Considerable parts of trust research have not shown too much interest in the role of institutions when analysing the development, maintenance or repair of trust. One of the reasons is that, from a psychological perspective, which is applied by many trust researchers, institutions are – if at all – merely conceptualized as external factors which may or may not have “some” effect on the quality of social relationships. In this disciplinary perspective, institutions are usually neither viewed as objects of trust nor as constitutive parts of a relationship between two actors.
Another reason for trust researchers’ relative negligence of institutions is that these are – even from a sociological perspective which puts institutions right in the centre of its interest – difficult to come to grips with because the elements of, for example, a country’s institutional framework are numerous and tend to be overlapping and fuzzy. Thus, significant methodological problems emerge when empirical research is supposed to include a given institutional order as the object of trust or systematically account for the various institutional influences that can deeply affect trust processes in social relationships. The question usually asked in this context is: How can we measure institutions? Although not everything in the social world may be “measurable” in the strict sense, this question, nonetheless, alerts us to the fact that there are frequently validity problems occurring when institutional arrangements are empirically researched. The latter seems due to their complexity and is largely independent of which epistemological approach one might favour.
A third reason can perhaps be seen in the existence of various meanings of the term “institution”. It is often not at all clear what we actually mean when we talk about institutions. Even within sociology, the term can refer to two quite different phenomena: abstract patterns of collective behaviour, for example marriage or paid labour, on the one hand, or concrete systems of established organizational forms, such as trade organizations, systems of higher education, etc. on the other. And to make it even more complicated, economists and political scientists use terminologies which suggest yet other denotations and connotations of the term “institution”.
Despite all these difficulties, trust research has managed to provide at least some important insights which are conducive to understanding the role of institutions in the context of trust processes. Simmel (1950), Luhmann (1979), Zucker (1986) and Shapiro (1987) are major points of reference in this literature. Bachmann (2001), Bachmann and Inkpen (2011), Kroeger (2012) or Fuglsang and Jagd (2015) are newer contributions which try to bring light into issues related to the phenomenon of institutional(-based) trust. In the following, we will focus on major issues in the current debate on institutional trust and try to give an overview of the state of the art in this research area, even though a large number of issues are, and perhaps will remain, controversial in this research field.
Bachmann and Inkpen (2011: 284) have defined institutional(-based) trust as “a form of individual or collective action that is constitutively embedded in the institutional environment in which a relationship is placed, building on favourable assumptions about the trustee’s future behaviour vis-à-vis such conditions”. This definition suggests to use this term not for trust that people might have in institutions but for trust that people might have in each other against the background of institutional safeguards influencing their decision making and actions.
In principle it is useful to analytically be clear about what the target of trust is, namely an institutional arrangement itself or another social actor’s behaviour which is constitutively shaped by these institutional arrangements, but in reality it is often difficult to make this distinction. Even the trustor him-/herself may not be able to tell whether he or she trusts a trained expert, for example a physician, or the medical system including its educational traditions and training curricula which medical experts have gone through before they meet patients (Bachmann, 1998). In one case, institutions are a reliable framework for a relationship between two actors, one of them (i.e., the trustee) being the object of trust. In the other case, the target of trust is an abstract system of institutional arrangements or organizationally structured entities which have gained the status of institutions, for example government, trade unions or universities.
Related but different to the concept of “institutional(-based) trust” is the term “generalized trust” (Uslaner, 2014) which is usually seen as social capital that has roots in cultural traditions as well as specific institutional arrangements. Fukuyama (1995) and many other other scholars (e.g. Zak & Knack, 2001; Dearmon & Grier, 2011; Bjørnskov, 2012) see this form of trust as very important with regard to the economic growth potential of countries in Asia and the West. Similar to “institutional(-based) trust” the concept of “generalized trust” does not (directly) refer to inter-personal relationships as such but the difference is that it is more open to all kinds of sources of trust and not specifically focussing on institutions as the concept of institutional (- based) trust does.
What does it actually mean when people say they trust in institutions? It means that a specific individual who represents the police, the national education system, the law courts, etc. is not seen as the object of trust and can thus fail to do his or her job properly or be replaced by another individual without too many consequences from the trustor’s point of view. What is more important is that a potential trustor has general, often diffuse, confidence in the functioning of social systems, irrespective of whether these are seen as a highly abstract set of rules or more concrete organizational structures.
Similar to trust at the inter-personal level, trust in institutions can build on a potential trustor’s experiences but it is also deeply cushioned into political and ideological worldviews which lack any experiential basis. This is why, for example, foreign countries’ institutions are usually trusted less than the domestic ones, and people prefer to take serious conflicts within international business relationships to a law court in their home country. In other words, the psychic distance people have to relevant institutions is in fact more often determined by cultural traditions, collective beliefs, etc. than by empirically verifiable observations.
