Organization Studies Call for Papers – Special Issue on “Trust in Uncertain Times”

Organization Studies is soliciting submissions to its upcoming Special Issue on “Trust in
Uncertain Times.” The Special Issue is guest edited by CTS Director Oliver Schilke, CTS Board
Member Reinhard Bachmann, Kirsimarja Blomqvist, Rekha Krishnan, and Jörg Sydow. The
objective of the Special Issue is to serve as a focal point for theory development on and
empirical insights into the various ways in which trust and uncertainty intersect, with a special
emphasis on the role of institutions in explaining the interface between the two. The deadline
for submissions is June 30, 2023.

For more details, see the Call for Papers.

MORE information:

Motivation
Trust has become one of the most widely researched topics in organization studies (de Jong, et
al., 2017). Often broadly understood as the willingness to make oneself vulnerable to the actions
of another party (Mayer, et al., 1995; Rousseau, et al., 1998), trust plays a central role in virtually
all intra- and inter-organizational interactions. Prior research suggests that trust can alleviate
concerns of opportunism, which reduces inter-partner conflict and transaction costs (Anderson,
et al., 2017; Zaheer, et al., 1998).
Although the study of trust represents a long-standing area of inquiry in organization studies,
several recent technological advancements and geopolitical developments have dramatically
changed the landscape in which trust is embedded, pointing to the need for a re-examination and
extension of earlier accounts. Perhaps most notably, the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution
(Schwab, 2017) is fundamentally altering both economic transactions and social exchange
(Meyer & Quattrone, 2021). Supported by unprecedented degrees of connectivity and processing
of vast amounts of data (Hanelt, et al., 2021), digital technologies provide significant
opportunities to re-design work and develop more open, flexible, and scalable organizing;
however, their fast development and complexity also create considerable uncertainty for
organizations. Digital technologies are transforming the nature of human interactions (Iansiti &
Lakhani, 2020), with profound impacts on organizations, organizing, and the organized (Alaimo,
forthcoming). Specifically, there are reasons to believe that digital technologies may cause trust
to become more institution-based (Lumineau, et al., 2020), with formal mechanisms substituting
for a history of interpersonal exchange as the source of trust. For instance, digital platforms
facilitate trust between strangers (Abrahao, et al., 2017; Kuwabara, 2015; Mikołajewska-Zając,
et al., forthcoming), blockchains can automate agreements with unknown partners (Hsieh, et al.,
2018; Lumineau, et al., 2021), and artificial intelligence (AI) helps in assessing partners’
trustworthiness (Liu, et al., 2014). As a result, trust may become comparatively less personal
(Seidel, 2018; Vanhala, et al., 2011) and more embedded in the institutional environment
(Bachmann & Inkpen, 2011).

2
These technological developments come amidst unprecedented levels of geopolitical uncertainty
and an accelerated decline of trust in institutions (Citrin & Stoker, 2018). Thought of as a relic
from the past, a new cold war seems to be possible again. The Russian invasion of Ukraine
exemplifies how key tenets of the economic world order—such as globalisation, free trade, and
democracy—are more fragile than many assumed. What is more, China has emerged as a new
superpower that is increasingly demanding its share of the global system of power and influence,
leading to tensions and new challenges. The world has been massively shaken by a pandemic
that has demonstrated the instability of trust in the absence of strong institutions (Fancourt, et al.,
2020) while highlighting the critical need for various forms of trust in times of distress (Schilke,
et al., 2021). In parallel, climate change will force humanity to completely rethink our energy
sourcing, with a substantial impact on almost every industry, transportation, and private

consumption, and trust in reliable institutions may represent a critical mechanism supporting pro-
environmental behaviour that could address this challenge (Smith & Mayer, 2018).

