Trust in Client-Vendor Relations: An Empirical Study of Collaboration across National and Organizational Boundaries

In an ever more globalized world we are faced with the challenges of collaborating across geographical distance. This article examines how trust is established in an offshore outsourcing engagement of IT operations between a leading Danish media company and an Indian IT-service provider. The findings presented in this paper are a subset of a larger ethnographic research project including more than four hundred hours of participant observation and twenty-nine semi-structured interviews. Thus, the article contributes with a empirical investigation of collaboration across national and organizational boundaries within the field of IT offshore outsourcing. The article concludes that trust is primarily established when the teams are meeting face-to-face and in order to establish trust at a distance they are dependent on technology being readily available and on engaging in active trust building, by imitating the way they communicate face-to-face, when collaborating virtually.