Individual representatives of abstract social systems, however, do have a function with regard to creating and reproducing trust in institutions insofar as once in a while human faces need to appear to assure trustors that there are well-trained and responsible real actors in control of the social processes by which they are affected. Giddens’ (1990) calls this “face-work” and argues that all subsystems of modern societies, which build on highly abstract expert knowledge, e.g. public health care systems, engineering departments of large automobile manufacturers, the federal reserve bank, etc. depend on human faces which at least occasionally have to become visible. Only where this is the case potential trustors can re-embed expert systems into their sense-making and interactions at the very concrete and practical level of social conduct.
In this perspective, the term “institutional(-based) trust” refers to the trustworthiness of systemic patterns of collective action or organizational structures, such as for example the legal system (Tyler, 2006), or the system of higher education and academic research (Gibbs, 2004). Trust in institutions is often studied by way of large-scale surveys, among which are the World Value Survey (2005–2008) and the Edelman Barometer (2016). All these surveys look into how the public’s trust in media, law courts, government and many other institutions develops over time in various parts of the world.
If “institutional(-based) trust” is to be understood as trust between two actors whose interaction is constitutively and deeply embedded into the institutional arrangements that surround them, we refer to the idea of actors having trust in each other in the face of a specific quality of an institutional order. In this case, one of the key questions is how institutions can actually do their job and help develop, maintain or repair trust in concrete relationships. How, for example, can the existence of reliable legal norms, industrial relations practices or professional training systems systematically lead social actors to build their relationships on trust rather than another coordination mechanism such as power or monetary incentives?
In order to unravel the functional role of institutions for trust development, it may be useful to compare it to a situation where inter-personal trust, i.e. a dyadic constellation between a potential trustor and a potential trustee, is to be created on the basis of both parties being initially unknown to each other. What is usually suggested in such circumstances is that trust can emerge if both parties establish some common ground. If there is no shared knowledge between them it is difficult to assume that trust can develop. However, if the two actors discover common characteristics or learn about each other by experiences in repeated interaction then “characteristic-based” trust or “process-based trust” – to use Zucker’s (1986) terminology – can emerge. In other words, it is some form of a “common world” which is necessary in order to build trust between two actors because this allows the trustor as well as the trustee to make realistic assumptions about the other party’s intentions and future behaviour.
With regard to institutional trust, we may analogously say that institutional arrangements can be seen as functional equivalents to experiential processes and the awareness of shared characteristics between two actors. In other words, institutions do essentially the same job as a shared cultural background or positive experiences in dealing with one another over some time. If, for example, a potential trustor and a potential trustee know that their sense-making is embedded in the same commonly known institutional environment – legal norms, educational and training standards, social rules about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable business behaviour, etc. – then institutions will tacitly align the actors’ expectations of each other’s future behaviour. Institutions can thus provide the common ground that is a vital precondition for trust, just as a shared cultural background or repeated experiences would do in the case of interpersonal trust.
Legal norms and technical or quality certification systems are examples of institutional arrangements which can facilitate business relationships and assure actors that they are sharing an understanding of what is “common practice” and what is “right” or “wrong” behaviour in specific situations. If institutions are seen as conducive to allowing specific mutual expectations between two actors, then we can also view this as a way to reduce risk. Commonalities reduce risk and the reduction of risk – or risk perception, to be precise – can be achieved by establishing a shared understanding of the social world in which relationships between actors are embedded (Granovetter, 1985). This, undoubtedly, helps to encourage a potential trustor to actually invest trust in a relationship to a potential trustee.
In this context, it is important to note that any potential trustor is confronted with the problem that he or she needs to accept “some” level of risk. This is indeed unavoidable because where there is no risk, trust is not needed. Thus, a potential trustor seeks to at least roughly assess and, where possible, reduce the risk emerging from his or her decision to trust, i.e. the risk of being betrayed by the trustee. And here is where personal experiences, personal characteristics and institutions appear to be very similar to one another, at least in functional terms. They reduce risk to a level where the trustor will actually feel encouraged to perform the “leap of faith” (Simmel, 1950; Möllering, 2006) which would often not be the case if the inherent risk of trust was not effectively reduced. This is how institutions work and why they play such an important role in trust creation processes.
