Separating personal from firm resources curbs distrust from kinship mediation

Evidence

Khaldun dislikes specialization because it sets individuals apart from the uniform community. Part of the specialization he rejects is in the task of handling difficult interpersonal exchanges and other enterprises. For such matters, we may be glad that no one of us relies on our cousins for managing those relationships. When your cousins now do play a strong role in mediating our relations, I have reason for distrust. This is, of course, the point of Max Weber’s thesis (1981, … 228) on the rise of the modern business corporation and the invention of the idea of corporate capital of fourteenth century Florence: the resources and accounts of the individual get separated from those of the firm. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 865

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s integration: the separation of personal from corporate accounts is a structural mechanism that reduces reliance on kin-trust, paralleling the institutional separations in the diamond trade reading.