Oliver Schilke

About

Oliver Schilke is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Eller College of Management, where he joined in 2014. He also holds a courtesy appointment as a Professor of Sociology and serves as the Director of the Center for Trust Studies. His academic background includes a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), earned in 2014, and he spent two years as a research fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Sociology. His research interests encompass micro-institutional processes such as trust, routines, and legitimacy, with a focus on inter-organizational relationships, R&D, and entrepreneurship. Schilke employs a variety of methodological approaches, including experiments, surveys, and large archival data sets, to explore these areas. His work contributes to understanding how trust and institutional processes influence organizational behavior and relationships, and he has published extensively on these topics, earning recognition and awards for his research.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Knowledge management
• Computer Security
• Social psychology
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Blockchain Governance—A New Way of Organizing Collaborations?

  Organization Science · 2020 · 475 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The recent emergence of blockchains may be considered a critical turning point in organizing collaborations. We outline the historical background and the fundamental features of blockchains and present an analysis with a focus on their role as governance mechanisms. Specifically, we argue that blockchains offer a way to enforce agreements and achieve cooperation and coordination that is distinct from both traditional contractual and relational governance as well as from other information technol…

  DOI

• Trust in Social Relations

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2021 · 329 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Trust is key to understanding the dynamics of social relations, to the extent that it is often viewed as the glue that holds society together. We review the mounting sociological literature to help answer what trust is and where it comes from. To this end, we identify two research streams—on particularized trust and generalized trust, respectively—and propose an integrative framework that bridges these lines of research while also enhancing conceptual precision. This framework provides the sprin…

  PublisherDOI

• Legitimacy Revisited: Disentangling Propriety, Validity, and Consensus

  Journal of Management Studies · 2020 · 135 citations

  Abstract Recent research has conceptualized legitimacy as a multi‐level phenomenon comprising propriety and validity. Propriety refers to an individual evaluator’s belief that a legitimacy object is appropriate for its social context, whereas validity denotes an institutionalized, collective‐level perception of appropriateness. In this article, we refine this multi‐level understanding of legitimacy by adding a third, meso‐level construct of ‘consensus’, which we define as the agreement between e…

  DOI

• The transparency dilemma: How AI disclosure erodes trust

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2025-04-23 · 105 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As generative artificial intelligence (AI) has found its way into various work tasks, questions about whether its usage should be disclosed and the consequences of such disclosure have taken center stage in public and academic discourse on digital transparency. This article addresses this debate by asking: Does disclosing the usage of AI compromise trust in the user? We examine the impact of AI disclosure on trust across diverse tasks—from communications via analytics to artistry—and across indi…

  PublisherDOI

• An Interaction Ritual Theory of Social Resource Exchange: Evidence from a Silicon Valley Accelerator

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2020 · 69 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Recent research on start-up accelerators has drawn attention to the central importance of social resource exchange among peers for entrepreneurial success. But such peer relationships contain both cooperative and competitive elements, making accelerators a prime example of a mixed-motive context in which successful generalized exchange—unilateral giving without expectations of direct reciprocity—is not a given. In our ethnographic study of a Silicon Valley accelerator, we sought to explore how g…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Bilateral Extensions to Studying Trust in Organizations

  NSF · $500k · 2020–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Martin Reimann

  59 shared

• Karen S. Cook

  26 shared

• Fabrice Lumineau

  15 shared

• Jacquelyn S. Thomas

  Southern Methodist University

  14 shared

• Bernd W. Wirtz

  German University of Administrative Sciences

  11 shared

• Lynne G. Zucker

  University of California, Los Angeles

  11 shared

• Malte Brettel

  WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management

  10 shared

• David Kroon

  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  7 shared

Education

• PhD

  UCLA Department of Sociology

  2014

• Postdoctoral Research Fellow

  Stanford University Department of Sociology

  2009

• Doctor rerum politicarum (D.B.A.)

  Universität Witten/Herdecke Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaft

  2007

• Diplom-Kaufmann (Master of Science in Management)

  Leipzig Graduate School of Management

  2003

• Vordiplom (Intermediate Diploma in Business Administration)

  Universität Siegen Fakultät Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsinformatik und Wirtschaftsrecht

  2001

Awards & honors

• Dean's Research Award, Eller College of Management (2021)
• Most Novel Paper, Strategic Management Society Annual Confer…
• CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2020)
• Ascendant Scholar Award, Western Academy of Management (2020…
• Emerging Scholar Award, Strategic Management Society (2019)

Similar researchers at University of Arizona

• Jerel Slaughterh-33
• Aleksander P.J. Ellish-29