Shapiro, Susan P. — The Social Control of Impersonal Trust

88 published claims from this book.

• Agency relationships drive social differentiation and bridge exchange distances
• Agency relationships multiply because scale creates access barriers to information and property.
• Collective agency shifts trust from persons to future-dated impersonal systems
• Contracts function as a form of norm-making between principals and agents
• Controlling trust creates new opportunities for abuse in an inflationary spiral.
• Controlling trust institutions increases dissatisfaction with their offerings.
• Courts hold directors liable for decisions made without adequate deliberation.
• Credit rating firms now function as regulators whose ratings corporations actively negotiate around.
• Credit ratings can be rented, shifting risk onto investors who trust them.
• Escalating trust guardianship distorts the original agency purpose
• Even honest guardians may not actually deliver the protection principals assume.
• Even parties who trust personally still adopt contracts.
• Excessive legal rigidity aimed at mistrust produces misgovernment
• Fiduciary duties respond to generic trustee opportunities for abuse through custody, access, and expertise.
• Fiduciary integrity is secured by severing agents from private loyalties and holdings
• Financial institutions signal trustworthiness through names that promise security and faith.
• Fraudsters exploit trust in overseers by forging faux regulators
• Gatekeeping mechanisms like licensing and peer review make trustees reproduce themselves in choosing successors.
• Geographic distance from information sources drives reliance on agents
• Guarantees merely shift trust to a further party, not remove it
• Guardians of trust are themselves positioned to abuse the trust placed in them.
• Guardians of trust are themselves trustees requiring ever-higher-order oversight
• Guardians of trust are themselves wide open to bribery and cooptation.
• Guardians’ reliability can decay over time, defeating static trust guarantees
• Impersonal trust emerges where face-to-face control mechanisms are unavailable
• Impersonal trust emerges where principals lose direct power to regulate agents.
• Impersonal trust persists despite agency tensions and varies greatly across conditions.
• Institutional trust guardians offer advance protection against future agent misconduct.
• Insurance and collateral fail as trust substitutes because they themselves demand trust.
• Insurance on institutional trustees both creates moral hazard and enables ancillary social control.
• Job rotation and deliberate redundancy deter collusion by raising conspiracy reorganization costs.
• Journalistic objectivity is a recent convention enabling shared trust markers rather than actual truth.
• Journalistic rules of impartiality suppress reporters’ own inferences
• Mechanisms for controlling impersonal trust themselves create new opportunities for abuse
• Modern commerce protects agency relationships through layered insurance and bonding
• Modern trustee training mirrors Weberian charismatic education in asceticism and testing
• Modern wealth consists of symbolic promises exchanged among strangers.
• Nineteenth-century Americans shunned life insurance as hazardous but embraced trust business.
• Organizations structurally sever intimate and financial ties that compromise fiduciary disinterestedness.
• Outside trust inspectors must infer trustee quality from indirect evidence.
• People delegate precisely because they lack the expertise to specify the task.
• People respond to trust risks by reducing reliance on agents, at great cost.
• Personal trust fails where trust must cross corporate intermediaries.
• Portfolio insurance designed to limit losses can amplify market volatility.
• Principals collectivize trust oversight to gain leverage through embedded ties.
• Principals delegate precisely because they cannot specify or evaluate agent performance.
• Principals mitigate distrust by hoarding wealth, self-sufficiency, or acquiring expertise.
• Principals spread risk through loans, reinsurance, and swaps to curb agent abuse.
• Private self-regulators can beat external regulators on knowledge and trust.
• Procedural norms substitute for outcome-control when agent behavior is hard to specify.
• Procedural norms substitute for substantive control when outcomes are hard to specify.
• Procedural rules for information offer conventions, not objective truth, for interpreting agents’ data.
• Protestant sect membership certificates once functioned as portable credit for strangers
• Rating agencies increasingly function as rule makers rather than neutral judges.
• Redundant oversight networks can either cushion or cascade failures
• Risk-spreading strategies like securitization exacerbate agency abuse rather than reducing it.
• Role competence is defined minimally as following basic procedural norms, not achieving good outcomes.
• Secrecy and distance structurally prevent principals from monitoring agents.
• Self-dealing spans conflicts of interest, exploitation of organizational resources, and insider trading.
• Self-regulation protects against fringe abuses while shielding mainstream misconduct.
• Social relations enable malfeasance on a larger scale than their absence does.
• Social-control remedies reproduce the structural vulnerabilities they target.
• Some fraudsters seek certification knowing corrupt inspectors will approve them.
• Structural conflicts of interest make independent auditors structurally incapable of full candor.
• Structural opportunity for agent abuse does not explain why agents actually seize it.
• The institutions that police trust are themselves trustees subject to the same agency problems.
• The same factors enabling agency relationships create the opportunity for agent abuse.
• The same features enabling trust also enable agent abuse.
• The very conditions that create agency also preclude personalizing trust relationships.
• The very mechanisms that enable trust also enable its abuse.
• Third-party trust guardians create new opportunities for exploitation.
• Trust can arise even when transactions are not embedded in social relations.
• Trust constraint-setting trades false alarms against missed betrayals.
• Trust control is a specialized occupation that sidelines ordinary actors
• Trust emerges from gradually escalated reciprocal exchanges in ongoing relationships
• Trust enables action before another party’s cooperation is assured.
• Trust expands the complexity a social system can sustain.
• Trust guardians purposefully fuse competing theories of social action
• Trust in economic life arises from social relations rather than morality or institutions alone.
• Trust institutions vary dramatically in the guardianship they receive
• Trust is a social relationship of investing responsibility in another for uncertain future return.
• Trust is defined as delegating authority for uncertain future returns
• Trust is structurally precarious because agents control symbolic wealth at a distance from principals.
• Trust is structurally vulnerable because agents can exploit principals’ ignorance and distance.
• Trust-based agency relationships fail when the principal cannot exit or evaluate.
• Trusted agents face a dense lattice of institutional surveillance.
• Trusting agency relationships enables complex social organization.
• Uncertainty-reduction strategies induce rather than replace trust.