Our theories of trust in organizations and processes of organizing need to reflect these
transformative changes. Against this background, we believe it is both important and timely to
reassess the role of trust in intra- and inter-organizational settings to better understand how
relevant contemporary developments affect and are affected by trust. The ongoing disruptive
technological, political, and societal changes that are affecting organizations call for revisiting
the very concept of trust, along with its consequences and the processes that underly its
development, maintenance, and repair.
Objectives
The objective of this Special Issue is to serve as a focal point for theory development on and
empirical insights into the various ways in which trust and uncertainty intersect, with a special
emphasis on the role of institutions in explaining the interface between the two.
Scope
The Special Issue invites submissions that make substantial contributions to our understanding of
trust in organized settings.
We embrace a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. The range of

theoretical orientations may include institutional, structurationist, ethnomethodological, socio-
material, phenomenological, and beyond. Diverse methodological approaches are welcome,

including case studies, experiments, secondary data analyses, and surveys. Purely conceptual
papers, empirical investigations, and combinations of theoretical and empirical research will also
be considered.

Our interest is directed toward trust at various analytical levels (i.e., micro, meso, and macro-
levels), as long as organizations or organizing have a central place in the analysis. At the micro

level, for instance, we find it worthwhile to revisit the role of ‘facework’ (Giddens, 1990),
boundary work (Weber, et al., forthcoming), and rituals (Collins, 2004; Krishnan, et al., 2021) in

3
organizational settings, as such analyses will be clearly geared toward a better understanding of
the relationship between trust and institutional arrangements in uncertain contexts.
Below, we list a total of nine exemplary research topics that we believe will provide useful
springboards for contributions that fit the scope of the special issue. However, submissions do
not have to be limited to these themes.
Potential Research Topics

• Uncertainty and trust. Uncertainty, in its various forms, is inseparably linked to the
  concept of trust. Uncertainty is often thought of as a precondition for trust, in that trust
  tends to be more relevant when uncertainty is high (Deutsch, 1958; Yamagishi, et al.,
  1998). Yet, it is precisely under conditions of high uncertainty when trust is particularly
  difficult to produce, given the trustor’s difficulty to reliably predict the trustee’s level of
  trustworthiness. Thus, many forms of trust production, and in particular institution-based
  trust production mechanisms, are fundamentally aimed at reducing uncertainty
  (Bachmann, 2001; Zucker, 1986). Taken together, these two positions result in an
  intriguing paradox (Krishnan, et al., 2006; Yamagishi, 2011): trust is more important
  when uncertainty is high but its presence reduces this very uncertainty. Given their
  complex interplay, we need greater insight into how different forms of uncertainty and
  trust coevolve and are reciprocally intertwined.
• A broader understanding of institution-based trust. Institutions are central to
  prominent accounts of trust production (Bachmann & Inkpen, 2011; Fuglsang & Jagd,
  2015; Möllering, 2006; Nooteboom, 2007; Owen & Currie, forthcoming; Schilke, et al.,
  2017; Zucker, 1986), but most of these discussions have focused on a rather limited set of

institutions, such as reputation systems and intermediaries. Broadly understood as taken-
for-granted, normatively sanctioned role structures and interaction orders (Ocasio, et al.,

2017), institutions are everywhere (albeit certainly not everything, Ocasio & Gai, 2020).
They exist at several levels of analysis—ranging from dyadic relationships to
organizations, inter-organizational networks, organizational fields, societies, and the
world system. Armed with this insight, we need to expand our repertoire of institutions
that shape the production of trust in a wide variety of contexts. Embracing the contingent
nature of trust production, we need to address the following question: What types of
institutions effectively support or restrict which types of trust in what settings? How is
trust in one institution intertwined with trust in another institution?

• Platform-enabled institutions and trust. It is also important to explore the ways
  institutions may serve as substitutes (rather than bases) for trust by eliminating the
  vulnerability of actors that is often seen as a defining feature of trust (Cook, 2015). One
  case in point are platform-enabled peer-to-peer reputation systems, which have emerged
  as important online institutions shaping exchanges through mechanisms such as peer
  feedback (Bauman & Bachmann, 2017; Kuwabara, 2015). Do such institutional
  arrangements indeed foster trust, or do they safeguard exchange partners against
  opportunism by enforcing cooperation? Under what conditions can platform-based
  institutions give rise to trusting communities?

