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Public organizations are constantly offered new ideas and concepts that involve a substantial investment of resources when it comes to translating them into organizational practice. An especially powerful group of such concepts in the discourse of organizations comprises so-called “magic concepts” that both pose opportunities and challenges for public leaders trying to translate them. Although critical discussion about the value of popular concepts has been intense in existing research, there is still little knowledge about the factors that determine why some magic concepts have a pervasive influence, while others quickly go out of fashion and leave little trace in organizational practice. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

By combining insights from public leadership theory, implementation theory, institutional theory and organizational psychology, this paper outlines four dimensions that are central to the robustness of the organizational translation of magic concepts. The paper develops a conceptual model labeled “The Translational Diamond,” which suggests that the robust translation of organizational concepts depends on the level of both strategic and local anchoring, as well as the interplay between reflection and experimentation in the translation process. The Translational Diamond is applied in two embedded case studies, which offer insight into the variance between two organizational departments attempting to translate the same magic concept.

A central argument in the “translational diamond” is that bigger, balanced diamonds reflect more robust translations than smaller, warped diamonds. The results support this assumption. Although the translation of trust involves challenges in both departments, there are much more severe difficulties in the social department, which is characterized by a notably smaller and much more warped diamond than the health and care department.

While this paper argues that strategic and local anchoring and the interplay between reflection and experimentation play a crucial role in the translation of magic concepts, there may be other factors at stake in the process. For example, Røvik argues that the skill of the individual translators engaged in the process is important for creating a robust translation (Røvik, 2007). In addition, magic concepts are potentially involved in a power battle with other magic concepts that are constantly competing for organizational attention (Hood, 2005). Such power dynamics may substantially influence actors’ engagement in translation, but are not within the scope of this paper.

For public leaders, the translational diamond may serve as a conceptual framework that can spur their understanding of, and reflection about, how to support the translation of magic concepts in their organization. For example, archetypically warped diamonds can illustrate the problems that might occur if translation is not sufficiently anchored in all four dimensions. Translating organizational concepts involves respect for the inherent dilemmas of securing a balance between strategic and local perspectives, as well as the strengths of securing feedback loops between reflection and experimentation. These dimensions will not necessarily be equally balanced at all times in the process of translating magic concepts. The conceptual model of the translational diamond may help leaders to understand the current status of a translation and guide them in their endeavor to support a better balance.

While symbolic change may serve other organizational purposes than effectiveness, this paper addresses the under-studied question of how organizational concepts are translated robustly into practice. The originality of the “translational diamond” is its focus on “how” rather than “whether” the translation of magic concepts should be attempted. In addition, the diamond’s integration of theoretical constructs from leadership theory, implementation theory, institutional theory and organizational theory offers a more nuanced understanding of central dimensions impacting organizational translation at a practical level.

This study provides much needed empirical data to conceptualise organisational distrust in communications' scholarship. A limited understanding of distrust has implications for corporate communication scholars and practitioners as, ultimately, efforts to rebuild trust and reduce distrust in organisations and corporations may be hindered if we do not truly understand the complexity and nature of the concepts we are trying to repair.

A repeated single-criterion card-sort method was utilised in this study to allow the sample of 40 respondents to identify the terms they associate with organisational trust and distrust.

From the current study's findings, it is proposed that there is support for organisational distrust to be considered and studied as a separate and distinct concept to organisational trust within the corporate communications and public relations literature. The current study's findings do not neatly reflect all the items included in existing scales for organisational distrust, and accordingly this suggests that further research into distrust as a concept is warranted.

This study contributes to the literature by presenting a proposed conceptualisation of organisational distrust and providing further evidence for organisational distrust and organisational trust to be studied as related but separate concepts. Developing a more comprehensive conceptualisation of organisational trust and distrust is important for both communication scholars and practitioners as it allows for a more accurate understanding of relationship quality between stakeholders and organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to differentiate clearly between three frequently used concepts found in the research literature on public perceptions of the police: confidence in the police, satisfaction with the police and trust in the police.

Systemic literature review and thematic analysis are employed to assess each key term in the official English language dictionary and in the research literature. Their individual origins, their evolvement and their current usages are examined with great care.

The findings of the study suggest that the three phrases are indeed distinct in their connotation. It is concluded that “confidence in the police” is the preferred choice when we survey the citizenry about the level of support for the police and when the police is evaluated as a political institution.

