What is the role of trust and bridging social capital
in immigrant business owners’ start-up processes? We tackle this question by
interviewing immigrant business owners in Finland. The paper applies a novel
synthesis of Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998) three-dimensional model of social
capital and Höhmann and Malieva’s (2005) categorization of the forms of trust
to case studies chosen from an original data set of 64 interviews. Incidences
of both trusting and distrusting were recognized, and the behavioural patterns
or factors that build trust or damage it were identified. These incidences were
used to validate the combined trust and social capital framework.