The authors integrate theory developed in several disciplines to determine five cognitive processes through which industrial buyers can develop trust of a supplier firm and its salesperson. These p...

An Examination of the Nature of Trust in Buyer–Seller Relationships:

Although trust is an underdeveloped concept in sociology, promising theoretical formulations are available in the recent work of Luhmann and Barber. This sociological version complements the psychological and attitudinal conceptualizations of experimental and survey researchers. Trust is seen to include both emotional and cognitive dimensions and to function as a deep assumption underwriting social order. Contemporary examples such as lying, family exchange, monetary attitudes, and litigation illustrate the centrality of trust as a sociological reality. In recent years, sociologists have begun to treat trust as a sociological topic (e.g., Conviser; Garfinkel; Haas and Deseran; Henslin; Holzner; Strub and Priest; Weigert,a,b). Indeed, two short and powerful books, Niklas Luhmann's Trust and Pauoer (1979) and Bernard Barber's The Logic and Limits of Trust (1983), have placed trust at the center of sociological theorizing about contemporary society. Nevertheless, we agree with Luhmann's lament that there is a "regrettably sparse literature which has trust as its main theme within sociology" (8). There is a large quantity of research on trust by experimental psychologists and political scientists, which, however, appears theoretically unintegrated and incomplete from the standpoint of a sociology of trust. These researchers typically conceptualize trust as a psychological event within the individual rather than as an intersubjective or systemic social reality. They also tend to use methodological approaches that reduce trust to its cognitive content through psychometric scaling techniques or to its behavioral expressions in laboratory settings. Luhmann and Barber, on the other hand, present trust as an irreducible and multidimiensional so

Trust as a Social Reality

Increasingly, researchers from a variety of business disciplines are finding that trust can lower transaction costs, facilitate interorganizational relationships, and enhance manager-subordinate relationships. At the same time, we see a growing trend toward globalization—in establishing alliances, managing and hiring employees, and entering new markets. These trends suggest a need to view the concept of trust from the perspective of national culture. Drawing on theories from several disciplines, we develop a framework that identifies and describes five cognitive trust-building processes that help explain how trust develops in business contexts. We include a series of research propositions demonstrating how societal norms and values influence application of the trust-building processes, and we discuss implications for theory and practice.

Understanding the Influence of National Culture on the Development of Trust

Although research on trust in an organizational context has advanced considerably in recent years, the literature has yet to produce a set of generalizable propositions that inform our understanding of the organization and coordination of work. We propose that conceptualizing trust as an organizing principle is a powerful way of integrating the diverse trust literature and distilling generalizable implications for how trust affects organizing. We develop the notion of trust as an organizing principle by specifying structuring and mobilizing as two sets of causal pathways through which trust influences several important properties of organizations. We further describe specific mechanisms within structuring and mobilizing that influence interaction patterns and organizational processes. The principal aim of the framework is to advance the literature by connecting the psychological and sociological micro-foundations of trust with the macro-bases of organizing. The paper concludes by demonstrating how the framework can be applied to yield novel insights into traditional views of organizations and to stimulate original and innovative avenues of organizational research that consider both the benefits and downsides of trust.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3086036.pdf

Trust as an Organizing Principle

There has been a growing interest in examining the factors that support or hinder one's knowledge sharing behavior in the virtual communities. However, still very few studies examined them from both personal and environmental perspectives. In order to explore the knowledge sharing behaviors within the virtual communities of professional societies, this study proposed a social cognitive theory (SCT)-based model that includes knowledge sharing self-efficacy and outcome expectations for personal influences, and multi-dimensional trusts for environmental influences. The proposed research model was then evaluated with structural equation modeling, and confirmatory factor analysis was also applied to test if the empirical data conform to the proposed model.

/pdf/knowledge-sharing-behavior-in-virtual-communities-the-5a8oou431y.pdf

Knowledge sharing behavior in virtual communities: The relationship between trust, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations

Trust has been little investigated outside the experimental laboratory situation, and its processual aspects have largely been neglected (cf. Swinth, 1967). Two common interactional patterns through which the marijuana user establishes the relationships of trust necessary for his drug-related activity are examined. The “disclosure pattern” occurs in three stages and provides the marijuana user with a coherent set of “identity documents” (Gross and Stone, 1964) as a basis for defining another person as trustworthy. The “extension pattern” provides the marijuana user with a trusted third party's definition of another as trustworthy as a basis for defining that other as trustworthy. It is suggested that these two interactional patterns may occur among groups as well as between individuals.

T. B. Priest

Papers

Two Patterns of Establishing Trust: The Marijuana User