I have been interested in the notion of trust for some time now, as it seems to me to evade explicit characterisation being partially embedded in the social infrastructure of culture and expectations, and only superficially in what is accessible to observation.
There are some phenomenon which it makes sense to explicitly represent as concrete data in a system. Details of persons and of business transactions for example, which correspond to items and facts in the real world, to put it somewhat niavely. They are if you like representable in the indicative mood (descriptions of what is actual ) , but there are other highly significant, more phenomenonolgical ‘facts’ about situations that cannot be adequately dealt with so concretely. Trust is an example of such a phenomenon which may indicate its presence through the absence of other concrete elements so that the difference between cautious low trust environment for example and more casual, high trust environment might be characterised by the magnitude size of the information flows relative to the rationality of the process itself.
It is said that in rural towns where ’everyone knows everyone else’ it is not unusual for residents to leave their doors unlocked, or to engage in business transactions by word of mouth on the understanding that both parties will act appropriately purely on the grounds of an unspoken commitment to a common social bond of community. In these cases, the necessary precautions that would otherwise be taken when trust is low, are as it were ‘stored’ in the social and cultural field surrounding the participants so that both parties know that certain behaviour is unacceptable. The amount of information that the parties need to exchange in such a context may be very low indeed, because both participants share a background knowledge that does not need to be made explicit in each transaction, but which nevertheless co-determines the behaviour and expectations of both parties and of the extended community at large.
It is not easy to manufacture such a situation, as something like trust must be built up over time, through repeated sucessful interactions that are mutually beneficial. It is likely also that an outsider, looking in on such interactions and observing only the concrete content of the exchange, might miss the essence of the situation entirely. And it is unlikely that either party would be able to make the grounds of their interaction explicit or explain why it is reasonable to forgo specific precautions; or why they failed to mitigate specfic risks associated with the interaction. Trust is, as it were indivisible, and manifests itself in the very casualness and familiarity that troubled the outsider in the first place. So trust is perhaps a social and sometimes communal virtue, akin to friendship and loyalty, strengthened when exercised, threatened when neglected, evasive, valuable and resistent to explicit interrogation. And trust is pervasive, in that every community, whether it is a workplace, a sporting club, a family, or a market place will be grounded in a shared value system, unwritten rules of engagement and so on. Every interaction will be like the proverbial ice berg with the bulk of its mass below the surface of the water, and perhaps even below the awareness of the participants themselves.
This being the case, attempts to  ’reengineer’ the business processes through BPM for example or to automate aspects of the workplace, such as B2B initiatives, would have to find some way of making explicit everything that is ’below the ice’ and in such a way that trust-based features of the situation are not destroyed. They must effectively extract the background understanding from the socio-cultural field, and install it as an explicit component of some technical system. In so doing though, the dynamic that ensured that trust was re-inforced through being exercised is lost and the system must now enforce what has become policies and ‘business rules’ and these grow according to a different dynamic – one driven be the demands of efficiency, transparency, the need for risk mitigation, and so on. Perhaps this is simply a byproduct of the rationalisation of society, as discussed by Max Weber, but the phenomenon of trust is i believe actually a formal structure, which is significantly threatened by various re-engineering endevours, which might even including the whole enterprise architecture approach itself.
I am looking for a way to analyse the phenomenon of trust along similar lines to the way that Michel Foucault analysed power and knowledge, in ’Discipline and Punish’ as pervasive and indirect structures of expertise and practice. Heidegger’s notion of the referential totality of background understanding from ‘Being and Time’ also seems relevant, as loss of trust manifests itself as a break in community or disruption in everyday goings-on. Enterprise architecture is essentially a making-explicit, and involves bringing language to bear on conceptual structures such that what is thought can be made public and intelligible and eventually real. But where trust is found in concrete situations, it has been achieved through a process of repeated sucessful trustings and re-trustings that cannot be adequately expressed in a service agreement. Indeed, the very notion of contracts and agreements are perhaps manifestations of the loss of trust that i am alluding to and are themselves attempts to substitute something explicit and public for something more ephemoral and personal. Trust is perhaps an essentially communal asset grounded in the shared world of individual persons, and passed on through institutions, and where business re-engineering attempts to re-organise such relationships, can erect a replica, but the spirit of the original has already disolved into the atmosphere…. here endeth this rant.