Given that most criminologists believe that we are doing scientific research, it is our duty to be attentive to the pitfalls of lack of conceptual clarity.

The essay advances the conceptual clarification of one of the popular themes in the study of the police.

The purpose of this paper is to defend the notion of “trust in technology” against the philosophical view that this concept is misled and unsuitable for ethical evaluation. In contrast, it is shown that “trustworthy technology” addresses a critical societal need in the digital age as it is inclusive of IT-security risks not only from a technical but also from a public layperson perspective.

From an interdisciplinary perspective between philosophy andIT-security, the authors discuss a potential instantiation of a “trustworthy information and communication technology (ICT)”: a solution for privacy respecting video surveillance. Here, strong data protection measures address grave concerns such as the threat of bulk biometric tracking of citizens. In a logical argument, however, the authors show that this technical notion of “trust” needs to be complemented by interlocking trust relations to justify public trust.

Based on this argument, the authors demonstrate that the philosophical position considering “trust in technology” to denote either “reliability” or “interpersonal trust” is too limited as it fails to address critical aspects of IT-security. In a broader, socio-technical sense, however, it is shown that several distinct accounts of trust – technical, interpersonal and institutional – should meaningfully interlock, to address concerns with ICTs.

This conceptual study demonstrates the potential of “trust in technology” for a more comprehensive evaluation of ICTs within the context of operation. Furthermore, it adds to the discussion of trust in IT-security by highlighting the layperson’s challenge of judging a technology’s trustworthiness. Vice versa, it contributes to Ethics of Technology by highlighting crucial IT-security needs.

This paper aims to propose a mathematical model for describing and clarifying the relationships among the indicators governing the social values of special customers in business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce systems. This mathematical model is also able to describe the degree of adaptability of e-commerce systems to the social values of specific clients, and commercial firms are able to use the parameters described in this paper to increase the versatility and has the power to trade with special customers in different areas.

In this paper, while analyzing the issue of trading from the point of view of the customer as an element of trading, the affecting factors the trading space have been extracted. These affecting factors are categorized in three major groups: culture, technology and customers. This classification is based on the e-commerce and developing the traditional commerce. Using the mapping functions, the effects of each element in these three spaces on the concept of social values have been analyzed. The result of this analysis is the mathematical model governing each parameter and its semantic relation with the concept of social value.

The presence of a mathematical model between the indicators influencing the model adaptability and social values space allows e-commerce system designers to be able to make decisions on the adaptability of the model with a quantitative approach. To examine the proposed mathematical models, important frameworks and patterns in the field of e-commerce have been analyzed with an Islamic approach, as one of the adaptations of B2C e-commerce model.

Regarding the innovation of the work, the case has been made, and the concept of social value and the model governing the elements of social values in this paper, in a B2C e-commerce model, has been discussed in general; the problem is parametric solved.

One of the key concepts in commerce is the ability of the commerce model to adapt to the requirements of special customers. This is more important in costumer-based e-commerce models. In these types of systems, if the commerce cannot match the customer’s characteristics, it will not be accepted and used by customers. This is especially more important in the field of social values for customers.

In this paper, a mathematical model is presented to examine the adaptability of e-commerce systems to the social values of special customers. In examining this model, the relationship between each element affecting the social value of specific customers and the factors affecting trade has been studied.

Vulnerability is a concept that lies at the core of the most prevalent academic trust definitions. Accordingly, a vast amount of scholars refers to vulnerability when studying trust. Surprisingly, there is almost no conceptual nor empirical work explicitly directed at understanding vulnerability itself. The purpose of this paper is to summarize and critique the existing base of knowledge of vulnerability with a particular focus on the leader-follower relationship and to open avenues for future research.

In the process of a very systematic literature search, the authors identified 49 studies that refer to vulnerability when studying trust at the interpersonal level. The authors coded the literature into conceptualizations, antecedents and consequences of vulnerability – with a particular focus on the leader-follower relationship.

The authors introduce a theoretical framework which allows the authors to structure the rather fuzzy discussed concept of vulnerability. The development of such a theoretical framework allows the authors to distinguish between trusting beliefs and actual trusting behaviour so that it is possible to separate the constructs of willingness-to-be-vulnerable and actual vulnerability.

With the help of the developed framework, the authors point to the need for more work on vulnerability in order to take the study of trust to the next level. In this respect, the authors formulate several propositions that should be tested in future research.

