Trust

Consumers' trust in experts, regulatory agencies, and corporate actors has received considerable media and political attention in Europe over the past couple of decades. Responses are expressed in sudden shifts in demand, public opinion polls, claims made by advocates and organizations, and via political channels. Within the American context, critique seems less often framed as a matter of consumer distrust. Case studies in countries like Russia and Vietnam, on the other hand, indicate widespread distrust in regulatory institutions and business corporations, affecting everyday practices but apparently not disturbing institutional actors enough to make them change. This illustrates how trust may have a variety of meanings, functions, and implications—for example, as belief in the accountability of public institutions, an element of market exchange, and a basis for our everyday routines.

Focus here is directed toward approaches that see trust as social and relational. Trust and distrust are products of consumer culture as well as influences on it. Trust refers to a set of moral values, social cohesion, or a cultural community, according to Barbara Misztal. The background has been formulated in rational terms; Jon Elster regards trustfulness as the expression of norms that makes everyone better off than they would be without it. Norms guide social action and contribute to social stability; they create credibility to promises and threats, providing “the cement of society,” without which “chaos and anarchy would prevail.” Trust here refers to their mutuality and beliefs that other people generally live up to these norms. Theorists who, at first glance, are quite divergent seem to share this idea of trust as fundamental to social order but at the same time fragile, such that distrust and disorder are a constant threat to society.

Recent contributions in this vein have focused on issues like solidarity and cooperation. Confidence develops slowly, starting early in life with basic, trusting personal relations, continuing into engagement in social networks and organizations. Robert D. Putnam claims that engagement in community activities, in sports, politics, or helping people in need, enhances mutual trust. Trust is a form of “social capital” that can help in solving social problems as well as representing a resource for the individual. Others, like Niklas Luhmann, see trust as a mechanism that helps to reduce complexity in modern societies. Trust allows life to go on relatively freely without personal knowledge or direct control. General predictability and mutual obligations can make complex “systems,” like nation-states, global distribution systems, or scientific knowledge, work better. System distrust, on the other hand, reduces flexibility and efficiency.

Others are less optimistic, seeing increasing complexity as a major source of distrust. Ulrich Beck views contemporary distrust as a reflection of growing individual uncertainty in association with the emergence of “risk society,” the causes of risks being societal rather than natural, often emerging as unintended side effects of producing welfare (e.g., conflicts over genetically modified food). Attention is directed toward imbalances of power in the production of scientific and technological knowledge and its use in society. In this view, people have become more skeptical, less deferential, less trusting of authority, [Page 1482]and more likely to see it as their own responsibility to make decisions about their personal actions, commitments, and careers. In such circumstances, says Anthony Giddens, we see the emergence of a new, reflexive type of trust that is more consciously and actively negotiated.

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