Trusting organizations: The institutionalization of trust in interorganizational relationships
从制度化视角重新审视组织间信任的多层次本质，分析信任如何在个体与组织层面转移和制度化，并探讨信任与权力的冲突，对组织研究者和实践者理解组织间信任的构建与传承有参考价值。
Recent research on interorganizational trust has stressed the need to develop a deeper understanding of the multi-level nature of this construct. This article focuses on trust on different analytical levels in an interorganizational context, and on the hitherto underspecified connections between these. Based on an institutionalization approach, it revisits the classic question: (how) can organizations trust each other? To do so, we consider organizations as objects of trust and reappraise the transferral from interpersonal to interorganizational trust in ‘facework’ (Giddens, 1990). We also examine the conflicts and struggles of trust and power that can arise from this process between boundary spanners and their organizational constituents. Next, we consider organizations as subjects of trust in interorganizational relationships. We detail the institutionalization of trust and its reproduction on an organizational level, and how it can be transmitted to new generations of organizational actors, creating path-dependent histories of trust which are truly interorganizational. Taking up the theme of trust and power, we analyse ways in which the institutionalization of trust can entail that of power, too, and examine the implications of this from a critical point of view. We conclude that in interorganizational trust, both the subject and object of trust move across analytical levels, and further, that this movement demonstrates the significance of the organization as a distinct entity that can be both trusted and trusting.