Impersonal Trust in Global Mediating Organizations

Abstract

The concept of impersonal trust in indirect social relationships is often treated as analogous to the personal trust of direct interpersonal relationships (whether “primary” or “secondary”). Studies in economic sociology of personal networks and overlapping trust relations among directors of major corporations, however, regard trust (or mistrust) as more exclusively a “property” of direct relationships. Personal trust relations, this study argues, are qualitatively different from impersonal ones, such as global mediating organizations of trust that give institutional promises to guard investments against future risk. They attempt to fulfill the claims of economic rationality in the face of the insuperable problem of temporality. Impersonal trust organizations include multinational accountancy firms and credit-rating agencies that provide allegedly reliable and objective ratings of firms and governments to financial speculators. Although a director of Moody's Investors Services argues (with reference to the 1997 East Asian “crisis”) that “markets are made up of atomised individuals, outside the controls of even the most vigilant governments,” this neglects the mediating trust organization itself, an “authority” that not only constantly tries to maintain its trustworthy appearance but one that unintentionally gives rise to increasing constraints and lack of agency. The implications of paying greater attention to impersonal trust in such global organizations are discussed.