4

• Micro-level mechanisms of the trust and institutions nexus. Institutions are a key
  source of trust production, but the precise mechanisms through which they create trust are
  largely unknown (Zucker & Schilke, 2020). Why do people trust individuals and
  organizations that are institutionally endorsed? In particular, what role does legitimacy—
  as a key institutional process—play in institution-based trust production? Conversely,
  what are the mechanisms through which trust affects actors’ engagement with
  institutions?
• Trust of meso-level institutions. The notion that institutions can be a target of trust is
  largely uncontroversial; however, the questions of whether and in what ways formal
  institutions—including organizations—have the capacity to place trust in other actors
  have often been ignored (but see Sydow, 2006). We need a better theoretical account for
  elaborating organizations’ capacity to trust that avoids merely anthropomorphizing
  collective entities. In what ways is trust placed by collective actors similar to and
  different from trust placed by individuals? Are the drivers of individuals’ trust
  generalizable to those of organizations’ trust?
• Macro-level institutions and trust. There are substantial differences among institutions
  embedded in distinct national environments (Henisz & Swaminathan, 2008; North,
  1990); similarly, trust is known to differ markedly across nations (Lane & Bachmann,
  1996; Yamagishi & Yamagishi, 1994). Nonetheless, a systematic account of how
  country-level institutions shape trust at the individual and organizational levels is largely
  lacking. Thus, we ask these questions: Which types of regulatory, normative, and
  cognitive institutions at the country level can explain generalized trust? Moreover, is
  there a reciprocal effect of generalized trust on the emergence of country-level
  institutions?
• Institutionalisation of trust. In some cases, the amount of trust placed is the result of a
  deliberate and reflective cognitive process that systematically weighs the pros and cons
  (Hardin, 1992); however, in many other cases, trust represents a rather automatic and
  highly institutionalised process (Kroeger, 2011, 2013; Schilke, et al., 2013). We need to
  know more about this institutionalised side of trust—under what circumstances it is likely
  to dominate and what (positive and negative) consequences it may entail. Particularly
  useful would be a process-oriented approach (e.g., Brattström, et al., 2019; Weber, et al.,
  forthcoming) that identifies relevant stages in the institutionalisation of trust—for
  instance, ranging from habitualisation to objectification to sedimentation (Berger &
  Luckmann, 1966; Tolbert & Zucker, 1996) and deinstitutionalisation (Clemente &
  Roulet, 2015). What are the mechanisms explaining the shift from one stage to another,
  and what conditions affect the pace at which the institutionalisation process may unfold
  in organizations and society as a whole?
• Erosion of trust in institutions. Institutions that enjoy public trust are a bedrock of
  society as we know it, yet trust in institutions is in stark decline, raising concerns about
  the rise of populism and conspiracy theories (Hosking, 2019). The reasons for this
  downward trend have remained largely elusive and require greater elaboration. Going

5
beyond interactions between citizens and the state, trust in public institutions has
important trickle-down effects on trust in private and public organizations. Examining the
nested nature of these trust relations—that is, how trust in institutions is related to trust in
organizations and individuals—provides much potential for approaching trust from a
systems perspective that allows for appreciating the relational complexity in trust
dynamics in society.

• Digital technologies and trust. The decline of trust in institutions has coincided with the
  advent of digital technologies. Several aspects of digital technologies—including
  blockchains, big data, and AI—may have critical implications for trust in organizational
  settings.
  o An increasing number of organizations consider the adoption of blockchains for
  structuring a wide variety of transactions (Lumineau, et al., 2021). In what ways
  and under which conditions do blockchains complement and/or substitute for
  trust? And how do blockchains alter the nature of trust if economic actors are no
  longer directly connected and may not even know each other (Hsieh, et al., 2018)?
  o Big data may come with huge benefits for society but also significant potential for
  misuse (Symons & Alvarado, 2016), and overreliance on big data analytics may
  transform organizations into near total institutions where conformity is enforced
  via constant surveillance (Anteby & Chan, 2018; Newlands, 2021). How may
  trusting communities emerge despite digital surveillance, and how can digital
  surveillance systems be used in a trustworthy fashion?
  o As AI is increasingly taking over decision making within and between
  organizations (Glikson & Woolley, 2020; Kaur, et al., 2022), the trustworthiness
  of this technology becomes an important issue (Shrestha, et al., 2019; Srinivasan
  & Chander, 2021). As a result, we need to reassess the age-old question of when
  opaque technological systems can be (dis)trusted.

