Towards a cross‐cultural typology of trust in B2B food trade

Purpose – This paper aims to develop a hierarchical typology of trust elements for business‐to‐business trade among European companies in the food sector.Design/methodology/approach – The paper integrates desk research literature study and a qualitative survey of food industry companies. An extensive literature review about inter‐organizational trust lays a foundation for designing a draft typology based on previous studies, with special attention paid to the influence of culture. Fine‐tuning and validation of the typology is achieved through an exploratory field study based on 18 qualitative in‐depth interviews with key informants in five EU countries, involving practitioners from the fresh fruit and vegetable, grain, meat and olive supply chains.Findings – A detailed typology of trust is developed. Although it is highly specific to the food industry, it is designed to be neutral to culture and sector, thus allowing the identification of differences in culture when dealing with trust building elements in...

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