Trust and social context

The question of trust, in the last decade moved from bit player to center stage in various domains, from philosophy, psychology and sociology to political science and economy, especially in organizational theory. The interest in trust issues has been fueled, at least in part, by accumulating empirical evidence that trust has a number of important benefits for organizations or institutions and their members. Remarkably, little effort has been made to integrate these different perspectives of articulating the key role that trust plays in social processes, i.e. in any kind of cooperative activity. In the paper, the author is concerned with two different global perspectives on trust: (i) philosopher's perspective (or perspective of personality theories) as a primarily individual perspective that stresses the individual personality differences or character traits as the main motivational factor and the target of trust-worthiness appraisal; (ii) the perspective in social psychology, sociology, political sciences and economics which understand trust as a mainly social and institutional phenomenon and focus on the interpersonal transactions between individuals that create or destroy trust. The main aim of this paper is to try to argue in favor of a compromise contextual perspective between individual and social approaches as a perspective that is most promising in detecting organizational or institutional barriers to the production of trust.