Serial Organizational Monogamy: Building Trust into Contractual Relationships

Abstract

Contracting as a mode of governance has spread across United States and Europe. Contracting out has been formed around “low-trust” principal-agent relations as seen in “hard” versions of contracting. Empirical experiences with contracting have shown the need to build more trust into models of contractual governance. This trend is evident in the recent attempts to form “high trust” public-private partnerships (PPP’S). The main question addressed is: How do different models of contracting deal with problems of trust? The relationship between contracting and trust is examined in the first part of this article. In the second part of this article, we compare recent experiences with contractual governance in the United States and Scandinavia. The article ends by suggesting “serial organizational monogamy” as a third way between low trust and high trust contractual relations.

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