A society’s trust-proffering style is shaped by which social groups control self-presentation.

Evidence

On the other hand, in these various equifinal causal constellations there probably exist various opportunities for social control of the process which offer different social groups ways of influencing it. Assurance in presentation, which is based on an elite education, is of a different sort, and has a mode of preparedness to take risks different from the inherent quick-wittedness of a campaign-hardened local politician or the irrepressibility of a commercial traveller, which is merely specific to that role. … One may suppose that the style of social interaction in a society, and hence also the specific directions in which it is prepared to proffer trust, are very significantly determined by those social forces which influence the inner sources of trust, in that they open up possible channels of expression for emotions and opportunities for successful self-presentation. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 296

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis: Stevens’s elite-trained assurance (never making a faux pas, attributing upsets to others) is exactly the inner source of trust Luhmann describes — links to Giddens’s facework and to Darlington-era class culture in Ishiguro. — connects to: Whoever controls category definitions holds the basis of social power. — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 77
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: elite presentation/self-presentation styles as class markers shaping social interaction, parallel to dress-coded class signaling.