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The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the question of whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be used as a link of trust between business and society, and which role CSR plays in recovering distrust in businesses. It uses a mixed methods study of processes of moving businesses within the Danish water sector from a general trust-breakdown to trust recovery from 2003 to 2013.

Trust recovery is found to depend on stakeholders’ mutual engagement with each other and their willingness to share knowledge and learn from each other’s professional and institutional cultures and languages. An alignment of vocabularies of motives between regulation and voluntary CSR is found to be useful for building trust between conflicting parties. Furthermore the findings shows that the more stakeholders’ languages, motives and logics can coexist, the more trust can be recovered.

The research is limited by a study of one business sector in one country and the findings have implications greater than the local contexts of which it is researched, because it is usable in other sectors that suffer from severe trust-breakdowns such as government systems in both the public and private sectors.

This chapter suggests a theoretical extension of Bogenschneider and Corbett’s (2010) Community Dissonance Theory to embrace multiple stakeholders each having their own complex and unique culture and communication modus based on their institutional, professional or individual comprehensive language universes. This includes knowledge-sharing and educative diffusion of the stakeholders’ language universes’ vocabularies including its important nouns, verbs, terminologies, semantics, taxonomies and axioms as well as the stakeholders’ motives and logics implemented into these universes.

It is well known that trust is an essential, yet a fragile part of organizational life. Because trust sometimes has to be placed without guarantees, it will inevitably be broken, violated, and damaged when parties involved in trustworthy relationships let others down. When trust-destroying events occur, trust is shattered and its level plummets quickly into the domain of distrust. The speed with which trust can be destroyed depends on the magnitude of damage from the act of untrustworthiness and the perceived intentionality of the untrustworthiness. Moreover, if seen as intentional, the destruction of trust is particularly severe, as intentional untrustworthiness reveals malevolent intentions that are seen as highly predictive of future untrustworthiness. Often, leaders are the ones responsible for improper handling of, destroying, or violating trust in their organizations. In this chapter, we explore the consequences of leaders for violating trust and examine how trust changes over time as a function of different types of violations and attempts at restoration. We argue that because distrust may irrevocably harm organizations, leaders as moral agents need to consciously work to rebuild relationships, restore broken trust, and instill hope.

The enormous financial losses during the economic crash in Iceland led to widespread anxieties, coupled with a deep sense of shared national disaster and moral collapse (Bernburg, 2015; Ólafsson, 2014). The strong sense of betrayal indicates how economic processes are not only about economic prosperity, but are embedded also in wider societal discourses and a sense of national identity (Schwegler, 2009). We use perspectives from anthropology and cultural economics to ask how the lack of trust by the Icelandic population after the crash signals both a different way of visualising Iceland’s role within an increasingly global world and a changing sense of Icelanders as national subjects standing unified against foreigners. Iceland’s neo-liberalisation inserted the country into global institutions and processes with the faith that these processes would automatically be beneficial to Iceland. Furthermore, the sense of some kind of a unified Icelandic subject was manifested in the image of the ‘Business Viking’, which was seen as embodying the interest of the Icelandic nation as a whole. Following the economic crash, the betrayal of trust involved disrupting the idea of the ‘oneness’ of Iceland and thus, the sharp distinction between ‘us’ Icelanders and ‘those’ foreigners. In our discussion, we trace different ways of conceptualising this sense of Icelanders as a unified entity, asking what this notion means in terms of trust. Our research shows how the sense of ‘unified Icelanders’ was instrumental in creating the feeling of trust, and how it is possible to manipulate and appropriate that trust.

Middle leaders are educators whose practices of building relational trust are critical for generating the kind of strong and sustainable professional learning communities necessary for leading productive site-based education development in their school. This chapter specifically focuses how building an ethic of relational trust, experienced in five interrelated dimensions, aligns with establishing core foundational conditions for building community. Building trust and communities of professional learners are not mutually exclusive – in fact, each reciprocally facilitates, progresses, supports, and sustains the development of the other. The foundations for community building, described as cornerstones, form over time and progressively involve, and achieve, contextuality, commitment, communication, collaboration, criticality, and collegiality. Reflection questions are provided throughout; these are designed to directly focus the attention of middle leaders towards understanding and developing their own trust practices, that with time, create conditions for generating strong viable communities of professional practice.

