Trust and Control in Organizational Relations

The phenomenon of trust has recently attracted enormous attention within organizational research and socio-economic theory. Both in intra- and trans-organizational relations, trust has been recognized as a central mechanism in the co-ordination of social actors' expectations and interactions. Without a certain degree of trust, it is almost impossible to establish or maintain successfully organizational relations over a longer period of time. Neither formal contracts nor informal agreements seem to be manageable solely on the basis of open threats of sanctions, and in most cases it even seems impossible to gain a complete knowledge of all the relevant factors that might influence alter ego's future behaviour. Thus, trust is undoubtedly one of the key concepts in the analysis of the internal and external relationships of organizations.

Trust has become a topic of growing interest among academics and a concern within organizational communities, not least because of a perceived sense that change is occurring more rapidly and dramatically. The fear of being 'out of control' renders notions of trust much more central and important in contemporary social relations. However, while concepts of 'trust' and 'control' have been prevalent in academic discourse and organizational practice for generations, this does not mean that they are well understood or unproblematic, as many of the papers in this Special Issue reveal.

Like most concepts, trust and control can be made to mean, at least to some extent, what a theorist or practitioner wants them to mean. They clearly can be, and are, used politically, since trust has an especially laudatory ring to it and, depending on the circumstances, control may be seen more pejoratively, particularly by those who feel that they are victims of control. At the same time, trust is dangerous if it means that caution is thrown to the wind and remaining in control is considered a highly positive way to behave. Consequently, trust and control cannot be taken for granted; their use and misuse and their management and mismanagement, in both theory and practice, are always a case for investigation and analysis. Nor should trust and control be seen to be necessarily on the opposite side of the fence, so to speak. While there are numerous examples in the literature where control chases out trust and situations in which trust seems to remove the necessity for control, there are equally as many exampl es of trust and control being complementary, or going hand in hand. Within this Special Issue, we see several variants of the relationship between trust and control.

Despite what could be seen as an overload of information available to practitioners in the age of electronic communications, organizations are often having to find ways of (inter-) acting on the basis of limited information and without the benefit of tightly monitoring all aspects of their 'internal' and 'external' behaviour. In these circumstances, trust inevitably becomes a central issue in control. More than ever, to avoid getting out of control, organizations need to be able swiftly to develop flexible but reliant relationships. On the one hand, trust merely appears to be a basic precondition of all social interactions within and between organizations. On the other hand, trust is an important -- but unevenly distributed -- resource that cannot only save on transaction costs, but also render strategic action possible in the first place. Thus, trust and control are essential features of organizational life.

However, it would be wrong to assume that trust is always a convenient and simple solution to the problem of how to achieve stability, flexibility and efficiency in organizational relations. Trust can be understood as a means that allows informational gaps to be bridged, but -- uno actu -- it often produces considerable risk, since, unavoidably, it can be betrayed and turn out to be misplaced. While the willingness and capacity to take such risks may vary between individual social actors, it seems that 'blind trust' is anything but a favourable option. In other words, even if trust is the dominant element, it usually occurs as one element in a complicated process of co-ordinating and controlling organizational relations. Notwithstanding this insight, substantial parts of recent organizational literature seem to suggest, rather naively, that business relationships should simply be based on more trust to make them more efficient. However, there is neither empirical evidence nor are there sound theoretical argum ents to support this view. If Lenin was wrong to believe that 'trust is good while control is better', since the reverse (and several other variants) of this are equally plausible, it seems unlikely that the truth of trust arises when it is simply turned on its head. From our point of view, the whole matter appears to be a lot more complicated.

Our aim in compiling this Special Issue is not only to make a substantial and critical input to the current debates on trust and control but, in particular, to question the tendency of some authors to treat these concepts unproblematically. It is time to develop an integrated, balanced and context-sensitive understanding of the social organization of trust, power and control. When we agreed to act as guest editors of this Special Issue, it was not our idea to reduce the study of organizational relations to the analysis of trust. Nor, on the other hand, was it in our minds to simply leap back to the notion of capitalist or managerial interests being in total control of the labour process as well as the quality of boundaries spanning organizational relations. Our intention, rather, was to provide an adequate forum, from a variety of angles, for thoroughly investigating the complex relations between trust and control. Clearly, the reviewing process has limited the diversity to some degree but we 'trust' that wha t is contained here is sufficiently provocative to stimulate further debate.