Trust and Team Production in Post-Capitalist Society
1999; Volume: 24; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0360-795X
Autores Tópico(s)Cooperative Studies and Economics
ResumoI. INTRODUCTION Clark and Dodge were a team. Dodge financed and managed the corporation; Clark held the secret formula. If Clark had kept the formula to himself, the business would have died with him. Dodge of course did not want this result, and agreed with Clark that if Clark were to reveal the formula to Dodge's son, Dodge would ensure that Clark would have lifetime employment and a secure financial return. Clark kept his end of the bargain; Dodge did not. Dodge not only breached his contract, he betrayed Clark's trust. Clark v. Dodges as a case is irrelevant to this discussion. But the story is not. The story reveals a tale of trust reposed and trust broken in a common enterprise in which the need for each party to rely on the other's commitment and dedication to the business and their loyalty to each other was critical to the success of the venture. While Clark's economic damage could be remedied in an action for breach of contract, his broken trust could not. If the business continued following the dispute, it would continue on very different terms, and with predictable increased costs in the conduct of the business. Trust is fragile; once broken, it is hard to regain.2 And where trust is gone, self-protection, suspicion, and diminished dedication to the enterprise are sure to ensue. In economic terms, the agency costs incurred by the team members-the costs of mutual monitoring if you will-are likely to increase.3 II. THREE LEVELS OF TEAM PRODUCTION: THE SOCIOLOGY OF MODERN ENTERPRISE Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout have opened the door to a new economic way of thinking about corporate governance and the conduct of the corporations' business by introducing their theory of team production.4 But as they well recognize, the tale is not one of economics alone, nor can it be put solely in economic terms.5 To understand corporate organization in terms of team production is not only, as they acknowledge, to conceive of the corporation as a political institution.6 It is also to understand it as a social institution. And to understand it as a social institution requires an investigation into the types of attitudes, norms, and practices that regulate such institutions, that make them hold together and ultimately enable them to achieve their institutional goals. The corporate norm of the moment is self-interest.7 The particular issue that I will investigate in this Article is the attitude, norm, or practice of trust and the role it may play in team production at three different levels: inter-firm cooperation; the governance of a single corporation; and the management of production within a single corporation.8 I will offer a modest pair of hypotheses: that trust is important in team production viewed at any and all of these levels, and that the degree of trust existing at each of these three levels is interdependent on the level of trust at the other levels-that trust or distrust at one level affects trust at all other levels.9 The first hypothesis is strongly suggested by recent work in social psychology, organizational behavior, economics, philosophy, and also by common sense.10 The second hypothesis is to some extent implied by the first, but also requires empirical testing for its verification. These hypotheses also suggest that team production is not a single organizational theory, but provides instead an evaluative matrix for thinking about a variety of forms of production. In making this argument, I will also forward a hypothesis about the nature and practice of trust that is sharply at odds with that prevailing in business studies, but is strongly supported by a vast body of social, psychological, and organizational behavior literature. The idea is that, while economic relations such as employment and intercorporate relations undoubtedly are motivated in strong part by the pursuit of selfinterest and have a calculative dimension, the social nature of business also integrates within these relationships attitudinal and behavioral modes that transcend self-interest, even if they are not present at the beginning of the relationship. …
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