In 1990, testing revealed the existence of benzene in the municipal water supply of a community named Three Lakes, a residential subdivision of Houston, Texas. The water was quickly changed to a clean supply, but residents were not notified that there had been a problem until five months later. This provoked much anger within the community, along with concerns over present and future health problems. A grassroots group formed in response to this problem, but lasted only one year. The failure of this social movement organization left community residents to fend for themselves. In the words of one resident, the community reacted “like someone stepping on an anthill – everyone running in different directions.”

The sawmill shootings in British Columbia, Canada, resulted in fatalities and grievous injuries to workers, which have put a sensational face on workplace violence in the forestry sector. Yet, for all of the attention devoted after this horrific incident, to the growth and possible consequences of workplace violence, little empirical investigation has been done regarding the extent to which this type of violence may have permeated the sawmill forestry workplace in Canada; employees' experiences of workplace violence; employees' definition of workplace violence; the specific type of violence that occurs in sawmills; and the drivers of workplace violence as experienced and perceived by managers, union, and employees in the forestry sector context in British Columbia, Canada.

This research critically explores these questions to better understand employees' experiences of workplace violence, the problems of violence and its implications for workplace stress, well-being, leadership, and corporate governance. This research contributes to the workplace violence body of knowledge as it relates to employment in the forestry sector in British Columbia, Canada.

A mixed methodological approach was adopted using 367 questionnaire survey, 20 telephone interviews, and 2 focus groups lasting 45–60 minutes (managers and employees) were used to focus on managers, union, and employees' accounts of their own experiences and perceptions of workplace violence.

The analysis of the data in this study lends support to the conclusion that workplace violence waged against workers in the forestry sector is significantly different than the violence being perpetrated in other sectors and work settings. The findings further suggest that forestry workers work environment, communities, and activity contributes meaningfully to the differences in workplace violence experienced by Sawmill employees.

Insights obtained from this research can be used to develop educational tools and resources, and new policies to foster workplace practices conducive to reducing drivers to workplace violence, towards a more respectful workplace and overall employee well-being.

This chapter is concerned with academic citizenry in higher education, and the conditions created within institutions for transformative leadership. This is central to the fitness-for-purpose of higher education institutions to drive the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Drawing from a mixed-method study, the chapter explores the patterns which emerged from literature, questionnaire responses, and semi-structured interviews about the problematics at play within six institutions in the post-colonial contexts of India and South Africa. The two upper middle-income contexts have strong constitutional commitments to democracy and social justice at the macro-level, with bold policy interventions undertaken at meso-level to address the legacies of exclusion and oppression in student enrollment and staff composition in HE. However, recent fraught dynamics and unrest within the sector in each country have brought renewed attention to the politics of participation and a breakdown in trust of governance and management.

In this study, the standpoint of key stakeholders was prioritized, including those in assigned leadership positions and academic staff. Particular attention was paid to gender and intersectional inequalities, impacting academic staff, and what they revealed about the persistence of policy-implementation gaps and their relation to principle-implementation gaps. Concerns are raised about impoverished comprehensions of, and conditions for, sustainable ethical leadership which emerged across both contexts.

We introduce a multi-level model of the dependence of interfirm network topologies on the distribution and commonality of information in a network and the information strategies pursued by its member firms. Network topology, information properties of the network, and firm-level action within the network form dynamic, recursive, cross-level relationships – information properties in the network determine firm-level action, which in turn impacts the network topology and information properties. We derive predictions about the kinds of information strategies that firms are likely to adopt and succeed with in different information regimes, and about the kinds and short- and long-run dynamics of network topologies expected under different information regimes. Our model sheds new light on network topologies as a dependent variable that can be explained by network-level information regimes and firm-level information strategies.