Abstract
In this paper we focus on the neglected role of anxiety and psychological security in organizational life, specifically in the context of the organization and development of offshoring relationships that extend across time and geography. In contrast with much of the literature on offshoring (and interorganizational relationships more generally), which tends to take a very conventional rational decision-making perspective on the phenomenon in question, we emphasize the less tangible, emotional dimensions. In particular, we are concerned with understanding the processes by which clients, who have little or no previous experience of offshoring, may develop and sustain adequate levels of psychological security to enable them to bracket risk and productively engage in such unfamiliar and alien work arrangements. To this end, we draw on Anthony Giddens’ distinctive, noncognitivist conception of trust, supplemented by other important contributions in the area, to explore the processes by which a sense of psychological security and stability is achieved in the face of the quotidian anxieties provoked by engagement in these contemporary modes of global organizing. Our synthesized theoretical framework is developed and illustrated in the context of an ongoing, in-depth, longitudinal study of the evolution of an Ireland–India information systems offshoring relationship. By tracing the dynamics of this relationship over an 18-month period, we examine the practices (or ‘relationship work’) through which trust is produced and suggest that different mechanisms can be discerned at different (albeit overlapping) stages of the relationship. In the earlier phase, the emphasis is on the role played by care and attentiveness in producing a sense of trust in the qualities of the supplier. As the relationship develops, however, the emphasis shifts to the production of a stable collaborative order. Here, we focus on the micropolitical dynamics of such processes and draw attention to three important tactical interventions (brokerage, signaling, and the ‘third man’). We conclude by arguing that the sense of trust that was carefully cultivated in the earlier phase of the relationship provided a crucial foundation, which not only facilitated the subsequent development of a stable collaborative order but, most noticeably, helped contain a serious crisis that beset the project in December 2006.
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Notes
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By highlighting the importance of trust, however, we do not wish to downplay that of more conventional means of control as a risk management strategy. Following Das and Teng (1998), we see trust and control as playing mutually supplementary roles in the production of an overall sense of confidence. As Hart (1988) felicitously puts it, trust exists ‘at the interstices of control.’
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Giddens uses the term ‘abstract systems’ to collectively refer to two distinct types of disembedding mechanism that allow social interactions/relations to be ‘lifted out’ of the particularities of specific locales and restructured across indefinite spans of time–space:
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Symbolic tokens: These refer to media of exchange that have standard value and thus are interchangeable across a plurality of contexts. Money is an important example. It can be passed around regardless of the specific characteristic of the individuals or groups that handle it at any particular juncture.
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Expert systems: These bracket time and space by deploying modes of technical knowledge that have validity independent of the practitioners and clients who make use of them (e.g. the system of Western medical knowledge). Thus, like symbolic tokens, they provide ‘guarantees’ of expectations across distanciated time–space.
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These conventional approaches implicitly adopt a ‘cognitivist’ perspective (Chaiklin and Lave 1996; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2005; Kelly 2005) that has been roundly criticized by those who would advocate a more holistic approach to understanding the human subject – that is, one that avoids a dualism between the cognitive and the emotional (cf. Ciborra 2006; Mcgrath 2006). Indeed, a key shortcoming of the notion of ‘calculative trust’ is that it fails to adequately discriminate between trusting behavior and calculated risk taking.
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Zollo et al. (2002) have also drawn attention to the importance of stable routines in facilitating productive interorganizational relations. Specifically, they draw on evolutionary economics to argue that such routines facilitate ‘…information gathering, communication, decision-making, conflict resolution, and the overall governance of the collaborative process’ (p. 709). Moreover, they draw an explicit distinction between the development of interorganizational routines and trust, because they view trust rather narrowly as an ‘interpersonal’ (p. 709) phenomenon and as the result of ‘deliberative efforts to assess the likelihood of opportunistic behaviour’ (p. 709). While we would agree with these authors’ conclusions that interorganizational routines are extremely important, we would argue that the view of trust synthesized here is more insightful, in that it does not confine the importance of such routines to mere ‘information gathering’ and ‘communication’. Rather, ‘trust as habitus’ also emphasizes the important anxiety reducing functions of such routines.
