Trust

It was in The Philosophy of Money that Georg Simmel had written the sentence that could be said to be a necessary starting point for every contemporary investigation of the phenomenon of trust: “Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty about another person, and very few relationships would endure if trust were not as strong as, or stronger than, rational proof or personal observation” (1978, pp. 178–179). Harold Garfinkel, in his experiments with trust, elaborated that “‘trust’ as a condition of stable concerted actions” (1963, p. 187) can be transformed into “attitude of daily life” (1963, p. 210).

Tim Traverse-Healy

Professional in Public Relations: 50 Years of Principles and Practice, http://www.pr-50years.co.uk. Reprinted with permission.

Originally, trust (fiducia) was a personal phenomenon that, at least since Peter Lombard (1100–1160), denoted the volitional aspect (facultas voluntatis) of medieval Christian faith (fides). In medieval Christianity,

For Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who accepted Lombard's phrase that man is endowed with both volitional and rational capacities, facultas voluntatis et rationis, it is the will that guides reason in the human search for the final meaning of life in acceptance and love of God.

In his work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, originally published in 1877 with a subtitle “A Treatise on Communism and Socialism as Empirical Forms of Culture,” which in the second edition, in 1902, was changed to “Basic Concepts of Pure Sociology,” a German sociologist, Ferdinand Toennies, secularized the notion of will and placed it on a societal level: “The scope of social will is the whole of the environmental conditioning of social interaction” (1971, p. 94). This way trust also lost its personal character and became the foundation and property of social order. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim adopted this redefinition of trust from a personal to a social fact that “is to be recognised by the power of external coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals” (1972, p. 58). This notion, that the underlying reality of trust is “irreducibly sociological” (Lewis & Weigert, 1985, p. 456), is still present in contemporary sociological approaches to trust.

In the second half of the 20th century, it was recognized in economics that trust as a form of social control has an economic value. Economic activities, as well as having “production costs,” also have “transaction costs” (Williamson, 1985, pp. 18–19), which are the costs of running economic activities and correspond to the notion of friction in physics. Trust serves as a lubricant that smoothes transactions and is therefore a cost-saving device. As we can monetarize transaction costs, so we can monetarize savings we get from applying trust—instead of personally investing in monitoring and control. Trust thus becomes a commodity itself and we can draw its utility function: trust and transaction costs are inversely related. Instead of transaction costs, E. L. Khalil wrote of “organisational costs” as “the cost of distrust and the cost to minimize it” (1994, p. 392). Although the economic notion of trust as a costsaving device stands on the sociological notion of trust as a social control that limits the permissible and available repertoire of human behavior, Francis Fukuyama applied the economic notion of trust to sociological theory in 1995, paralleling economic (transaction or organisational) costs with social costs: trust in a society is inversely related to the costs associated with monitoring and controlling its members (police, courts, etc.).

...