Article
Details
Citation
Siebert S, Martin G, Bozic B & Docherty I (2015) Looking 'beyond the factory gates': towards more pluralist and radical approaches to intraorganizational trust research. Organization Studies, 36 (8), pp. 1033-1062. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840615580010
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to suggest new avenues for trust research by critiquing the extant literature on this topic. We analyse the most influential research on intraorganizational trust from the perspective of a classic industrial sociology framework from the 1970s – Alan Fox’s work on frames of reference and trust dynamics. Our analysis of intraorganizational trust studies leads us to three conclusions. First, the large majority of intraorganizational trust research has strong unitarist underpinnings, which support a managerial agenda
that is potentially detrimental to employees’ (and indeed managers’) long-term interests. Second, most of this research fails to explain how trust in organizations is embedded in societal and field-level institutions, hence it would benefit from looking ‘beyond the factory gates’ for a more complete understanding of trust dynamics in organizations. In this connection, we argue that Fox’s pluralist and radical perspectives, which are under-represented in intraorganizational trust research, could provide new lines of inquiry by locating internal trust relations in a wider institutional context. Third, Fox’s explanation of how low and high trust dynamics in organizations are embedded in wider society may help address the concerns about undersocialized, endogenous explanations and open the way for structure-agency analyses of building, maintaining and repairing intraorganizational trust.
Keywords
Alan Fox; frames of reference; industrial sociology; organizational trust; trust dynamics
Journal
Organization Studies: Volume 36, Issue 8
Status | Published |
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Funders | University of Glasgow |
Publication date | 31/08/2015 |
Publication date online | 07/05/2015 |
Date accepted by journal | 01/03/2015 |
URL | http://hdl.handle.net/1893/29705 |
ISSN | 0170-8406 |
eISSN | 1741-3044 |
People (1)
Dean of Institute for Advanced Studies