A Rubik's Cube Called Trust
Being aware that the trust concept has a proper 'architectural structure' and each of its building part is present in the literature and could be developed concurrently by the scholars, so that the dialogue among disciples and a real knowledge-building process could be advanced is one of the main conclusion of the paper The Meanings of Trust(s). A Content Analysis on the Diverse Conceptualizations of Trust in Scholarly Research on Business Relationships by Sandro Castaldo, Katia Premazzi, and Fabrizio Zerbini (Marketing Department) published in Journal of Business Ethics (2010,vol.96: 657-668 doi:10.1007/s10551-010-0491-4).
The concept of 'trust' has increasingly proliferated in diverse disciplinary domains, becoming a crucial concept to understand human resource management and job relations, marketing management and inter-organizational dimension as well as the ethical issues rising in business studies. Hence, although scholarly research converges on the argument that trust covers a high importance to drive economic agents to mutually fairness or satisfaction, since it discourages them from norms deviations, a general agreement on its meaning and an accepted definition of this concept do not really exist. The paper by Castaldo, Premazzi, and Zerbini faces this existing problem in the literature trying to interpret and disentangle the facets of the 'trust' concept and reconstruct its evolution, focusing especially on its role in market relationships.
The challenge of this work has been to unbundle the 'trust' concept by following as first a "static" approach followed by a "dynamic" one. According to the first, the authors collected definitions of 'trust' over a 20-year period published in the most influential marketing, strategy, and organization journals. Then, by a content analysis and a thematic analysis, the authors obtained patterns of data, term frequency lists, and a map of lexical associations of co-occurring terms so that they could discern the recurrent building blocks composing the 'trust' definition. Second, employing a network analysis they individuated the roots of the blocks through the reconstruction of trust conceptualization by focusing on citation patterns.
As expected, on one side the results from content analysis show that trust is a multifaceted construct focusing on five recurring "building pieces". They include the subjects (namely the trustor and the trustees indicated by generic or specific terms such as agent, another party or consumer, buyer, seller, but all characterized by competence, integrity, benevolence etc.) and the conceptual nature of their relation, which is generally conceived as willingness, expectation, or attitude. Moreover, the other three blocks are the objects of trust (i.e. actions), its consequences, and the contextual characteristics. It is interesting to notice that in relation to these last aspects, the analysis points out that trust is usually associated to uncertainty but correlated outcomes are predictable and favorable. At the same time, co-occurrence analysis of the diverse facets indicates that they follow stable patterns of combination, for instance, the most likely is the combination of the 'subjects' with the 'conceptual nature' of trust.
On the other side, as final step, the network centrality analysis highlights that only two papers, conceiving trust as "willingness to rely" or "confidence", are very cited and highly connected with the others, which indicates that a few studies are influential and substantially contributed to the process of trust conceptualization by exploiting only two dimensions (subjects and concept nature).
From all this evidence, the authors conclude using a nice metaphor. Although two pieces are constantly highlighted and became central in the evolution of the literature, trust rests a polyhedral concept, similar to a Rubik's cube. Each block has a different face and scholars decide which block, which face of it, and which type of combination to use. It is exactly from the discretion of these choices that heterogeneity emerges across studies.