| This study examined information sharing between and among organizations in a network of public and private agencies in order to explore the factors that influence organizations to join an information-sharing network. Additionally, it considered the types of trust developed among agency participants. Finally, it attempted to determine a link between the factors that influence an organization to join a specific network and the subsequent trust that develops within that network.; The New York State Homeless Information Management System (RIMS), brought together almost twenty organizations to address policy, management, and technology issues among homeless service providers and government agencies. Relying on interviews, observations, and examination of archival records, the HIMS organizations provided the information-sharing setting for this qualitative research.; The study analyzed how networks emerge, combining two models from the literature (Gulati and Gargiulo 1999; Hardy and Phillips 1998) and examining an additional set of network factors, including coercive, normative, mimetic, and cognitive influences. This research found that each set of these influences played a role in RIMS. Still, this study found mimetic factors played the smallest role in determining network membership.; Furthermore, this study examined the emergence of trust. Collectively, the literature on trust offers an almost endless list of types of trust. For the purposes of this research, trust was divided into three categories (trustor-trustee, trustor-context, and trustee-context trust), finding that these categories are a useful way to examine the types of trust within a network. Trust within these categories was identified during the interviews, although not all the individual types of trust were identified. Trustor-trustee types of trust were the most prevalent, presumably due to the members' similar backgrounds and context.; Finally, this study attempted to find a relationship between the type of influence on network membership and the subsequent type of trust developed. While this relationship was not established here, this research makes several expected and unexpected contributions to current scholarship on information sharing and organizational studies. For instance, the importance of information sharing as a motivating factor for joining a network was an unexpected finding. |
