In this chapter, I suggest that interorganisational trust should be studied neither in terms of micro or macro phenomena, nor just as singular concepts, since trust between multiple organisations will involve a complex web of interactions between individuals representing the organisations that are attempting to build trust, which current research methods currently struggle to address. Therefore, rather than viewing trust as a thing that exists as a fixed construct based on specific constructs or levels of trust, one might conceive that interorganisational trust-building and the various aspects of trust described in this chapter will be both created and shaped by human behaviour and determined by the actions or beliefs of the trustee or trustor and will represent ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity organised around shared understanding’ (Schatzki 2001: 2).
Considering trust from a practice perspective aims to study relationships situated and socially accomplished through the actions and interactions of multiple actors. Such a perspective builds on Weick’s (1979) distinction that social life is better understood using gerunds and verbs instead of static, reified concepts. Central to such an approach is the notion that social life ‘is an ongoing production and thus emerges through people’s recurrent actions’ as it focuses on dynamics, relations and enactment (Feldman & Orlikowski 2011: 1240).
In conclusion, a practice theory approach to building and maintaining trust offers four unique angles to trust research. First, a practice ontology rejects dualisms, such as micro-macro, subject – object, theory-action, body-mind. In trust research this is an important reorientation of thinking and addresses the challenge that we currently face in the trust literature between micro and macro conceptualisations of trust (Dietz and Den Hartog, 2006; Bachmann et al., 2015) where levels of analysis are considered as discrete (Fulmer & Gelfrand, 2012), described as different categories (Schoorman et al., 2007) or as dualistic (Lewicki et al., 2006) and provides new opportunities to consider trust beyond levels of analysis. ‘Individual and collective social agency is therefore constituted through assembling, aligning and stabilising patterns of relationships so that any form of social order is in fact the outcome of observable instances of ordering’ (Nicolini, 2009: 1394) rather than existing at a level of analysis or as a static, reified concept. From this follows that the aim of studying interorganisational trust in this way is concerned with ‘tracing the associations between human agency and the structures it creates and studying the effects that the resulting arrangements make in the world’ (Nicolini, 2012: 32). This provides an
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opportunity to revaluate our approach to studying trust-building that does not build up levels of analysis (See Bachmann et al., 2015) but rather considers the micro and macro in a state of mutual constitution (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011).
Second, a practice approach focuses on the centrality of everyday actions as consequential. Activity, performance and work create and perpetuate all aspects of social life (Nicolini, 2012) as ongoing, routinized and recurrent accomplishments. Conceptualising interorganisational trust as both a process curated by the individual and a process that shapes the individual acknowledges that the individual is at once an agent able to shape the environment of their organisation and the interorganisational system they exist within, as well as an actor bound up in the routines, practices and cultures of their organisation and the interorganisational system. Therefore, the everyday actions in the word and the deed can be understood to provide insight into the various practices that take place as a whole range of different individuals and organisations interact to rebuild trust in the UK banking sector whilst also rebuilding trust amongst themselves and in their own organisations. It is only once we appreciate the set of practices involves ongoing, routinized and recurrent accomplishments that we can ask what sort of ability individuals have to build interorganisational trust. Thus, rather than considering concepts like control, knowledge or ability as existing in a reified sense, a practice perspective on these characteristics or concepts that have been linked to trust, would consider how knowledgeability (or control etc) is accomplished and perpetuated (or altered) in everyday actions. Using this approach makes trust public and visible, manifest in what people do, rather than an idea or belief internal to an individual.
Third, the practices of building trust become the central unit of analysis. Practice as a unit of analysis takes account of bodies, people, histories, knowledge, rules, objects, goals that work together to enact practice. In relation to trust, this suggests that the perceptions, reasons and goals established in and through a practice wherein trust is being built can be just as important as the bodily movements or actions that are performed. It also highlights that knowledge – for example regarding someone’s ability or competence – is not the property of an individual but is formed through practical understanding, ways of proceeding as well as the material environment and that actors are ‘capable of shifting from one form of trust to another’ (Nicolini, 2009: 1396), using a particular form of trust sooner than expected or ‘negotiating their strategies of trust as circumstances change’ (Ibid.). The role of space is therefore an important consideration, since the physicality of the space, the material objects that the actors interact with, the histories and shared knowledge of a space
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will influence the possibilities and propensity for trust-building. This suggests that the perceptions, reasons and goals established in and through a practice wherein trust is being built can be just as important as the bodily movements or actions that are performed. It also highlights that knowledge – for example regarding someone’s ability or competence – is not the property of an individual but is formed through practical understanding, ways of proceeding as well as the material environment they interact with.
Fourth, practice theory posits that activities are not accomplished by discreet entities, such as individuals, knowledge and objects. Therefore, the analytic task, again, is to identify ‘concerted scenes of action’ (Nicolini, 2009: 1394). Interorganisational trust-building considered in this way is constantly evolving and shaped by the actions and reactions of the trusting parties using practices and routines adopted over time that best align their individual and organisational needs with their needs in the present. This ontology begins to make sense of the challenges of interorganisational trust-building where trust-building is taking place between multiple individual actors, at multiple levels and between organisations with agendas that are both at once competing and aligned, and shaped by the encounters and beliefs that have both created and have been formed by the structures within which the organisations operate. This confirms a view that interorganisational trust is neither micro nor macro, nor interpersonal or organisational, but as the result of the dynamic relationship of mutual constitution co-created in relationships (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011). Thinking about interorganisational trust in this way will provide an opportunity to explore the five aspects of trust discussed in this chapter for instance without limiting them to either a level or orientation to the trusting parties but acknowledging trust is a collaborative process that exists as a result of a relationship not because of the construct.
Thus, practices such as building trust, are mutually constituted by the multiple entities and actors enacting them, rather than cognitive reasoning. Individuals become orientated to one another, as well as rules, histories etc, through an ongoing process of adjusting (Barnes, 2001) as they work to earn or learn trust. How an individual might respond to another, monitoring or adjusting their actions to accomplish a goal, suggests that an examination of trust as practice needs to account for collective level activities, and interdependent social agents.
Each of the aspects of trust discussed in this chapter might therefore exist for a moment, change with time, develop into something new depending on the actor’s own motivations and interpretation of their own actions and those around them.
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Acknowledgement of the individual’s role as an actor that has the ability to both to ‘enact trust and influence structures’ (Meyerson, Weick & Kramer, 1996) whilst also recognising they remain ‘suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’ (Geertz, 1973: 44) presents an opportunity to address the challenge of studying the complexities of the interorganisational trust-building described in the previous chapter and an understanding about how the aspects of trust discussed in this chapter might be used to provide further insight into interorganisational trust-building not as constructs to provide positivistic evidence, or to test for the presence or absence of a type of trust, but as heuristics for understanding the complexities of the social reality of the interorganisational environment in which trust-building is being attempted.