ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to investigate the factors that enhance or decrease interpersonal trust in international joint ventures. It focuses on the building of trusting relationships in a cross-cultural context - specifically the east-west one in Russia. The concepts of cultural embeddedness and networks often become intertwined, particularly when it comes to writings on eastern Europe. The complex, informal, opaque alliances and operations arising out of the former command economies that greeted the early foreign investors in Russia clearly lend themselves to analyses via network theory and cultural embeddedness. In traditional definitions, these types of external variables are in a sense 'assumed away' - the external environment is generally viewed as certain and known to economic actors. There are some further traditional elements of trust definitions that rely on certain aspects of an assumed external business environment that were not in place, or that operated differently in Russia.
