Virtual collaboration and digital trust: an actor-network frame

Trust is a social factor at the foundations of human action. The pervasiveness of trust explains why it has been studied by a large variety of disciplines, and its complexity justifies the difficulties in reaching a shared understanding and definition. As all the social factors, trust is continuously evolving as result of the changes in the social, economic and technological conditions. Internet and many other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions have changed organizational and social life. Such mutated scenarios challenged what researchers know about trust, thus several studies tried to investigate the difference between online and traditional (physical) environments. The aim of this paper is to solve this multi-dimensional puzzle by presenting a conceptual framework that will take into consideration the complexity of ICT mediated-trust. The extant literature still lacks of a homogeneous framework and presents a large amount of different perspectives, each one addressing a very specific issue. By using the methodology suggested by Short (2009) and Cropanzano (2009) we propose a conceptual model for understanding the dynamics of trust in online settings. In doing so we adopted he Actor Network Theory conceptual frame for disentangling the ambiguous role of technology in its relation with trust. This paper provides an ultimate conceptual model on trust in virtual settings that will help systematize the extant contributions and also identifying the gaps that can be addressed by future researches.