This paper investigates trust worthiness and dependent stakeholder relations with a contextualised case-study of the Milaki plant in Greece, owned and operated by a multinational concrete aggregates firm. We investigate the opinions of community stakeholders concerning operational decisions made by the case-study firm in multiple challenging contexts (e.g. the Greek economic recession). We focus on the community stakeholder with regard to trustworthiness of the firm i.e. ability, integrity and benevolence (Mayer et al., 1995). With this novel emphasis on the dependent (less powerful) stakeholder of the local community, we can make a contribution by bringing together the stakeholder literature with the literature on trust (Greenwood and Van Buren, 2010). How organisational trustworthiness unfolds in the organisation-stakeholder relationship is under-researched, especially in challenging contexts. This focus enables us to shed light upon how decisions perceived as ethically questionable by the community, and which potentially breach trust, change the dynamic of dependent-stakeholder to organisation relationship. The imp act of this change and the subsequent implications of it for the stakeholder-organisation relationship will be explored in the full paper