Practitioners are made aware of the need to risk willingness to be vulnerable as a base for trusting behaviour. There is no way around being willing to be vulnerable.

This literature review provides a holistic understanding of the concept of vulnerability. The intention is to show the different understandings and interpretations of this term within the literature and identify which antecedents and consequences are related to the concept of vulnerability.

Although trust is discussed widely in the literature, there are still discrepancies in the existing conceptualisations of the trust concept. These are usually either unidirectional or bi‐directional, and a limited or narrow approach is usually applied or taken into consideration. There is an apparent lack of mutual and simultaneous considerations beyond the dyadic business relationship. It is argued that an approach beyond dyadic business relationships is necessary to truly understand the trust between two actors in a marketing channel. In the first place, the trust in other upstream and downstream dyadic business relationships affects the trust in the dyad at focus. At the same time, the dyadic business relationship at focus is affected by upstream and downstream trust in other dyadic business relationships. Therefore, a generic model of the synchronised trust chain concept is introduced, as well as managerial implications and research proposals in the area.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated conceptual trust building model for supply chain partners’ relationships. It is based on the literature on trust building models from various disciplines.

Various trust building concepts and models were reviewed and five widely referred trust building models were selected from the literature to analyze and integrate the views to develop an integrated conceptual model from supply chain partners’ relationships point of view.

The conceptual frame work suggests that trust is a sum of risk‐worthy characteristics, risk‐worthy rationale and risk‐worthy institutional systems of supply chain members. Though the model represents the trust building process at dyadic level, the concept can simply be extended to any number of levels and perspectives.

The model has considered the trust building perspectives from supply chain partners’ relationships point of view. The discussions of the model lead to empirically testable issues.

The study results suggest that the supply chain members should strive to reduce the risk levels to build trust rather than striving to build trust to reduce the risk. As long as members’ risk levels are within their bearable limits trust can be considered as a risk coping mechanism and when the risk levels exceed their bearable limits the subject of trust turns into risk management/security management.

The trust building concepts developed through this model can be used by both practitioners and researchers on the subject of trust. However the model's application is not limited to supply chain management; it can be easily adapted to any discipline of management.

The purpose of this paper is to study how different types of trust develop and change over time in the collaboration between an organization and its board.

This paper is a response to a recent call to apply the concept of trust in understanding the collaboration between a public organization, its board, and other stakeholders. Here, the authors study a single case, and based on a longitudinal in-depth case study method covering the period of 2003–2015, the authors have conducted 27 interviews, including the CEO and all the board members.

The authors introduce and advance the concept of trust in the public sector literature on board work. This paper shows that trust is complex and multidimensional at different units of analysis. The types of trust discussed in this paper are cognitive, affective, contractual, competence, and goodwill. Different types of trust are developed to make the collaboration between a governed organization and its board to work.

Because this paper uses the case study method and only studies one single case, the findings of this paper might be questioned on the issue of generalization.

The authors conceptualize and adopt trust as a multidimensional, dynamic concept, and with different units of analyses, capture the nature of the collaboration between a public organization and its board, and its complexity.

The concept of trust suffers from conceptual confusion. The current perspectives on trust within the B2B marketing domain could be visualised as a big box of which the borders are defined by the disciplines marketing, economics, psychology and sociology. The purpose of this paper is to enlarge the box by introducing neuroscientific insights on trust to the B2B marketing domain.

By a literature study on neuroscientific insights on trust, this paper examines how neuroscience can help to solve existing problems within trust research and how it can address problems that otherwise might not be considered.

The neural coordinates of trust not only show that trust entails cognitive and affective elements, but also that these elements are so intertwined that they cannot be completely separated. What can and should be separated are the concepts of trust and distrust: the neural coordinates of trust are clearly different from the neural coordinates of distrust. Furthermore, there are personal differences in the ease of trusting others, which are not only caused by previous experiences but also by differences in resting patterns of frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and by differences in hormonal state.

Specifically, the neural difference between trust and distrust might shape the future research agenda for trust research within industrial marketing. It is likely that the process of distrust goes quick, whereas trust comes more slow. This is reflected in the dual processing theory, which is seen as a paradigm shift in the psychology of reasoning.

New perspectives and directions for trust research are presented. The distinction between trust and distrust is connected to approach- and avoidance-motivated behaviour, which is highly relevant for deepening the studies on trust within industrial marketing.