La relation interpersonnelle présente une place importante dans l’instauration et le développement de la relation client. Cette importance est surtout évidente dans le secteur des services et surtout dans le contexte socioculturel des pays asiatiques. Le « renqing » (la norme de réciprocité dans le contexte asiatique) joue un rôle important dans la création et le suivi de la relation interpersonnelle. Il consiste en un mécanisme de stabilisation et d’harmonisation de la relation entre des individus au sein des sociétés asiatiques en se basant sur l’échange de faveurs et sur l’obligation mutuelle. Ce concept a été intégré dans le cadre de notre recherche au niveau la relation interpersonnelle entre le personnel en contact et le client dans le contexte de prestation de service bancaire au Vietnam. En adoptant une perspective dyadique, nous étudions le « renqing » du personnel en contact et du client, de l’un envers l’autre, et leurs impacts sur la qualité de la relation client au niveau interpersonnel comme institutionnel. L’enquête empirique par questionnaire sur le terrain de service bancaire au Vietnam nous permet de vérifier nos propositions de recherche. Le « renqing » du personnel en contact envers le client contribue à déterminer son comportement d’adaptation dans la prestation de service au client. Par ailleurs, le « renqing » du client envers le personnel en contact est un déterminant de la confiance interpersonnelle, qui influe ensuite sur la qualité de la relation du client envers la banque. Enfin, dans une perspective dyadique, notre recherche confirme la proposition exploratoire d’une part en ce qui concerne l’impact du renqing du personnel en contact sur le renqing du client et d’autre part en ce qui concerne l’impact indirect du renqing du personnel en contact sur la confiance interpersonnelle du client à travers deux variables médiatrices : le renqing du client et le comportement d’adaptation. Notre recherche permet de confirmer le rôle essentiel du « renqing » dans le modèle de relation client dans le contexte culturel du Vietnam. En effet, l’examen d’une perspective dyadique du concept de « renqing » nous permet de comprendre la manière par laquelle la réciprocité mutuelle entre le personnel en contact et le client renforce la relation client dans le contexte socio-culturel d’un pays asiatique. / Personal relationship plays an important role in creating and developing customer relationship. This important role has been confirmed in the service field and especially in Asian culture. “Renqing” (the norme of reciprocity in Asian context) has a critical role in creating and maintaining personal relationship. “Renqing” is considered a stable mechanism and helps to harmonize personal relationships in Asian societies based on favor exchange and reciprocal obligation. This variable is included in our study in the relationship between frontline employees and customers in the context of Vietnamese banking service. With the dyadic approach, we studied the “renqing” variable of frontline employees and customers in their relationship and their impacts on the relationship quality. “Renqing” of frontline employees have an effect on the employees’ adaptive behavior in service delivery. In terms of customers, “renqing” for frontline employees is a variable affecting interpersonal trust and through this trust it affects the quality of the relationship between customers and the bank. Finally, with the dyadic approach, our research confirms the suggestions on the effects of “renqing” of employees on “renqing” of customers and the indirect effect of employees’ “renqing” on customers’ trust through the two mediator variables: “renqing” of customers and adaptive behavior. Our research allows us to confirm the role of “renqing” variable in the customer relationship model in the Vietnamese context. Indeed, the study with the dyadic approach to “renqing” variable enables us to understand the way reciprocity between frontline employees and customers strengthens customer relationship in the context of an Asian country.

New technologies have increased the possible ways in which humans interact and as a result require new as well as old ways to establish trust. The findings of this paper suggest that trust should be divided into three main categories of trust drivers, exchange factors, design factors and motivational factors. The results indicate that tutorials can, and should, include drivers that build these categories. While we found varying degrees on how well implemented these were, we found that design factors were generally more prominent and found opportunities for tutorials to improve on the exchange side.

Trust and its antecedents have been demonstrated as a barrier to the successful adoption of numerous fields of technology, most notably e-commerce, and may be a key factor in the lack of adoption or adaptation in the field of telemedicine. In the medical arena, trust is often formed through the relationships cultivated over time via clinician and patient. Trust and interpersonal relationships may also play a significant role in the adoption of telemedicine. The idea of telemedicine has been explored for nearly 30 years in one form or another. Yet, despite grandiose promises of how it will someday significantly improve the healthcare system, the field continues to lag behind other areas of technology by 10 to 15 years. The reasons for the lack of adoption may be many given the barriers that have been observed by other researchers with regards to trust and trustworthiness. This study examined the role of trust from various aspects within telemedicine, with particular emphasis on the role that trust plays in the adoption and adaptation of a telemedicine system. Simulators examined the role of trust in the treatment and management of diabetes mellitus (common illness) in order to assess the impact and role of trust components. Surveys of the subjects were conducted to capture the trust dynamics, as well as the development of a framework for successful implementation of telemedicine using trust and trustworthiness as a foundation. Results indicated that certain attributes do influence the level of trust in the system. The framework developed demonstrated that medical content, disease state management, perceived patient outcomes, and design all had significant impact on trust of the system.

