Personal trust fails where trust must cross corporate intermediaries.

Evidence

This coping strategy, for example, virtually precludes participation in collectivized forms of agency that aggregate and depersonalize and limits transactions in symbolic wealth effected by faceless market mechanisms. In complex labor markets, one can still find the dedicated family doctor among the one-shot specialists and interchangeable HMO staff physicians, the loyal attorney among the anonymous collection of law firm associates and the highly turned-over stable of franchised legal-clinic lawyers, the trusted neighborhood mechanic among the AAMCO transmission and Midas muffler shops, and other familiar specialists who provide ongoing expertise to meet individualized needs (however, see Stinchcombe 1984, pp. 864-65). But analogous long-term relationships with trusted bankers, stockbrokers, insurance agents, and others (who usually represent huge corporations that merge and divest or shift their management and ownership and, therefore, their “identities,” and who often act as intermediaries between still other faceless individuals and corporations) merely provide a personalized smokescreen for inherently collective forms of action. — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 43

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the tension between personal and institutional trust in contemporary finance and bureaucracy literature; the ‘personalized smokescreen’ idea echoes critiques of relationship banking and advice-as-cost. — connects to: Corporate municipal rule enabled corruption that individuals could not sustain; System trust survives individual disappointments that would destroy personal trust; Institutions substitute for trust by securing trustworthiness coercively. (+1 more)

Related

• Corporate municipal rule enabled corruption that individuals could not sustain (similarity 0.83)
• The very conditions that create agency also preclude personalizing trust relationships. (similarity 0.80)
• Impersonal trust emerges where face-to-face control mechanisms are unavailable (similarity 0.79)
• Impersonal trust persists despite agency tensions and varies greatly across conditions. (similarity 0.79)
• People respond to trust risks by reducing reliance on agents, at great cost. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• System trust survives individual disappointments that would destroy personal trust #qualifies (0.75)
• Institutions substitute for trust by securing trustworthiness coercively. #complicates (0.75)