Sympathy for the devil? Reflections on the perils of institutionalising trust research

Abstract

This paper explores the dark side of institutionalisation of trust research. More in particular, it signals two major perils: the risk for trust to be just another managerial fad and the difficulty for the research on trust conducted within the management science field to have an impact on other fields such as marketing and economics. A quick empirical test shows that while the first peril seems to be not that relevant, the risk of isolation and limited impact is a serious one. The paper suggests how to consider and avoid these perils, in order to strengthen the contribution research on trust makes towards better practice, and in order to conquer more legitimate space and recognition within institutionalised research.

Keywords:

• trust
• institutionalisation
• research method
• co-citations

Acknowledgements

I thank Alberto Bani for valuable research assistance with this commentary and Sandro Fazzolari for his contribution to the editing.

Notes on contributor

Vincenzo Perrone is Professor of Organization Theory at Bocconi University, Milano (Italy). He earned his Ph.D. from Bocconi University in 1988. He has been Visiting Professor at Carlson School of Management, U. of Minnesota, 1992–1994. His research interests focus on new organizational forms (n-form), trust in intra and inter-organizational relations, inter-firms coordination mechanisms, organizational resources for competitive advantage and forms of capital.

Notes

1. The Journals listed in the Appendix are the most relevant in each field based on a combination of two bibliometric indicators, often used as a sign of quality and impact: the Journal Impact Factor as measured over a period of five years and the so-called Article Influence Score (Rizkallah & Sin, 2010).

2. The total number of articles indexed in ISI web of science increased considerably from 1985 to 2012. ‘To adjust for this growth, we multiplied the number of quality circle (“trust” in this study) articles in any one year by the ratio between the total number of articles indexed in 1984 (“1985” in this study) and the total number of articles indexed that year. This adjustment technique is analogous to the technique used by economists to transform nominal into real currency amounts, thereby factoring out the effect of inflation’ (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999, p. 717).

3. The adjustment has the same logic as above, but it is performed separately for each of the four categories (management, economics, marketing and practitioners). Therefore, we multiplied the number of trust articles published in the selected management journals in any one year by the ratio between the total number of articles indexed in 1985 in these journals and the total number of articles indexed that year in the same panel of journals. We also applied the same process for the other three categories.

4. One reason in favour of this assumption is that researchers usually consider a longer time horizon when they select the object of their study, given the time needed to develop a research question, collect adequate data and publish meaningful results in top journals. To bet on a volatile fad would then be a very risky option for them.

5. We used Bibexcel software, designed by Professor Olle Persson of the Institute of Information Sciences at the University of Umeå (Sweden).

6. That is, ‘co-citation analysis is based on the distribution frequencies obtained from the citations count, by forming all the pairs possible from the most frequently cited documents and counting all the articles that cite both documents’ (Ramos-Rodríguez & Ruíz-Navarro, 2004, p.984).

7. VOSviewer has been designed by Professor Nees Jan van Eck and Professor Ludo Waltman of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University (The Netherlands).

8. We should add that the very same question should have also received a convincing answer by our colleagues involved in research on other topics, such as leadership or negotiation; ones that already enjoy a greater degree of institutionalisation in comparison with trust research.