In principle, there are two ways conceivable as to how, for example, legal norms can exert their risk-reducing influence. First, actors make a rational decision and possible sanctions feature as a variable in their calculation. If this variable increases over a certain threshold, this may lead to the prediction that trust will be invested by the trustor as the trustee is assumed to behave trustworthily due to his or her fear of legal sanctions being potentially mobilized against him or her. This perspective follows assumptions deeply engrained in Rational Choice (Coleman, 1990) and Game Theory (Axelrod, 1984). However, it is questionable whether such a conceptualization has actually much to do with trust. Coleman (1990) suggests to see the trustor as if he or she was a better, for example on a race track for horses or greyhounds. However, in such situations, actors do not deal with fuzzy knowledge which seems precisely what a trustor is confronted with. If all possible knowledge is available, which should be the case for a bettor, one can indeed do a risk assessment in a purely calculative manner. But, where this is a viable approach to come to a decision of what to do or not to do, there is no need for trust. It is exactly where rational risk assessments are not possible due to the prevalence of fuzzy – rather than just incomplete – knowledge where trust has its place.
The other conceivable and indeed more realistic way to conceptualize the influence of institutions on individual behaviour follows phenomenological premises, such as those present in New Institutionalist Theory (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 1995), Structuration Theory (Giddens, 1984), Systems Theory (Luhmann, 1996) and Practice Theory (Bourdieu, 1977). In this perspective institutional arrangements are forces that only roughly – yet effectively – shape the behaviour of actors. They are not seen as exerting their influence in a deterministic manner; they rather “channel” the minds of relevant actors into specific directions. With regard to legal norms we would – on the basis of this approach – not assume that rational actors interact in the face of fear of sanctions; rather we would suggest that a large number of semi-conscious individuals’ behaviours are drawn in the same direction. If this is how institutions work, then legal norms would not need to enter individuals’ highly rational calculations before they become influential. In fact, they are in most cases expected to remain latent and would actually need to be only implicitly referred to in order to be effective in encouraging trust among social actors (Luhmann, 1979). Under these circumstances, which seem much closer to empirically observable human behaviour than the Rational Choice approach, legal norms – among other social norms – are institutional forces which can significantly support high levels of trust (building) within, for example, a business community. Legal norms do their job best if no sanctions need to be mobilized against anybody. Conflict and coercion are surely a sign of legal norms having failed to function effectively, and much the same can be said about other forms of social norms and standards which are embodied in the institutional settings of a regional or national business system, or society as a whole.
Institutional(-based) trust, as trust created between two actors in the face of strong and reliable in stitutional arrangements, is a form of trust which differs from inter-personal trust in that institutions play a constitutive role in the trust process. It may well be true that inter-personal trust is often more intensive and thus in some situations most desirable, but it also requires a lot of effort at the level of individual conduct. If strong and reliable institutions are in place, actors can draw on their trust-encouraging effects without any effort being made by an individual on the spot. This is the advantage of institutional(-based) trust. Institutions are created collectively and are relatively stable over longer periods of time. In this sense, they can be seen as an economically efficient way to reduce risk and encourage trust. Even though this form of trust may not be as strong as inter-personal trust developed in an intimate relationship between two social actors, it is widely available and easy to draw upon where strong and reliable institutions exist. In business relationships, in particular, institutional forms of trust are often very useful and – with regard to their intensity – often completely sufficient. By contrast, the absence of institutional(-based) trust may result in high immediate costs for the relevant individuals when trust needs to be built at face-to-face level, i.e. in the form of inter-personal trust. As this option might in this situation sometimes not be seen as feasible or attractive, a potential trustor might well decide to forgo the chance to engage in any transaction or consider power or purely money-based incentive systems as the primary social coordination mechanism in a specific relationship.
