In Cloud We Trust? Co-opting Occupational Gatekeepers to Produce Normalized Trust in Platform-Mediated Interorganizational Relationships
In Cloud We Trust? Co-opting Occupational Gatekeepers to Produce Normalized Trust in Platform-Mediated Interorganizational Relationships
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我们信任云吗？
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发表时间：
2021
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通讯作者：
Arvind Karunakaran
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Arvind Karunakaran
组织间信任在促进业务关系，特别是组织采用新服务方面起着重要作用。先前的研究表明，组织间的信任发展时，委托人有足够的信心，受托人的服务的可靠性。然而，可靠性故障也是服务提供中不可避免的一部分。在基于平台的服务中，这种细分尤为突出和明显。然而，基于平台的服务继续被组织客户采用和使用。尽管这些服务的可靠性不一致，但其采用和使用的增加提出了以下问题。信任在平台中介的组织间关系中是如何产生的？为了研究这个问题，我对一家云计算平台提供商及其客户进行了为期20个月的实地研究，重点关注可靠性故障后的信任生产实践。在这里，我描述了客户对平台不一致的可靠性的担忧，这种不一致的可靠性阻碍了组织间信任的发展。然后，我确定了平台提供商制定的信任工作的四种做法，以解决其中的一些问题，并在客户组织中选择负责技术采用决策的职业守门人。在此之后，我描述了这些职业守门人如何以及为什么进行合理化工作，以合理化继续使用该平台，尽管其不一致的可靠性。信任工作和合理化工作共同促进了组织间信任的共同生产，通过将可靠性故障规范化为“一切照旧”的事件。综合这些发现，我开发了一个正常化模型的信任生产，并讨论了正常化的信任的影响，在数字经济中的平台介导的组织间关系。
Interorganizational trust plays an important role in facilitating business relationships, especially for the organizational adoption of new services. Prior research suggests that interorganizational trust develops when the trustor has adequate confidence in the reliability of the trustee’s services. Nevertheless, reliability breakdowns are also an inevitable part of service provisioning. Such breakdowns are especially prominent and visible in the context of platform-based services. Yet platform-based services continue to be adopted and used by organizational customers. This increased adoption and use of such services despite their inconsistent reliability pose the following question. How is trust produced in platform-mediated interorganizational relationships? To examine this question, I conducted a 20-month field study of a cloud computing platform provider and its customers, focusing on the practices of trust production in the wake of reliability breakdowns. Here, I describe customer concerns about the platform’s inconsistent reliability that hampered the development of interorganizational trust. I then identify four practices of trust work enacted by the platform provider to address some of these concerns and to co-opt the occupational gatekeepers in customer organizations who are responsible for technology adoption decisions. Following this, I describe how and why these occupational gatekeepers performed justification work to rationalize the continued use of the platform despite its inconsistent reliability. Together, trust work and justification work facilitate the coproduction of interorganizational trust through normalizing reliability breakdowns as “business-as-usual” events. Synthesizing these findings, I developed a normalization model of trust production, and discuss the implications of normalized trust for platform-mediated interorganizational relationships in the digital economy.