The effective functioning of a democratic society—including social, business, and political interactions—largely depends on trust. Yet trust remains a fragile and elusive resource in many of the organizations that make up society's building blocks. In their timely volume, Trust and Distrust in Organizations, editors Roderick M. Kramer and Karen S. Cook have compiled the most important research on trust in organizations, illuminating the complex nature of how trust develops, functions, and often is thwarted in organizational settings. With contributions from social psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and organizational theorists, the volume examines trust and distrust within a variety of settings—from employer-employee and doctor-patient relationships, to geographically dispersed work teams and virtual teams on the internet. Trust and Distrust in Organizations opens with an in-depth examination of hierarchical relationships to determine how trust is established and maintained between people with unequal power. Kurt Dirks and Daniel Skarlicki find that trust between leaders and their followers is established when people perceive a shared background or identity and interact well with their leader. After trust is established, people are willing to assume greater risks and to work harder. In part II, the contributors focus on trust between people in teams and networks. Roxanne Zolin and Pamela Hinds discover that trust is more easily established in geographically dispersed teams when they are able to meet face-to-face initially. Trust and Distrust in Organizations moves on to an examination of how people create and foster trust and of the effects of power and betrayal on trust. Kimberly Elsbach reports that managers achieve trust by demonstrating concern, maintaining open communication, and behaving consistently. The final chapter by Roderick Kramer and Dana Gavrieli includes recently declassified data from secret conversations between President Lyndon Johnson and his advisors that provide a rich window into a leader's struggles with problems of trust and distrust in his administration. Broad in scope, Trust and Distrust in Organizations provides a captivating and insightful look at trust, power, and betrayal, and is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the underpinnings of trust within a relationship or an organization. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

The dynamics of trust and distrust are central to understanding modern society. These dynamics are evident at all levels of society, from the child’s relation to caregivers to the individual’s relation to the state, and they span from taken for granted trusting relationships to highly reflective and negotiated contractual interactions. The collection of papers in this book questions the diverse ways in which the concept of trust has been previously used, and advances a coherent theorisation of the socio-cultural dynamics of trust and distrust. In this volume, trust and distrust are analysed in relation to lay knowledge and situated in historical, cultural and interactional contexts. The contexts analysed include witch-hunting during the Reformation, China before and after the move to capitalism, building close personal relationships in South Korea, the representation of political corruption in Brazil, tourists bargaining for souvenirs in the Himalaya, disclosing being HIV+ in India, the historical shaping of trust in Portugal, and the role of trust and distrust in the economic development of the Baltic States. Throughout these analyses, and in associated commentaries and theoretical chapters, the focus is upon the cultural and social constitution of trust and distrust.

Mark Knights offers the first overview of Britain's history of corruption in office in the pre-modern era, 1600-1850. Drawing on extensive archival material, Knights shows how corruption in the domestic and imperial spheres interacted, and how the concept of corruption developed during this period, changing British ideas of trust and distrust.

The importance of research on the notion of trust has grown considerably in the social sciences over the last three decades. Much has been said about the decline of political trust in democracies and intense debates have occurred about the nature and complexity of the relationship between trust and democracy. Political trust is usually understood as trust in political institutions (including trust in political actors that inhabit the institutions), trust between citizens, and to a lesser extent, trust between groups. However, the literature on trust has given no special attention to the issue of trust between minority and majority nations in multinational democracies – countries that are not only multicultural but also constitutional associations containing two or more nations or peoples whose members claim to be self-governing and have the right of self-determination. This volume, part of the work of the Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales (GRSP), is a comparative study of trust, distrust, and mistrust in multinational democracies, centring on Canada, Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Beliefs, attitudes, practices, and relations of trust, distrust, and mistrust are studied as situated, interacting, and coexisting phenomena that change over time and space. Contributors include Dario Castiglione (Exeter), Jérôme Couture (INRS-UCS), Kris Deschouwer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jean Leclair (Montréal), Patti Tamara Lenard (Ottawa), Niels Morsink (Antwerp), Geneviève Nootens (Chicoutimi), Darren O’Toole (Ottawa), Alexandre Pelletier (Toronto), Réjean Pelletier (Laval), Philip Resnick (UBC), David Robichaud (Ottawa), Peter Russell (Toronto), Richard Simeon (Toronto), Dave Sinardet (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and Jeremy Webber (Victoria).

If trust is sometimes the rational response in interpersonal relations, then it can also be rational to distrust. Indeed, distrust is the preferred response when it protects against harm—as when parents do not entrust the safety of their child to a disreputable caretaker. Liberal political theory was largely founded on distrust of government, and the assumption that government cannot and should not be trusted led the framers of the U.S. constitution to establish a set of institutions explicitly designed to limit government power. With contributions from political science, anthropology, economics, psychology, and philosophy, Distrust examines the complex workings of trust and distrust in personal relationships, groups, and international settings. Edna Ullman-Margalit succinctly defines distrust as the negation of trust, and examines the neutral state between the two responses in interpersonal relations. As Margalit points out, people typically defer judgment—while remaining mildly wary of another's intentions—until specific grounds for trust or distrust become evident. In relations between nations, misplaced trust can lead to grievous harm, so nations may be inclined to act as though they distrust other nations more than they actually do. Editor Russell Hardin observes that the United States and the former Soviet Union secured a kind of institutionalized distrust—through the development of the nuclear deterrent system—that stabilized the relationship between the two countries for four decades. In another realm where distrust plays a prominent role, Margaret Levi, Matthew Moe, and Theresa Buckley show that since the National Labor Relations Board has not been able to overcome distrust between labor unions and employers, it strives to equalize the power held by each group in negotiations. Recapitulating liberal concerns about state power, Patrick Troy argues that citizen distrust keeps government regulation under scrutiny and is more beneficial to the public than unconditional trust. Despite the diversity of contexts examined, the contributors reach remarkably similar conclusions about the important role of trust and distrust in relations between individuals, nations, and citizens and their governments. Distrust makes a significant contribution to the growing field of trust studies and provides a useful guide for further research. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

Gauging another state's trustworthiness -- A weak form of trust reflecting external compulsion -- A semi-strong form of trust motivated by reputational considerations -- A strong form of trust grounded in appropriateness and unthinkability

This book is the result of the workshop “Deception, Fraud, and Trust in Agent Societies”, held in Barcelona on June 4, 2000 as part of the Autonomous Agents 2000 Conference, and organized by Rino Falcone, Munindar Singh, and Yao-Hua Tan. The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from di?- ent ?elds (Arti?cial Intelligence, Multi-Agent Systems, Cognitive Science, Game Theory, and Social and Organizational Sciences) that could contribute to a b- ter understanding of trust and deception in agent societies. The workshop scope included theoretical results as well as their applications in human-computer - teraction and electronic commerce. This book includes the revised and extended versions of the works presented at the workshop, incorporating many points that emerged in our discussions, as well as invited papers from experts in the ?eld, which in our view allows a complete coverage of all relevant issues. We gratefully acknowledge the ?nancial support from the Italian National Research Council - Institute for Cognitive S- ence and Technology and the ALFEBIITE European Project, contract number IST-1999-10298. We would like to express our gratitude to Cristiano Castelfranchi for his stimulating and valuable comments and suggestions both for the organization of the workshop and for the preparation of this book.