Preexisting reciprocal interdependence needs no communication and sustains trust tacitly

Evidence

The situation is different when such interdependencies already exist and can be presumed to be known, when the participants are living in a system which is familiar to both of them, so no further information about it is required, since it tacitly provides an everyday basis for mutual understanding. In such circumstances the participants know that they are bound to encounter one another again, and that they are bound to become dependent on one another in situations which cannot be exactly foreseeable, and which sometimes favour one of them, and sometimes the other. They also know, each of them, that their partner assesses the situation in those terms. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 180

Categorization

• XREF: This is the systemic/preinstitutional substrate that Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ build upon — a shared system within which experts and laypersons expect long-run mutual encounter, so individual facework can be dispensed with.