Following Bachmann and Inkpen (2001), four scenarios can be identified where institutional (- based) trust matters the most in business contexts: (a) at the early stages of relationship building; (b) where swift trust is needed; (c) where the level of asset specificity is low; and (d) where relatively mature industries are concerned. Ad (a): Institutional(-based) trust matters in the early stages of relationship building because it is often the perfect first step in establishing some common ground between two actors if this only requires both parties considering that alter knows the same behavioural rules emanating from institutional arrangements as ego does. This entails minimal individual costs and can be highly effective in the initial phases of a relationship. Many social interactions would not be viable if trust could only be built at the inter-personal level at this stage of the relationship because the latter usually requires significant time and effort which is not always possible or economical for potentially transacting individuals. Ad (b): Somewhat overlapping with the function of institutional(-based) trust in the early stages of relationships, and yet different, is the importance of institutional(-based) trust in situations where “swift trust” (Meyerson et al., 1996) is required. The speed of trust building is often more important than the intensity of trust. For example, there are situations where the quality of a product offered by a seller is relatively easy to assess by a potential buyer: the price may seem attractive to him or her, and the product may lose its value if it is not bought and consumed quickly. Then it can be very useful to draw on institutional arrangements which may provide a sufficient level of trust between the buyer and seller and – most important – do so instantly. Ad (c) Not every product is highly customized. Rather, most products which we use on a daily basis are fairly standardized and mass-produced. In these cases, it is not very advisable to establish an intensive form of trust, i.e. inter-personal trust, before transactions can take place. The mere existence of strong and reliable institutions can be completely sufficient and have the desired effect. Institutions may, under these circumstances, be good enough to reduce risk to a tolerable level and thus encourage a potential trustor to actually build a relationship on trust. Ad (d) An analysis of different types of industry and their affinity to specific forms of trust can also be insightful. In the high-tech sector, for example the biotech industry, it is not uncommon that firms are small start-ups, and personal bonds between a handful experts may be of the essence to develop very profitable businesses. Thus, inter-personal trust is important here, whereas institutional(-based) trust is often most useful in relatively mature industries which are characterized by large and capital-intensive operations. The automobile or chemical industries can be seen as examples. Countries in which these industries are most developed, i.e. Germany or Japan, tend to have more room for strong and reliable institutions promoting institutional-trust in business relationships rather than inter-personal trust which generally features more strongly in countries such as the UK or the US.
As indicated above, institutional arrangements can be complex and varied in terms of consistency and reliability. Any cross-country comparative research will confirm this, and much of the institutional influences on trust development, maintenance and repair can only be assessed fully in a comparative perspective (e.g. Lane, 1995; Hall & Soskice, 2001; Whitley, 2002).
In a multi-country comparative view, certain patterns tend to arise so that countries may be grouped and specific institutional arrangements which have a typical influence on trust and trust building can be identified. Liberal market economies (e.g. the UK or Australia) generally build on a low level of socio-economic regulation, i.e. institutional arrangements tend to be relatively weak and not too reliable; whereas coordinated market economies (e.g. Germany, France, etc.) tend to have a considerably stronger institutional framework. Just to pick law again as one element of the latter, the differences between the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition and the civil law tradition, which prevails in mainland Europe, are quite significant in terms of their potential to control individuals’ behaviour. Civil law is based on a commonly accessible written code which leaves very little room for interpretation. Common law, by contrast, essentially rests on prece dent cases, which lay people have little chance to identify and transfer to their specific circumstances. Or take the professional education and training systems, where also significant differences exist. In Germany, for example, standards of education and training are high and apply nationwide. In the UK, professional education and training can take on various forms and it is sometimes difficult to judge the skills of a professional merely on the basis of a certificate or degree which has been awarded to him or her. At least it is vital to know where a vocational training certificate or a university degree comes from. In Germany, by contrast, there is in daily practice hardly ever any reference made to the degree-awarding organization, and it would even seem a bit odd if somebody did emphasize it without being explicitly asked. German universities, for example, are considered to be all at an equal level and any university degree has thus the same value in the labour market as long as the grades are the same. This certainly is quite different in the English-speaking part of the world.
If forms and levels of trust are compared between countries representing the liberal market economy, on the one hand, and countries that draw on the coordinated market economy model, on the other, a robust correlation between the specific business system and the prevalent form of trust (development) appears to exist. Countries of the coordinated market economy type have strong institutions, and actors’ behaviour is deeply embedded in specific sets of institutional rules. Thus, institutional(-based) trust is in its natural habitat in these circumstances. Liberal market economies, by contrast, have comparatively loose and variable institutional arrangements and institutional(-based) trust (building) is thus not much supported. Consequently, inter-personal trust will feature more strongly in this system and actors will indeed frequently resort to other coordination mechanisms, such as power and monetary incentives, especially where inter-personal trust creation may seem not worth the effort, for example, if it is only very cheap and simple products or services that are exchanged between a seller and a buyer. Unsurprisingly, in this environment, trust is generally less present as a coordination mechanism in business relationships than in the coordinated market economy.
Each model of socio-economic order has a place for trust. However, due to the characteristics of their specific institutional arrangements, different types of trust, i.e. inter-personal vs. institutional(-based) trust, are dominant, and the availability as well as the intensity of trust differs accordingly. Institutional(-based) trust is less intense but usually widely and effortlessly available. Building inter-personal trust, by contrast, requires more individual efforts and is thus relative scarce in business and society.
