Trusting The Unseen: Mechanisms of Trust-Building in ‘Book & Claim’ Logistics Service

Sammanfattning

Infrastructure barriers and high costs of alternative sustainable fuels constrain the global logistics sector's transition to decarbonization. This research investigates how logistics providers establish institutional trust in the 'Book and Claim' service, where the environmental benefits of sustainable fuels are spatially decoupled from the physical transport of goods. Because corporate clients cannot observe these invisible carbon reductions, they suffer from visibility and proximity biases, creating significant psychological and commercial resistance to paying a green premium. To overcome this, logistics firms must act as Trust Architects by engineering an architecture of costly signals, such as internal Decarbonization Banks and independent third-party audits, to guarantee technical integrity and prevent deceptive "cheap talk" like greenwashing. The study illustrates how these complex technical truths are translated into commercial value through boundary objects, specifically the Sustainable Fuel Declaration, which enables diverse actors to co-create value and meet macro-institutional ESG mandates despite the service's inherent intangibility. This research employs a qualitative, embedded single-case study of a leading global logistics service provider. Empirical data were collected through 12 in-depth interviews with internal high-competence strategic experts across both technical and commercial domains, triangulated with external specialists and institutional documentary evidence. The empirical material was processed through abductive thematic coding and analyzed through a nested theoretical architecture integrating Service-Dominant Logic, Global Circular Networks, Signaling Theory, and Boundary Objects. The findings empirically validate the need for institutional engineering, demonstrating that the Decarbonization Bank and "Big Four" audits serve as costly signals against greenwashing. The Sustainable Fuel Declaration operates as a boundary object that bridges divergent stakeholder realities. The study reveals that customer willingness to pay is activated only when triggered by a macro-institutional threshold, such as coercive EU regulatory mandates, the GHG Protocol, and the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) guidelines. As its primary theoretical contribution, this study proposes the Sustainable Logistics Service Ecosystem (SLSE), a novel framework modeling how trust is architected and distributed across multiple scales to commercialize decarbonization within global supply chains.