Introducing Trust, in the Entrepreneurial Venture

The importance of social interaction in human activity has been explicitly or implicitly acknowledged by various disciplines in the social sciences. This is so to such an extent that, rather than there being many social sciences concerned with investigations into the acquisition of economic wealth and its consequences, such as economics, management studies, marketing and so on, ‘there is only one social science’ (Hirshleifer 1985: 53, in Landa, 1994). This is because it is ‘impossible to carve a distinct territory [for each] bordering upon but separated from other social disciplines’ (ibid.). This, in turn, is because social interaction is the primary source of economic activity (Huemer, 1998). Thus, as Morgan (1990: 72) notes, explanations of business organisations that fail to consider ‘the precarious nature of the production and reproduction of social relationships have made a fundamental error in their starting point.’