Claudia Labarca

Circumventing communication blindspots and trust gaps in technologically-mediated corporate relationships: the case of chilean business-to-consumer E-commerce

Trust is an essential ingredient of constructive human relationships, including economic exchanges. Blindspots are harmful omissions in strategy implementation due to reasons such as corporate inertia or management obsession in pursuing a certain vision mismatched with reality. This article outlines the main areas in which customer trust is under stress in Chilean business-to-consumer e-commerce and how e-buyers circumvent the problems that arise in those areas, from a Communications perspective. We not only discovered compensatory strategies devised by users to overcome those problems, but also some relevant corporate blindspots that should be addressed by retailers. Despite the strong growth of retail sales in emerging Latin American countries, Chilean e-commerce is relatively weak and problems of trust may be an important cause. Four areas of stress were outlined: previous perceptions about the firm, clarity and coherence of online information, personal data security, and delivery and post-sales services. Within these, inter-channel communication incoherence, lack of integration between retailers and outsourced logistics, and incoherent notions of trust emerged as the most important corporate blindspots harming the relationship with customers. On the other hand, we identified four compensatory strategies used by clients: selective auto-exposure, informal certifications, online/offline hybridization and anticipation/incorporation of other people experience.

International business and trust The Sino-Chilean experience

There is academic consensus that trust facilitates economic cooperation since it helps to mobilize resources, acts as a mechanism to cope with uncertainty, diminishes transaction costs and reduces system complexity. In cross-cultural management, trust has been acknowledged as a facilitator of economic relations. Nevertheless, its nature, definition and sources are still debated from antagonistic and sometimes exclusive perspectives. Additionally, trust research has been pointed out as acontextual, which limits trust understanding across the cultures that interact in a global economy. This article attempts to enrich this debate by analysing the sources of trust within a cross-cultural case study: the Sino-Chilean economic exchange. Using a qualitative methodology, and based on empirical research, the article examines the contextual setting in which the Sino-Chilean relationship is embedded and proposes sinicization as an alternative source for trust, understood here as a rationally driven, restricted form of cultural adaptation adopted by the weakest party in the relationship, which is able to embrace different perspectives on trust building.

IDENTITY AND lNSTITUTIONALISATION AS TRUST BUILDING STRATEGIES: THE SINO-CHILEAN CASE

Resumen en: This article argues that China has used two mechanisms to build trust as a way to counteract the uncertainties and perception of risk produced by its gro...