This thesis examines how knowledge management professionals use trust as a component in the creation of knowledge management systems, and what methods they use for building trust. Adopting a grounded theory approach, interviews with 8 knowledge management professionals active in different industries served as the base for an analysis that identified trust to be the single most important common factor in the data. The concept of trust used by the informants was identified as relating to the knowledge management system itself, rather than other users, employees or groups in an organisation. Building trust, the KM-professionals mainly focused on three methods: simple solutions, system superiority, and implementation security. Using these methods, the KM-professionals seek to ensure system trust by creating opportunities for users to obtain positive experiences of using the system, and thereby generate a foundation for a trust-based relationship between the user and the system.

In the ongoing debates about the reasons and impacts of the financial crisis 2008, trust is supposed to play a relevant role. Unaware of this future happening the economic researchers Paul J. Zak and Stephen Knack published a paper in the late 90's, where they tried to find a correlation between economic growth and trust. Their applied model proved that there is a connection between the level of confidence and the economic wellbeing, represented by GDP growth. If this is still the case, after the dramatic damages of the worlds financial systems, and if the model is adoptable to prove again the correlation with today's data, is the content of this thesis. With the help of a regression calculation not all the findings of Zak and Knack could be confirmed. Some show an opposite development, some have still the same impact and others are not statistical significant. But nevertheless it demonstrates that trust, and its determinants, are correlated to the economic progress of a country. Moreover is proved that trust can be influenced - negatively, by high degree of inequality, and positively, with a low degree of bribery and economic discrimination.

The present study aimed to examine how support and trust in democracy was viewed among young citizens in Sweden. The study used a quantitative approach, in which a web survey was developed based on two well validated measurement instruments. The web survey was distributed via an internet site with 241 respondents age 18-29 years (M = 23.5 SD = 2.61). Four indexes were created (trust, support for democracy, autocracy and ideals of democracy) and the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression models. The results showed that the participants had a fairly large support for democracy and did also have a fairly high trust in democracy. The support for other governance than democracy was fairly low. These young citizens in Sweden preferred participatory democracy over electoral democracy. A bivariate regression model showed an indication that lower trust in democracy leads to more active participation among young citizens. A multiple regression model however showed that females with a lower trust in democracy preferred participatory democracy and that males with a higher trust preferred electoral democracy. The authors argue that these important findings should be prioritized within the democratic discourse in order to be able to address young citizens regarding their concern and confidence in democracy. This in turn could give rise to more adequate efforts and decision making processes for both politicians and civil servants.

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the declining direction that brand trusthas taken, throughout the past years in the Swedish market. Analyzing the present situation tobe able to build a picture of future solutions that brands could use in trying to build trust. By investigating the cause and then through these defined methods and tools be able to break this trend. Method: With a qualitative method consisting of semi-structured interviews with 7 communication- and marketing agencies within in southern part of Sweden. With the aim of getting an expert view of the problem´s past and present, to be able to build an assumption about the future of brand trust in this market. Theory: A theoretical framework consisting on the definition of brand trust, with a description of the micro- and macro perspectives. With theories about factors behind brand trust and also the markets mistrust of such. Some of which, authenticity, communication, satisfaction and customer loyalty arise as needed to build and uphold trust. These factors are described with the help of models, developed for this paper´s comprehension. Conclusion: The result has indicated that the decline is due to digitization, expectations/satisfaction and confusion for the consumer. Moreover, the result in the long termperspective is to build authenticity and genuineness, choose the right target groups, communicate the right expectations, dare to participate in public topics and build the brand with a purpose. Blockchain has also been located as a possible future solution.