Submitting your paper
Please submit your manuscript through the journal’s online submission system
(http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgstudies ). You will need to create a user account if you do not
already have one, and you must select the appropriate Special Issue at the “Manuscript Type”
option. The Special Issue Editors handle all manuscripts in accordance with the journal’s policies
and procedures; they expect authors to follow the journal’s submission guidelines
https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/OSS). You can submit your manuscript for this
Special Issue between June 8 and June 30 2023. For administrative support and general queries,
you may contact Sophia Tzagaraki, Managing Editor of Organization Studies, at
osofficer@gmail.com.

6

References
Abrahao, Bruno, Parigi, Paolo, Gupta, Alok, & Cook, Karen S. (2017). Reputation offsets trust
judgments based on social biases among Airbnb users. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 114, 9848-9853.
Alaimo, Cristina (forthcoming). From people to objects: the digital transformation of fields.
Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406211030654.
Anderson, Shannon W., Dekker, Henri C., & Van den Abbeele, Alexandra (2017). Costly
control: an examination of the trade-off between control investments and residual risk in
interfirm transactions. Management Science, 63, 2163-2180.
Anteby, Michel, & Chan, Curtis K. (2018). A self-fulfilling cycle of coercive surveillance:
workers’ invisibility practices and managerial justification. Organization Science, 29,
247-263.
Bachmann, Reinhard (2001). Trust, power and control in trans-organizational relations.
Organization Studies, 22, 337-363.
Bachmann, Reinhard, & Inkpen, Andrew C. (2011). Understanding institutional-based trust
building processes in inter-organizational relationships. Organization Studies, 32, 281-
301.
Bauman, Antonina, & Bachmann, Reinhard (2017). Online consumer trust: trends in research.
Journal of Technology Management & Innovation, 12, 68-79.
Berger, Peter L., & Luckmann, Thomas (1966). The social construction of reality: a treatise in
the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Brattström, Anna, Faems, Dries, & Mähring, Magnus (2019). From trust convergence to trust
divergence: trust development in conflictual interorganizational relationships.
Organization Studies, 40, 1685-1711.
Citrin, Jack, & Stoker, Laura (2018). Political trust in a cynical age. Annual Review of Political
Science, 21, 49-70.
Clemente, Marco, & Roulet, Thomas J. (2015). Public opinion as a source of
deinstitutionalization: a “spiral of silence” approach. Academy of Management Review,
40, 96-114.
Collins, Randall (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cook, Karen S. (2015). Institutions, trust, and social order. In Edward J. Lawler, Shane Thye &
Jeongkoo Yoon (Eds), Order on the edge of chaos: social psychology and the problem of
social order (pp. 125-144). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
de Jong, Bart A., Kroon, David P., & Schilke, Oliver (2017). The future of organizational trust
research: a content-analytic synthesis of scholarly recommendations and review of recent
developments. In Paul A. M. Van Lange, Bettina Rockenbach & Toshio Yamagishi
(Eds), Trust in social dilemmas (pp. 173-194). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deutsch, Morton (1958). Trust and suspicion. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2, 265-279.
Fancourt, Daisy, Steptoe, Andrew, & Wright, Liam (2020). The Cummings effect: politics, trust,
and behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet, 396, 464-465.
Fuglsang, Lars, & Jagd, Søren (2015). Making sense of institutional trust in organizations:
bridging institutional context and trust. Organization, 22, 23-39.
Giddens, Anthony (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.

