Trust in Online Customer-Firm Interaction

Trust is a key element in developing customer-firm relationships in the virtual marketplace. The peculiarities of the online setting, however, threaten firms’ capability to exploit opportunities derived from such environments. This can lead to customers mostly using the online setting as an information source rather than as a place to conduct transactions. Trust is a key antecedent of online transactions. In this chapter, the authors focus on trust’s role in the virtual marketplace by reviewing a series of relevant studies and proposing directions for future research.

Anonymous Workblogging and Organizational Coping Strategies

In recent years, the rise of blogging has led to debate about whether employees should be free to talk about their employers on the Internet, and whether they should be able to blog on company time. Several high-profile cases of fired bloggers between 2002 and 2006, drew attention to important labor and civil rights issues that led to debate among human resources and employment law experts in the mainstream media. The negative publicity surrounding the cases of fired bloggers has given rise to an alternative management strategy – a cautious embrace of blogging by employers, who saw the practice as a potential opportunity for marketing and professional development. However, efforts by bloggers to retain their right to blog anonymously signify continuing tensions, revealing the contradictions between workplace surveillance and an “enlightened” management doctrine based on openness and trust, indicating a refusal by some employees to align their blogging endeavors with the interests of their employer. This chapter examines the workblogging phenomenon as an intersection of organizations, technology, and trust, and makes some tentative connections between Guerra et al.’s (2003) concept of “trust-tension” and the critical management literature.

Internet Trust as a Specific Form of Technology Trust and its Influence on Online Banking Adoption

The construct of trust is important for online banking, because it underlines what is conducive to an enabling online banking environment. This chapter reports on an empirical study of 381 bank customers in Austria that investigates the role of Internet trust as a specific form of technology trust in the context of Internet banking. Furthermore the impact of propensity to trust as a facet of personality on Internet trust is investigated. The findings stress the importance of Internet trust as a determinant of consumer attitudes toward Internet banking and its adoption. In addition, the results show that propensity to trust is a determinant not only for trust in interpersonal relationships but also for trust in technological systems.

Millennials, Social Networking, and Trust

Trust in exchanges is an important concept in business and has become of topic of some interest in e-commerce. Substantial work has been done on how institutional mechanisms, technology, word-of-mouth, and numerous other variables affect trust in a website and potential customers’ willingness to conduct business there. This study continues that line of research by considering how the millennial generation perceives the trustworthiness of three types of online sites: a retailer, an auction site, and a social networking site. Little work has been done on whether social network sites have more or less trust than other types of websites and what aspects of trust are affected. Given the broad trend toward utilizing these social network sites for commercial purposes, it makes sense to assess how targeted users view and interact with them. This study presents preliminary data on all of these issues, suggesting that there do appear to be differences between social network sites and more traditional online vendors.

Technology

The country-level determinants of generalized trust that usually command the most research are ethnic homogeneity, institutional performance, civic culture, and economic development. Despite the popularity and insight of this research, there is little quantitative empirical evidence that explores the impact of technology—a necessary and exogenous condition for many of these determinants—on generalized trust. In this chapter, technology measures from the World Bank are combined with a generalized trust measure from the World Values Survey and other country-level predictors from various data sources to test two competing theories of generalized trust across 57 countries. One theory, new institutional economics, argues that technology will yield formal institutions, which structure incentives and reduce uncertainty, that, in turn, increase generalized trust. The other perspective, overjustification and crowding theory, argues that actors constrained by extrinsic motivators, such as technology and institutional incentives, will attribute trust to the incentive rather than to the individual, and generalized trust, as a result, will decrease. Structural equation model results confirm the new institutional economics claim that the positive effects of technology on generalized trust are positively mediated by formal institutions. The authors conclude by outlining various managerial implications and directions for future research.

The Role of Trust in Interactive High Tech Work

With regard to the spread of self-presentations of individuals and small firms on the internet, this chapter inquires into the role of trust and trust-building techniques of freelance web-designers in spreading the application of high-technology to end-consumers. Engendering relationships of trust is a predominant necessity for the freelancers in a market lacking structural assurances, making that group an ideal object of study for trust-enhancing strategies in client interaction. Methodologically, it proposes a way to study the adaptation of entrepreneurs to the requirements of trust, enlarging the focus on dramaturgic action of the trust-taker in exchange situation to markets for cooperation, in which cooperative experiences are a major trust-building factor. The analysis suggests that in those markets dramaturgical action is not only directed at clients but also at the referral networks in which they are embedded in, having important repercussions for the negotiating power of freelancers.

Social Trust as Seed

This chapter examines the role the mobile phone plays in the poor urban youth’s social life. This chapter argues that one can better grasp their social life by looking through the new technology lens. It seeks to examine the collective-mediated learning, sharing, and experimenting with the emergent patterns of trust in the social context. The emergence of three types of social trust genres that correspond respectively to the stage of domestication by the poor urban youth are described: social trust as a seed for peer-to-peer learning, social trust as a seed for group underground sharing, and social trust as a seed for fueling the experimental spirit. It concludes that social trust functions as a seed for increasing positive interdependent towards others play an important role in nurturing trust among the poor urban youth as they domesticate new media technology, such as the mobile phone, into their everyday lives.

Trust in Technology

The notion of trust in technology has recently flourished through translating what researchers know about interpersonal trust into the realm of technology. What has been missing from this movement is a sociological perspective on trust in technology, an understanding of how the social and cultural framework in which one is embedded can shape outcomes like trust. To fill this void, the author develops a framework for understanding how these macrostructures can become imported into the local context (e.g., the workplace) to influence trust in technology. Specifically, this framework takes a status value approach (Berger & Fisek, 2006) to explain how the status of social actors (e.g., people, organizations) can transfer to the technologies to which they are associated and be used as a basis for trust. The author focuses the discussion of this theory around implications for technology adoption and offers suggestions for future applications of the theory in other domains.

The Savory Deviant Delight

Massively Multiplayer Online worlds (MMOs), like World of Warcraft (WoW) have been established as increasingly prominent, technologically-based communities. Because MMOs require high-levels of cooperative activity, and are organized in an anonymous, virtual space, the establishment of a normative order among participants is essential. Trust is a key component of that normative order. This study examines trust and normative order among WoW game-players, and is based upon an ethnographic analysis of the gaming community. The results identify four primary techniques of normative order maintenance that are both formally institutionalized in the game, and informally organized within the player community itself. Trust is identified as a key resource through which players manage the uncertainties of their technologically-based community, and maintain the integrity of WoW’s normative order. The study concludes that the construction of a normative order within online worlds is crucial and that trust plays an important role in their stability.

A Framework for Studying the Problem of Trust in Online Settings

The chapter contributes to the conceptual foundations of research on trust in online settings by introducing a framework of the preconditions and constitutive elements of trust. Moving beyond simplistic, narrow, and vague applications of the notion of trust, researchers are enabled by this framework to recognize when trust is relevant and to address a broader range of elements and processes involved in the social constitution of trust. By way of illustration and differentiation, the authors discuss trust issues in online marketplaces and online communities in greater detail. An important message from the chapter is that the problem of trust does not only occur in specific activities on a particular website but, more importantly, through the interconnectedness of the websites used and the development of complex online biographies. Accordingly, the authors advocate research methods that are not only are well-grounded conceptually but also geared praxeologically toward the actual experience and enactment of trust.