L’intérêt sans cesse croissant des données RDF disponibles sur le Web a conduit à l’émergence de multiple et importants efforts de recherche pour enrichir le formalisme traditionnel des données RDF à des fins d’exploitation et d’analyse. Le travail de cette thèse s’inscrit dans la continuation de ces efforts en abordant la problématique de la gestion des données RDF en présence d’imperfections (manque de confiance/validité, incertitude, etc.). Les contributions de la thèse sont comme suit: (1) Nous avons proposé d’appliquer l’opérateur skyline sur les données RDF pondérées par des mesures de confiance (Trust-RDF) dans le but d’extraire les ressources les plus confiantes selon des critères définis par l’utilisateur. (2) Nous avons discuté via des méthodes statistiques l’impact des mesures de confiance sur le Trust-skyline.(3) Nous avons intégré à la structure des données RDF un quatrième élément, exprimant une mesure de possibilité. Pour gérer cette mesure de possibilité, un cadre langagier appropriée est étudié, à savoir Pi-SPARQL, qui étend le langage SPARQL aux requêtes permettant de traiter des distributions de possibilités. (4) Nous avons étudié une variante d’opérateur skyline pour extraire les ressources RDF possibilistes qui ne sont éventuellement dominées par aucune autre ressource dans le sens de l’optimalité de Pareto. / The ever-increasing interest of RDF data on the Web has led to several and important research efforts to enrich traditional RDF data formalism for the exploitation and analysis purpose. The work of this thesis is a part of the continuation of those efforts by addressing the issue of RDF data management in presence of imperfection (untruthfulness, uncertainty, etc.). The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows. (1) We tackled the trusted RDF data model. Hence, we proposed to extend the skyline queries over trust RDF data, which consists in extracting the most interesting trusted resources according to user-defined criteria. (2) We studied via statistical methods the impact of the trust measure on the Trust-skyline set.(3) We integrated in the structure of RDF data (i.e., subject-property-object triple) a fourth element expressing a possibility measure to reflect the user opinion about the truth of a statement.To deal with possibility requirements, appropriate framework related to language is introduced, namely Pi-SPARQL, that extends SPARQL to be possibility-aware query language.Finally, we studied a new skyline operator variant to extract possibilistic RDF resources that are possibly dominated by no other resources in the sense of Pareto optimality

Many argue that personalization is needed in a modern marketing strategy. Whilst there are several positive aspects of personalization, e.g. improved customer satisfaction rates, it can also lead to firms being perceived as intrusive and elicit privacy concerns. This dilemma describes the personalization paradox, which refers to the two-sided results of using personalized communication by collecting and analyzing consumer data. To address the issue of how firms balance the need for personalization while still respecting consumers’ privacy, previous researchers have mainly investigated the issue from the consumer perspective. However, the consumer is believed to display a paradoxical behavior in regards to personalization. Therefore, we have addressed this issue through interviewing 12 company representatives from 7 companies. Our findings indicate that companies are mindful when creating personalized content and do acknowledge the issues with privacy and the risk of being perceived as intrusive. To overcome the personalization paradox, firms are not explicit about their data analysis in their personalized communication as this can lead to consumers feeling discomfort. Finally, an essential way that firms can prevent privacy concerns is to create relevant content as this outweighs feelings of discomfort. These findings to a certain extent do not reflect the empirical research on the topic, however the discrepancies may exist as previous studies were conducted from the consumer side.

Thesis advisor: Lauri Johnson / Schools seeking to increase student achievement often employ professional development strategies to institute instructional reforms, yet research offers little guidance on how leadership behaviors might support professional development aimed at district reform and instructional change. This qualitative case study examined the following research questions in a suburban Massachusetts district: 1. What is the role of leadership in an initiative to change literacy instruction in a small, suburban district? (a) How is leadership distributed, if at all, in this initiative? (b) What leadership behaviors, if any, do teachers and administrators view as contributing to or limiting to positive instructional change in the literacy initiative? Who is exercising these leadership behaviors? (c) What leadership behaviors support or limit engagement in the initiative? 2. How, if at all, do the professional development strategies utilized in this literacy initiative build capacity for teacher and administrator growth and further change? Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with six district leaders, including four elementary principals, the superintendent, and literacy coach; observations of Literacy Leadership Team meetings and study groups; a written teacher questionnaire; and a reflexive journal. Findings revealed that participants favorably viewed the reform- oriented professional development activities and reported that instructional changes had occurred in their schools. Discrepant perspectives on leadership affected its successful distribution. Time and communication concerns surfaced deeper, adaptive challenges related to the collective understanding of the initiative's vision and priorities, the enactment of instructional leadership by principals and teachers, and trust between stakeholders. Recommendations that arose from the findings provide guidance to the district about how to build professional capacity, shared meaning, distributed leadership, sustainability, and trust. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.