of this from a critical point of view. We conclude that in interorganizational trust, both the subject and object of trust move across analytical levels, and further, that this movement demonstrates the significance of the organization as a distinct entity that can be both trusted and trusting.
Highlights
Over the past two decades, the centrality of trust in economic relationships has come to be increasingly acknowledged – a development that, if anything, seems likely to become even more pronounced that the emergence of the present crisis has been so obviously linked to an escalation and collapse of trust
Interorganizational trust has remained a compelling subject partly because it allows us to study processes of trust building in the absence of the integrating normative horizon that comes with common organizational membership, so that it is largely up to trustor and trustee to define their context and engage in active trust constitution (Giddens 1994; Möllering, 2006a)
It is only relatively recently that interorganizational trust has come to be acknowledged as a distinct construct, with previous research focusing on trust in isolated dyads without due consideration of its organizational context (Currall & Inkpen, 2002; Ferrin et al, 2006; but see e.g. Lane & Bachmann, 1996; Arrighetti et al, 1997)
Summary
Over the past two decades, the centrality of trust in economic relationships has come to be increasingly acknowledged – a development that, if anything, seems likely to become even more pronounced that the emergence of the present crisis has been so obviously linked to an escalation and collapse of trust. Trust has become one of the most frequently cited concepts in studies of cooperative interorganizational relationships (Grandori & Soda, 1995; Rao & Schmidt, 1998; Arnott, 2007; Zaheer & Harris, 2006). It is only relatively recently that interorganizational trust has come to be acknowledged as a distinct construct, with previous research focusing on trust in isolated dyads without due consideration of its organizational context Zaheer and colleagues (1998), too, note the fundamental challenge to transpose an individual-level concept like trust to the organizational level
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