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

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -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 different sectors in the food supply chain. Research limitations/implications -Since the buyer's perspective is adopted in this paper, further research is needed to validate the typology on the seller side. The typology developed here must also be tested in practice, for instance within a descriptive research quantitative study, aimed at quantifying the relative importance of the different trust elements. Practical implications -The typology stimulates the consideration of cross-cultural or cross-sector differences in the salience of trust attributes and its construction process confirms that reputation management is an extremely important determinant of success or failure. It can serve as a checklist for any company that is interested in improving its relationships with suppliers or buyers. Originality/value -The paper adds to the body of knowledge about inter-organizational trust, providing researchers with a useful tool for conducting experimental research on trust creation mechanisms.

Trust Based Relationships between Family Members and Long-Term Employees of Family-Owned SMEs

“…Hofstede, Fritz, Canavari, Oosterkamp, and Sprundel (2010) conducted a study to develop a detailed trust typology and argued that trust is a culture-specific phenomenon because the societies are different from one another. Erdem and Aytemur (2014) conducted a study on the Turkish business organizations and demonstrated that the cultural tendencies in a trust relationship might change the expectations of parties.…”

Berry Supply Chain Management: An Empirical Approach

“…Formalization of these relationships, however, is at a developmental stage and the general situation in fresh produce partnership is informality, or at best loose agreement, as opposed to binding contractual and financial agreement [4,9]. The informality of the relationships between fresh produce supply chain actors triggers the use of other contract-based coordination mechanisms in order to ensure the smooth functioning of the relationship [9,11,12]. As a result, trust and commitment seem to be key regulators of relationships within the fresh produce supply chain; however, the complexity of food supply chain business partnerships makes it critical to pay attention to the many facets that are involved in the trust that each part places in the other, which usually involve the implementation of quality control systems along the chain [11].…”

“…The informality of the relationships between fresh produce supply chain actors triggers the use of other contract-based coordination mechanisms in order to ensure the smooth functioning of the relationship [9,11,12]. As a result, trust and commitment seem to be key regulators of relationships within the fresh produce supply chain; however, the complexity of food supply chain business partnerships makes it critical to pay attention to the many facets that are involved in the trust that each part places in the other, which usually involve the implementation of quality control systems along the chain [11]. In this way, trust mechanisms are reinforced with quality control over the business models and products supplied by any upstream supplier, downstream customers, or logistic service firm.…”

“…However, research on food supply chain management is still scarce, fragmented, and has focused on the use of operational tools by individual actors (e.g., balanced scorecard, budgeting, target cost) instead of establishing strategic management mechanisms to gain cooperation along the chain [9]. As a result, there is a lack of knowledge on the role of different management control mechanisms to build and maintain collaborative relationships among supply chain partners [9] in order to develop a stronger marketing position and, finally, to gain bargaining power and reduce imbalances in food supply chains [5,[11][12][13][14].…”

“…However, formalization of collaborative supply chain relationships is at a developmental stage, so the general situation in fresh produce partnerships is "informality, or at best loose agreement, as opposed to binding control and financial agreement" [4] (p. 60). While such informality triggers the use of traditional control management mechanisms [9,11,12], informal management mechanisms, such as trust, commitment, and quality control, could have a central role in coordinating close relationships within the fresh produce supply chain [7,11].…”