📚

Trust & Reputation Library

Trust and Power

In this important book, Niklas Luhmann uses his powers as an analyst of the social system to examine two of the most important concepts which hold that system together and allow it to evolve: trust and power. He criticises those theoretical accounts whose roots lie in what he refers to as ideologies accounts which use implicit beliefs in particular conceptions of human nature to explain and predict social action in a one-dimensional way. Theories of rational choice and moralistic explanations are taken to task, as are the theories of both Marx and Habermas. Luhmanns unique scientific sociology underpins every page and enables him to highlight the potential shortcomings of these narrative approaches. Underlying this approach is the idea that ideologically-based social theory, whether critical or conservative, is unable to do justice to the complexities existing within the parameters of social systems, individuals, and the interactions between them. He aims to show instead how only a painstaking systems analysis can capture these intricacies. Although written over 40 years ago, Luhmanns complex vision of the operations of trust and power provides a wealth of insights of considerable value to scholars and students grappling with contemporary social and economic problems. The editors introduction to this new edition and the significant revisions they have made to the translation will help to reveal the richness and clarity of this vision and its relevance to the ways that trust and power operate in todays society.

www.wiley.com

Trust is an important layer to the human experience that is required, secured and applied to navigate uncertainty in the present. This uncertainty is primarily introduced by human actors capacity for unpredictable actions. Trust is placed in the expectations of others to uphold commitments to fulfil certain obligations in the future that they are judged to have made based on the identities applied to them within an interaction. Trust, like identity, is not static or fixed, but contextually dependent, individually perceived and constantly changing in response to information. For trust to be placed intelligently, identities and their binding to entities must be stabilised by systems of trustworthy information flows that provide assurances in the constancy and continued applicability of these identities within future presents. In doing so, trust structures possibilities from a meaningful experience reducing the complexity of action selection in relation to an uncertain future populated with unpredictable entities. (See https://iiexhibition.studio/exhibit/6 for diagram)

I also strongly believe that instead of trying to design systems based on a pattern commonly used today of identify, predict and control at ever greater fidelity so as to reduce the uncertainty and need for trust is a mistake.

Trust is a powerful tool that allows us to navigate uncertainty without proscribing the form the future will take. It keeps the future open to possibility and emergence. We should design for that.