The last fifteen years have seen an explosion in research on trust, but there are still important gaps in our understanding of its sources and consequences.1 In particular, we know relatively little about the relationship between trust and the other sources of cooperation that social scientists have identified, most prominently institutions, sets of rules that shape the behavior of communities of actors through providing individuals with information about the likely social consequences of their action. How may we map out the relationship between midlevel phenomena, such as institutional rules, and micro-level expectations, such as those involved in trust? It is hard to answer these questions because debates about trust have emerged in partial isolation from broader social science debates about the respective roles of institutions (Knight 1998) and other mid-level social phenomena in supporting cooperation. The result is that even though scholars of trust are surely interested in the empirical question of how trust operates within environments shaped by institutions they lack intellectual tools that would help them investigate this, and related questions, easily.
Henry Farrell, “Constructing Mid-Range Theories of Trust: The Role ofInstitutions,” Whom Can We Trust? How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make Trust Possible (the Capstone volume of the Russell Sage Foundation project on Trust) eds. Karen Cook, Russell Hardin and Margaret Levi, Russell Sage Foundation: 2009).