Exploring the Role of the Law in Repairing Interorganizational Trust

Trust scholars have highlighted both the extent to which the topic of trust repair needs to be a high priority in research agendas and the fact that the role of institutions in trust repair is not yet sufficiently investigated, especially from an empirical perspective. In this article, the authors used an in-depth case study to explore the extent and the circumstances in which a law is interpreted by key stakeholders as contributing to dealing with distrust and/or repairing trust in cases where the latter has been undermined. Analysis of qualitative data extracted largely from sixty-one semi-structured interviews that investigated the perceptions of five groups of informants (buyers, suppliers, technology initiators, key institution representatives and lawyers) enabled us to understand of the conditions in which the law can contribute to trust repair. Our results extend research on trust by showing that the law’s embeddedness, the law’s content and the law’s application are dimensions perceived by actors as influencing the law’s ability to repair trust/deal with distrust by limiting trust-violation events, while trust repair is perceived as an independent dynamic construct that can emerge after distrust has been dealt with.