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Firms tend to engage in interorganizational relationships (IORs) to an increasingly large extent.

IORs are however problematic. On one hand, they entail expectations of continued possibilities. On the other hand, they entail expectations of complete explicitness – business partners simply expect intentions to be transparent and fixed. Co-workers in IORs manage these expectations with trust: in the context of IORs, trust is both a promise of continued possibilities and explicitness. Continued possibilities require changeable intentions however, making explicitness hard to maintain. The given promise is consequently very hard to keep, and the result is accusations of betrayal.

The management method of trust is comprised by dilemmas originating from a complex interplay between strong ideas about what to (and not to) do and the dynamics of IORs. This could be described as an interplay between ideology, cooperative situations and dilemmas of practice.

Ideology is investigated using corpus linguistics and functional grammar applied on concordances extracted from academic articles about Trust and the contrasting terms Control and Betrayal. Cooperative situations are investigated using correspondence analysis applied on an indexed interview material. Underlying interviews concern IORs, and informants come from a broad sample reflecting different types of firms, industries and professions. Dilemmas of practice, finally, are represented by in-depth interviews with individuals whom possess rich experience of IORs. The interviews are transcribed in detail and analyzed using functional grammar.

Results show that IORs are profoundly dilemmatic and that co-workers use trust as a mean to bridge the dilemmas of IORs. Result also reveals that dilemmas of IORs have an ambiguous quality; dilemmas are not just a problem that needs to be handled, but to an equal extent a resource that can be used for deliberation and decision. In the management method of trust, dilemmas are as inevitable as they are indispensable.