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Although Zucker’s emphasis on information and deliberation clearly has cognitivist leanings that would sit uncomfortably with the perspective synthesized here (i.e. we would view interaction as consisting of much more than mere information exchange), we nonetheless believe that the broad mechanisms that she identifies are a very helpful supplement.
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More precisely, building on the notion that any such abstract system will be interpretively flexible and may be enacted or embedded differently in different contexts, we argue that the key issue at stake is the expert system-in-use (i.e. the specific way in which such abstract principles are instantiated in the practices that constitute this project). The fact that systems always have to be reembedded underscores the importance of making the connection between forms of system trust and personal trust, between the rule and its application (Wittgenstein 1953). It is not merely trust in ‘abstract principles’ that needs to be reestablished at access points but, also, trust in the manner in which these principles are appropriated and applied.
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We could, indeed, countenance a further stage immediately prior to this Courtship one. At the Dating stage, NetTrade explored a number of options and had some brief liaisons with a number of other vendors. (They had to kiss a few frogs before finding their Prince!) In fact, these encounters were very important in framing their subsequent relationship with IndiaSoft. Here, however, we believe that the anxiety-reducing mechanisms at play were essentially the same as those in the Courtship phase, and so we rejected the idea of analyzing them separately.
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Whether this was an ‘accurate’ impression of IndiaSoft or not is, perhaps, beside the point. While we are conscious of the danger of resorting to cultural stereotypes here, the key issue is that John formed and sustained this impression of them, and acted on that basis. One point worth considering in this respect is the extent to which IndiaSoft staff were ‘mirroring’ (perhaps unconsciously) particular traits of their client. It would be interesting, for instance, to observe how their ‘presentation of self’ (Goffman 1956) would differ with a very different kind of client. On the evidence of our interaction with IndiaSoft staff, however, both in Ireland and in India, we could also clearly recognize the kind of traits to which John drew attention, and broader social values appear to be a very important feature of life in the firm. Furthermore, there are some good bases for making cultural comparisons between Ireland and India. Not only do both countries share a similar British colonial history (indeed India adopted a modified version of the Irish constitution postindependence and even a modified version of the Irish national flag!) and an emphasis on familial and community ties, but comparisons might also be drawn between recent modes of economic development based on engineering and high technology (see e.g. Foley and O’Connor 2004). Indeed, as John Stuart Mill once pointed out, ‘[t]hose Englishmen who know something about India, are even now those who understand Ireland best’ (Cook 1993: 53).
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Of course, we would be sympathetic to the general idea that even ostensibly rational/cognitive exercises are often enacted in ritualistic ways as a means of facilitating a more emotional type of commitment. This illustrates the difficulties associated with making a clean separation between the ‘cognitive’ and the ‘emotional.’
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At the same time, however, the trust also had a brittle quality. In September 2006, one of the researchers met an Irish software developer who had worked with IndiaSoft in India for a short, and unhappy, period. His experience of working with IndiaSoft was not very positive and was dramatically at odds with NetTrade’s impression of them. John, on hearing this story, became extremely worried about the project, and for a short time began to seriously question his own judgments.
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This kind of interaction became a familiar theme in the project and might be understood as involving the negotiation of the boundary between frontstage and backstage (Goffman 1956). Such was John’s anxiety that he was always trying to ‘peep backstage.’ In his view, however, IndiaSoft did not want to show him their ‘dirty laundry’.’ The fact that trust rests on a presentational base, where frontstage impression management is vital, would suggest that IndiaSoft’s reluctance to accede to John’s wishes was well founded.
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Cramton (2001) notes how physical separation and reliance on communications technologies can exacerbate uncertainty when trying to interpret the meaning of silence.
- 15.
Demonstrating their irritation over the issue, the €80,000 bill that they received was always referred to as a ‘penalty’ by NetTrade but as a ‘cost overrun’ by IndiaSoft.
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Kelly, S., Noonan, C. (2017). Anxiety and Psychological Security in Offshoring Relationships: The Role and Development of Trust as Emotional Commitment. In: Willcocks, L., Lacity, M., Sauer, C. (eds) Outsourcing and Offshoring Business Services. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52651-5_10
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