Organizations shift the risk of trust from the individual to the system

Evidence

If the effect of these various mechanisms is to be increased, their combination must be secured independently of personal motivational structures and proclivity for risk. This can only be done through organization, which brings into play new, impersonal, motives for action. To this extent, moreover, a differentiation of the system to be trusted is a prerequisite for extensive inner specification. Organization in no way makes trust and distrust superfluous but it depersonalizes these mechanisms. The person who trusts no longer does so at his own risk but at the risk of the system. All he has to do is to take care still that no detectable mistakes creep into his bestowing of trust. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 322

Categorization

• XREF: This is Luhmann’s account of how ‘faceless commitments’ work — the individual delegates risk-bearing to expert systems, exactly the mechanism Giddens describes and Ishiguro dramatizes in Stevens’s deference to Darlington Hall.
• DEFINE: Defines organizational depersonalization of trust as the mechanism that relieves the individual of personal risk-bearing.