Low Trust And Opportunism In Action

Abstract

Recent changes in the nature of competition increase the potential for opportunism between firms. Without more trusting relations, poor performance arises because of opportunism. Moving away from the literature's stress on overly dense success stories, the paper gives evidence on opportunism in action in the UK engineering construction industry, 1960–80, where low-trust relations underlay chronically poor performance. The paper details the conditions necessary for the systemic reproduction of opportunism, and analyses why more trusting relations did not emerge; in the process, it subjects Williamson's conceptual framework to critical analysis.

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