7
Glikson, Ella, & Woolley, Anita Williams (2020). Human trust in artificial intelligence: review
of empirical research. Academy of Management Annals, 14, 627-660.
Hanelt, André, Bohnsack, René, Marz, David, & Antunes Marante, Cláudia (2021). A systematic
review of the literature on digital transformation: insights and implications for strategy
and organizational change. Journal of Management Studies, 58, 1159-1197.
Hardin, Russell (1992). The street-level epistemology of trust. Analyse und Kritik, 14, 152-176.
Henisz, Witold, & Swaminathan, Anand (2008). Institutions and international business. Journal
of International Business Studies, 39, 537-539.
Hosking, Geoffrey (2019). The decline of trust in government. In Masamichi Sasaki (Ed), Trust
in contemporary society (pp. 77-103). Leiden: Brill.
Hsieh, Ying-Ying, Vergne, Jean-Philippe, Anderson, Philip, Lakhani, Karim, & Reitzig, Markus
(2018). Bitcoin and the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations. Journal of
Organization Design, 7, 14.
Iansiti, Marco, & Lakhani, Karim R. (2020). Competing in the age of AI: strategy and leadership
when algorithms and networks run the world. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.
Kaur, Davinder, Uslu, Suleyman, Rittichier, Kaley J., & Durresi, Arjan (2022). Trustworthy
artificial intelligence: a review. ACM Computing Surveys, 55, Article 39.
Krishnan, Rekha, Cook, Karen S., Kozhikode, Rajiv, & Schilke, Oliver (2021). An interaction
ritual theory of social resource exchange: evidence from a Silicon Valley accelerator.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 66, 659-710.
Krishnan, Rekha, Martin, Xavier, & Noorderhaven, Niels G. (2006). When does trust matter to
alliance performance? Academy of Management Journal, 49, 894-917.
Kroeger, Frens (2011). Trusting organizations: the institutionalization of trust in
interorganizational relationships. Organization, 19, 743-763.
Kroeger, Frens (2013). How is trust institutionalized? Understanding collective and long-term
trust orientations. In Reinhard Bachmann & Akbar Zaheer (Eds), Handbook of advances
in trust research (pp. 261-284). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Kuwabara, Ko (2015). Do reputation systems undermine trust? Divergent effects of enforcement
type on generalized trust and trustworthiness. American Journal of Sociology, 120, 1390-
1428.
Lane, Christel, & Bachmann, Reinhard (1996). The social constitution of trust: supplier relations
in Britain and Germany. Organization Studies, 17, 365-395.
Liu, Xin, Datta, Anwitaman, & Lim, Ee-Peng (2014). Computational trust models and machine
learning: CRC Press.
Lumineau, Fabrice , Schilke, Oliver, & Wang, Wenqian (2020)’. Organizational trust in the age
of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: shifts in the nature, production, and targets of trust.
http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.20789.50401
Lumineau, Fabrice, Wang, Wenqian, & Schilke, Oliver (2021). Blockchain governance—a new
way of organizing collaborations? Organization Science, 32, 500-521.
Mayer, Roger C., Davis, James H., & Schoorman, F. David (1995). An integrative model of
organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20, 709-734.
Meyer, Renate E., & Quattrone, Paolo (2021). Living in a post-truth world? Research, doubt and
organization studies. Organization Studies, 42, 1373-1383.
Mikołajewska-Zając, Karolina, Márton, Attila, & Zundel, Mike (forthcoming). Couchsurfing
with Bateson: An ecology of digital platforms. Organization Studies.
https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406211058628.

