Interfirm trust is not reducible to sentiment or friendship.

Evidence

How are we to interpret this stress on the importance of personal relations? Is this evidence that friendship or caring is involved in efficient economics? Are we to conclude that trust between firms depends on bonds of friendship between the respective employers or managers? From the structure of this paper you can probably foresee that my answer is negative. It would be difficult to explain how trust could be present as often as it is in subcontracting if it were to depend on sentiments of friendship. If this were true, we would have to adopt in the economic sphere Hawthorn’s (this volume) conclusion in the political: that any attempt to produce trust which was not in fact an attempt to produce something else, something self-reinforcing, must fail. It seems implausible to entertain feelings of friendship for someone when it is realized that he or she is acting in a friendly way solely for the purpose of facilitating an economic transaction. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2620

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Mirrors Hardin/Luhmann: apparent trust-as-feeling is really trust-as-observable-constraint. Personal warmth is the visible shell of a monitoring relationship.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense inversion: the author argues that the very stress on personal relations is NOT evidence of friendship, but of strategic adaptation — so closeness itself is a trust artifact, not its cause.

Related

• Inter-firm trust cannot rest on friendship because instrumental friendliness is self-defeating (similarity 0.94)
• Instrumental friendliness cannot generate genuine trust (similarity 0.85)
• Trustworthy reputation can be deliberately cultivated without deep personal bonds (similarity 0.84)
• Trust operates most prominently in friendship, unmediated by kinship or contract. (similarity 0.82)
• Trust cannot be eliminated from ongoing economic relations. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust is distinct from familiarity, friendship, and moral values (similarity 0.81)
• Trust is produced through gifts rather than required as a precondition for association (similarity 0.81)
• Trust flourishes only in the gaps left by kinship and contract structures (similarity 0.81)
• In patronage societies trust depends entirely on special personal relationships (similarity 0.81)
• Trust can be deliberately simulated and codified far beyond its natural sources (similarity 0.81)
• Trust should not be economized even without supportive feelings and networks (similarity 0.80)
• Familiarity and expected future meetings enable cooperative trust (similarity 0.80)
• Trust was historically bound to friendship, not just narrow intimacy (similarity 0.80)
• Trust operates in the zone between kinship and formal contract (similarity 0.80)
• Trusting friends more than strangers is definitional to personal bonds (similarity 0.80)