Trust relationship in cultural districts: the audio-visual cluster of Rome

This issue concerns the topic of born and development of trust relationship among firms, localised in a delimited area (clusters or urban districts). The central idea is that cultural district is one of more useful frameworks to analyse the concept of trust. Specifically, the aim of this paper is to underline the role that a theoretical, cultural, Marshall district, or different degrees of it, could have in the dynamic process of creation and exploitation of trust relations. The concept of cultural district is connected to the productive factor named CANH “Cultural, Artistic and Natural Heritage”, used to study the process of “cultural distrectualisation” of a High Culture (HC) local system (in our case, the city of art). The theoretical framework, identified by the CANH method let to study economic and productive relations among firms and to analyse socio-economic relations, taking into consideration the concept of relational capital (firm’s perspective) and social capital (community’s perspective), viewed as two integrated parts of relationships among actors localised into the urban cluster. The network analysis and the social capital theory represent a valid perspective for studying the process of creation of trust in local area. Trust, in fact, occurs in cognitive and affect-based forms. Besides, the presence of trust among partners in inter organisational relationships improves communication and dialogue and can create common strategic visions. Many researchers, in fact, analyse the concept of trust in order to study social linkages among organisations. The theoretical background is based on these steps: enduring and frequent social interactions could create common goals and mutual expectations, that could produce trust.