8

Möllering, Guido (2006). Trust: reason, routine, reflexivity. Oxford: Elsevier.
Newlands, Gemma (2021). Algorithmic surveillance in the gig economy: the organization of
work through Lefebvrian conceived space. Organization Studies, 42, 719-737.
Nooteboom, Bart (2007). Social capital, institutions and trust. Review of Social Economy, 65, 29-
53.
North, Douglass C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Ocasio, William, & Gai, Shelby L. (2020). Institutions: everywhere but not everything. Journal
of Management Inquiry, 29, 262-271.
Ocasio, William, Thornton, Patricia H., & Lounsbury, Michael (2017). Advances to the
institutional logics perspective. In Royston Greenwood, Christine Oliver & Thomas B.
Lawrence (Eds), The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 509-531).
London: Sage.
Owen, Gareth, & Currie, Graeme (forthcoming). Beyond the crisis: trust repair in an
interorganizational network. Organization Studies.
https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406211031732.
Rousseau, Denise M., Sitkin, Sim B., Burt, Ronald S., & Camerer, Colin (1998). Not so different
after all: a cross-discipline view of trust. Academy of Management Review, 23, 393-404.
Schilke, Oliver, Reimann, Martin, & Cook, Karen S. (2013). Effect of relationship experience on
trust recovery following a breach. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110,
15236-15241.
Schilke, Oliver, Reimann, Martin, & Cook, Karen S. (2021). Trust in social relations. Annual
Review of Sociology, 47, 239-259.
Schilke, Oliver, Wiedenfels, Gunnar, Brettel, Malte, & Zucker, Lynne G. (2017).
Interorganizational trust production contingent on product and performance uncertainty.
Socio-Economic Review, 15, 307-330.
Schwab, Klaus (2017). The fourth industrial revolution. New York, NY: Penguin Random
House.
Seidel, Marc-David L. (2018). Questioning centralized organizations in a time of distributed
trust. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27, 40-44.
Shrestha, Yash Raj, Ben-Menahem, Shiko M., & von Krogh, Georg (2019). Organizational
decision-making structures in the age of artificial intelligence. California Management
Review, 61, 66-83.
Smith, E. Keith, & Mayer, Adam (2018). A social trap for the climate? Collective action, trust
and climate change risk perception in 35 countries. Global Environmental Change, 49,
140-153.
Srinivasan, Ramya, & Chander, Ajay (2021). Biases in AI systems. Communications of the
ACM, 64, 44-49.

Sydow, Jörg (2006). How can systems trust systems? A structuration perspective on trust-
building in inter-organizational relations. In Reinhard Bachmann & Akbar Zaheer (Eds),

Handbook of trust research (pp. 377-392). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Symons, John, & Alvarado, Ramón (2016). Can we trust big data? Applying philosophy of
science to software. Big Data & Society, 3, 2053951716664747.
Tolbert, Pamela S., & Zucker, Lynne G. (1996). The institutionalization of institutional theory.
In Stewart. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy & Walter R. Nord (Eds), Handbook of organization
studies (pp. 175-190). London: Sage.

9
Vanhala, Mika, Puumalainen, Kaisu, & Blomqvist, Kirsimarja (2011). Impersonal trust.
Personnel Review, 40, 485-513.
Weber, Clarissa E., Kortkamp, Christian, Maurer, Indre, & Hummers, Eva (forthcoming).
Boundary work in response to professionals’ contextual constraints: micro-strategies in
interprofessional collaboration. Organization Studies.
https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406221074135.
Yamagishi, Toshio (2011). Trust: the evolutionary game of mind and society. Tokyo: Springer.
Yamagishi, Toshio, Cook, Karen S., & Watabe, Motoki (1998). Uncertainty, trust, and
commitment formation in the United States and Japan. American Journal of Sociology,
104, 165-194.
Yamagishi, Toshio, & Yamagishi, Midori (1994). Trust and commitment in the United States
and Japan. Motivation and Emotion, 18, 129-166.
Zaheer, Akbar, McEvily, Bill, & Perrone, Vincenzo (1998). Does trust matter? Exploring the
effects of interorganizational and interpersonal trust on performance. Organization
Science, 9, 123-141.
Zucker, Lynne G. (1986). Production of trust: institutional sources of economic structure, 1840-

1920. Research in Organizational Behavior, 8, 53-111.
      Zucker, Lynne G., & Schilke, Oliver (2020). Towards a theory of micro-institutional processes:
      forgotten roots, links to social-psychological research, and new ideas. Research in the
      Sociology of Organizations, 65B, 371-389.