It should not be ignored that some trust scholars suggest a divergent view and in fact argue that regulation is not conducive to creating trust. Their view is that the institutional guardians of trust need to be trusted themselves and thus exacerbate the problem rather than solving it (Shapiro, 1987), or they indeed go as far as to claim that strong forms of regulation are a functional equivalent to trust and will thus make trust superfluous. This is a position which is challenged by most of the “trust and/or control” literature (Arrighetti et al., 1997; Bijlsma-Frankema & Costa, 2005; Möllering, 2005) but is consistent with older strands of the socio-legal literature (Macaulay, 1963; Beale & Dugdale, 1975). What essentially follows from the latter view is that if trust is to be saved or (re-)established, for example in the financial services industry, strong forms of regulation are to be avoided and principles of business ethics should be referred to and insisted on instead (Harris et al., 2014).
On closer inspection, this view is based on an understanding of regulation which is slightly different from the concept of institutional arrangements put forward in our perspective. If regulation refers to a comprehensive set of rules that imply sanctions, which are explicitly threatened to be mobilized in the case of non-compliance, then it may be true that there is little space left for trust (Sitkin & Roth, 1993). However, if regulatory systems are embedded in cultural traditions and implicit knowledge, i.e. institutional arrangements “channel” individual actors’ behaviour, rather than appearing as a formal parameter in an individual’s calculation of the potential consequences of different behavioural options, then these institutional rules can do a very effective job in facilitating trust between social actors. In this case, it will not be necessary to simply rely on ethical claims if trust is to be encouraged in business relationships.
For a variety of historic reasons, the ditch between the advocates of ethics and regulation is largely congruent with the boundary between the liberal market economies and the coordinated market economies. The ethical approach seems attractive to many scholars in the English-speaking parts of the world while continental European scholars, for example, tend to have more confidence in regulatory policies. However, it is important to note that in continental Europe institutions and rules are always rooted in complex contexts in which they are interpreted and utilized. Where context matters less and explicit guidelines and check lists prevail as tends to be the case in the liberal market economy where cheap semi-skilled labour is used more frequently, strict rules and regulation may indeed not be very conducive to trust building, and ethical approaches appear more useful to this end. Of course, on both sides, ethics and rules can in some situations, go hand in hand and reinforce each other (Bachmann, Gillespie & Priem, 2015).
While we may have reached some understanding of the importance of institutional arrangements in the context of trust creation, we still need to invest considerably more effort into elaborating how institutionally created trust can transform behavioural practices in organizations. How, for example, can country-specific institutional arrangements such as education and training systems, systems of financing investments or legal systems translate into meso-level behavioural systems, i.e. organizational practices, in such a way that organizations are more likely to be (seen as) trust worthy? How can macro-level financial regulation policies contribute to trustworthy practices within financial services organizations? While we can explain how individuals get motivated to behave trustworthily in the face of institutional arrangements, we have not yet developed a clear understanding of how behavioural patterns and routines, as elements of organizational structure and culture, can be shaped by way of macro-level institutional frameworks.
Also, we need to invest more effort into refining our methodologies in trust research. We currently have very few ideas as to how we can capture institutions in our empirical research. Of course, we have produced many interesting case studies and some classifications of different types of institutions within business systems. But when it comes to systematically gathering empirical data on institutional frameworks our efforts tend to produce very patchy descriptions. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, institutional frameworks are varied and complex and thus pose a major challenge to empirical research. Thus, it is not surprising that conventional means to collect data, such as questionnaire-based interviews, are insufficient to come to grips with institutional arrangements and their impact on social behaviour. What seems to be needed to get to the essence of institutional systems is a combination of different methods which include powerful qualitative tools, such as focus groups or repertory grids. The methods mostly used in trust research (Lyon et al., 2015) are still oriented to measuring behaviour at the micro level. However, we have to go beyond this methodological approach in order to better understand the meso and macro contexts in which trust features as a highly embedded phenomenon.
Institutions are apparently very important where trust building, maintenance and repair are concerned. All advanced economies either draw on strong institutional arrangements to encourage institutional(-based) trust, or indeed switch to other coordination mechanisms, such as power or monetary incentive systems, when sufficient institutional(-based) trust is difficult to produce and inter-personal trust creation is too costly to establish. Admittedly, trust is not always the best coordination mechanism. There are certainly also dark sides of trust. However, on the whole, institutional(-based) trust is surely a valuable resource which socio-economic systems need to utilize if they want to be successful (Zaheer et al., 1998).
Institutional(-based) trust is specifically relevant when the quality of inter-organizational relationships in specific business systems is under review. Even in those regions and countries where institutions are relatively weak and trust is primarily of an inter-personal trust nature, institutional(-based) trust will not be completely absent and add to the production of common ground without which no developed economy or society is able to exist. The latter provides more than a good reason to further invest in the study of institutional(-based) trust.
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