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Introduction
Trust has emerged as a central theme in international strategy research, particularly since Madhok's influential article published in the Journal of International Business Studies in 1995. That paper laid out the structural and social dimensions of trust, and used trust as an explanatory mechanism for how and why ownership might not translate into control or into perceptions of equity in the context of international joint ventures (IJVs). While Madhok's seminal contribution set the stage for theorizing about the importance of the social dimension in IJVs, the primary focus of that article was trust across organizational boundaries rather than across national boundaries, and the 'international' dimension was more or less relegated to the use of IJVs as the context. A decade later, researchers have still barely begun to explore the related idea that trust may differ systematically across cultures, and thereby present significant challenges for both cross-border and comparative research, as well as practice, in a broad range of international management areas, from market entry and entry modes to IJVs, foreign acquisitions, and the management of subsidiaries, customers, and suppliers overseas. Our specific focus in this paper is on international collaborations, broadly defined.
We make the case for fresh approaches to examine the role of trust in an international context, based on the idea that not only do the levels and degree of trust differ across international borders, but also the very nature of trust can vary in different national contexts. Overall, whether trust is viewed as an etic (culture-general or universal) or as an emic (culture-specific) concept in a cross-border situation (Triandis, 1994; Earley and Mosakowski, 1996), the intersection of different levels or meanings of trust has implications for research into, and the practice of, international collaborations.
Even when one approaches trust from the more common etic view, that is, that the concept means the same thing and is measurable the same way across cultures, differences in the levels of trust across societies, as has been found in several studies (Fukuyama, 1995; Yamagishi et al. , 1998; Dyer and Chu, 2003), raise the possibility that the assumptions of symmetry in trust across partners that have informed much of our discussion of international collaborations may need revisiting. While strategic and structural bases of asymmetry...