CFP: Cooperation and Trust in New and Small Enterprises (FINT)

[entrepreneurship-phd at lists.uni-due.de]

From: Teemu Kautonen [mailto:teemu.kautonen at uwasa.fi] 
Date: Tue 17 Feb 2009 07:53

The First International Network on Trust (FINT) organises the 5th Workshop on Trust Within and Between Organisations in Madrid, Spain, 28-29 January 2010. 

The workshop includes one particular Special Session, which is of interest to the entrepreneurship and small business research community.  

Special Session VII:

COOPERATION AND TRUST IN NEW AND SMALL ENTERPRISES

Chairs: 
Matthias Fink, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria 
Teemu Kautonen, University of Vaasa, Finland

Cooperative business relationships are at the same time a great opportunity and a serious risk. This is especially true for small enterprises and new business ventures. On the one hand, cooperative strategies can be of vital strategic importance for new and small enterprises and impact positively on their performance. For example, by pooling critical resources such as know-how, production capacities or reputation, partners may come up with unique combinations that generate competitive advantages or allow them to overcome the liabilities of newness and smallness which otherwise restrict their ability to compete with larger and more established companies in the market. On the other hand, the commitment to a specific cooperation arrangement brings about specific investments and therefore bears a degree of risk. The key to success in cooperative relationships is an efficient and effective coordination of the actors' behaviour within the scope of the cooperation arrangement. Given the limited means for hierarchical or formal coordination in new and small firms, scholars often argue that trust is a particularly well-suited social mechanism for behavioural coordination in this context. 

This special session aims to contribute to a better understanding of the definition, prerequisites, functioning and effects of trust-based inter-firm cooperation in the context of new and small enterprises. The Chairs welcome both theoretical and empirical papers (both quantitative and qualitative approaches are welcome) and particularly encourage authors to present innovative conceptual work that challenges the dominant ideas in the mainstream literature. 

Some of the specific questions that this session seeks to address include, but are not limited to: 

- How can small and new ventures set up successful trust-based cooperative relationships? 
- What criteria and processes do new and small enterprises apply to identify the right partner? 
- What means do and can entrepreneurs and owner-managers apply to ensure that their partners behave in the agreed, and therefore, expected manner? 
- How does trust emerge and evolve in inter-firm co-operations? 
- How can trust-based cooperative relationships be evaluated? 

Authors intending to participate are requested to upload an 800-1000 words abstract of their work by June 1 2009 at: 
http://www.eiasm.org/frontoffice/event_announcement.asp?event_id=669

By June 20 they will receive a notification of acceptance/rejection. Final papers of 6.000-10.000 words and 1,5 spacing should be uploaded at this website by November 21 2009. 

The following information is required in the abstract: 
- Title of paper. 
- Name, academic affiliation(s) and address of author(s). 
- E-mail address of each author