Processes Facilitating Reliance on Trust in Inter-Organizational Networks

While acknowledging networking of firms as an important tool for achieving sustainable competitive advantage for firms to gain access to critical resources beyond the boundaries of their own resources, the author says that much of the research on networks has focused on antecedents of networks, their structure, and their relationship to economic performance but not on the role of trust in governing economic exchanges. The paper therefore offers propositions dealing with issues that arise from reliance on trust in network settings.