The author examines trust as the key social factor in outsourcingIS development work. He argues that all outsourcing projects proceedthrough “virtuous and vicious” cycles involving trust,structure (of the written contract), and performance. A balance of trustand structure is essential for project success, which in turn improvestrust, especially performance-based trust. Excessive focus on either thewritten contract or trust, ignoring the other, hurts projectperformance.

The idea of trust as a part of a “psychologicalcontract” between vendor and client is appealing, as is thecategorization of trust into four types: calculus-based,identification-based, knowledge-based, and performance-based. However,in the absence of detailed case illustrations for each type of trust anddifferentiation between them, it is not clear how to apply this part ofthe discussion. The paper is rather simplistic in its portrayal of thecommonly held belief that trust is important in any relationship. Theresearch potential of this issue may be limited.

The domain of the study is “somewhat limited” becauseout of 18 cases, 13 were only from the vendor’s viewpoint, and 14 comefrom a single country, India. The author concludes that further researchis needed to validate his findings, but the real question is whether anyfurther research is required to prove the value of trust inoutsourcing. Let’s take it for granted!