Up, Down & Sideways Approaches to Building Trust and Dispelling Distrust Across National Boundaries

National boundaries are often the lines in the sand between the trusted “us&x201D; and the distrusted “them.&x201D; Alternatively, national boundaries can be transformed into sites of collaboration and bridges that bring people together. In a time when people around the globe are reinforcing boundaries, we bring together a renowned panel of trust scholars to engage the audience in a discussion of ways to build trust and reverse spirals of distrust across national boundaries. We will debate and integrate top-down versus bottom-up versus sideways approaches. Some panelists will argue for bottom up approaches such as building cross-national understanding among employees, whereas others will advocate for the top-down approaches embodied in contracts and control systems that undermine distrust and ensure calculative trust. A third group will argue for sideways mechanisms such as those present in the gig economy and available through cross-sector and research collaborations. We will conclude by integrating these approaches and by highlighting new avenues of scholarship that have emerged from current global trends, such as trust in firms as political actors. But the discussion will not end there. It will continue on social media with our partners, The LSE Business Review blog in the UK and beBee, headquartered in Spain, who will help us reach out to their broader global audience. Using social media (before, during and after) this session will engage people across continents and highlight the important partnership between management scholars and business leaders, policymakers and the general public. Social Media Partners beBee (international social media startup) Contributors: John White and Itziar Ruiz LSE Business Review Blog Contributor: Helena Vieira