A system’s trust decisions depend on which membership system it refers to.

Evidence

It is a basic thesis of systems theory that systems constitute themselves by means of the distinction between inner and outer and maintain themselves by stabilizing this boundary. If we conceive rationality in the sociological sense as system rationality, it is plausible to seek in this inner/outer distinction a rational criterion for the distinctive location and the joint increase of trust or distrust. In working out this idea, care must be taken to distinguish different system references. The reference system whose inner/outer distinction we are now considering is not the system which trusts or distrusts. It is not therefore a matter of distinguishing external and internal conditions for trust, which was dealt with earlier. We are referring now rather to the case where a system, be it a person or a social system, takes part in another social system, so that it becomes enmeshed into a social system through membership and is called upon to decide, in questions of trust, whether from the point of view of this membership system trust is required for system-internal or for system-external processes. Although system nestings of many sorts are involved, we can, to simplify matters, consider the case of the membership of people in organizations. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 314

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key distinction: the reference system for trust is the membership system a person participates in, not their own person-system.
• XREF: This nesting-of-memberships framing — a person embedded in an organizational system deciding what to trust — maps directly onto Stevens’s position within Darlington Hall in Ishiguro’s novel.