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Introduces six empirical studies on trust within organisations which were originally presented at a workshop on “Trust within and between organisations”, organised by the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management at the Free University Amsterdam, in November 2001. Areas covered include: the legitimacy of the field of study; common understandings and disagreements in theoretical ideas; and directions for future research.

Research on antecedents of trust has, so far, yielded results that do not easily stand up to confrontation with the widely‐held assumption of bounded rationality. By employing complex constructs as indicators of antecedents, it is implied that actors, in pondering on trust in managers, can deal with many complex cues, instead of a few single ones, as bounded rationality suggests. This study proposes a different approach, by searching for a parsimonious set of managerial behaviours that serve as cues for subordinates regarding trust in managers. Interview and survey data were combined in this search. Regression analysis and a Boolean pattern analysis were used to arrive at a parsimonious model with high explanatory power.

This chapter identifies factors influencing doctoral candidates’ mobility plans based on empirical studies as well as theories of social inequality and migration. The relative importance of the identified factors is assessed through a series of linear and logistic regressions, which are calculated based on data from a 2010 online survey of doctoral candidates employed at German universities. The theoretical considerations are mostly confirmed: mobility experiences during the previous studies and during the doctorate mobilise doctoral candidates to plan further research periods abroad. Moreover, contextual factors play an important role. For instance, working in an internationalised institutional environment and having regular contact with academics abroad increase the likelihood of developing mobility plans. Regarding social factors, age turns out to be negatively associated with mobility plans. Parenthood also affects mobility plans negatively, but only among female doctoral candidates. Contrary to the hypothesis, we do not find that a high social background significantly increases the likelihood of planning a research period abroad.

Traditional studies in the sociology of science have highlighted the self-organized character of the academic community. This article focuses on recent interrelated changes that alter that distinctive governance structure and its related patterns of competition and cooperation. The changes that we identify here are contractualization and large-scale cooperative research. We use different data sources to exemplify these new patterns and discuss the illustrative role of research clusters in German academia. Research clusters as funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) are both a highly prestigious scarce good in the competition for reputation and resources and a means of fostering cooperation. Our analysis of this German example reveals that this new institutional configuration of universities as organizations, academic researchers, and the state has a profound effect on organizational practices. We discuss the implications of our empirical findings with regard to collegiality in academia. Ultimately, we anticipate a further weakening of collegial bonds, not only because universities and the state have become more active in shaping the nature of academic competition and cooperation but also because of the increasing strategic and individualistic orientation of academic researchers. In the final section, we summarize our findings and address the need for further research and an international comparative perspective.