Trust is Good, Most of All within Organizations

At the base of any human relation, the issue of trust is particularly critical for the management of organizations and facing it has become a more and more urgent priority: at least according to the hundred international academics and researchers who arranged to meet on June 14^th and 15^th in Bocconi to discuss it.

The 6^th Workshop on Trust Within and Between Organizations, organized by First International Network on Trust (FINT) under the patronage of SDA Bocconi and European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM), welcomed seminars and round tables on trust management, a discipline aimed to apply marketing strategies in order to develop trust relationships between organizations.

Thanks to the participation of experts from different disciplines, the various sessions of the workshop could deal with the subject in a multidisciplinary perspective and within a variety of contexts: scholars of political science faced the theme of trust in governments and institutions, management researchers focused on trust within and between organizations, marketing experts investigated consumers' trust in brands and distribution firms. Some studies also analyzed the multi-cultural and cross-country dimension of trust, highlighting the different attitude to trust and the different reliability of individuals from different countries, while some interactive workshops on subjects as 'Teaching trust to students' or 'Organizational trust interventions' provided the opportunity to skip from theory to managerial practice.

Enthusiastic the local organizers of the workshop, Sandro Castaldo and Fabrizio Zerbini (Department of Marketing): "In contrast to other EIASM events", Zerbini explains, "the 6^th Workshop on Trust recorded a growth in the number and quality of participants". "Apart from the scientific leadership, shared with Universitat Konstanz", Zerbini says, "Bocconi has been particularly appreciated for the welcome reserved to its guests and for the organization of the event", which scheduled a rich program of social meetings.

"The workshop has underlined the increasing need of trust which emerges from our economy and from organizations", states Castaldo who, former director of SDA Bocconi Marketing area, is FINT member from the first hours and now is part of the new board, chaired by Antoinette Weibel (Universitat Liechtenstein), "most of all in this moment of crisis and increasing uncertainty".

First International Network on Trust, the international community of reference for the studies on management of trust, established in occasion of the first bi-annual workshop held in Amsterdam in 2002, in the 10 years of its existence has welcomed 350 members from over 20 countries.