Trust, Social Networks and Enterprise Development: Exploring Evidence from East and West Germany

This paper examines the role of social networks in enterprise development by comparing personal trust (as inherent in social relationships) to collective and institutional trust (derived from the wider cultural, political and legal environment). The findings indicate that there is a shift from personal towards institutional trust as the firm develops and grows, but they also confirm enterprise behaviour being based on a mixture of different trust forms. Moreover, the findings underline the difficulty of studying trust empirically, recommending longitudinal qualitative approaches for further research.