A pragmatic contribution for a more reflexive institution-based trust

Abstract

This paper presents a philosophical reflection on the concept of trust in order to promote a pragmatic reflexivity in institutionalist theory. The objective of this article is to indicate why the best way to deal with trust issues is to reflexively balance their rational and routine origins. Understood as an individualist effort for the rational action theory, such reflexive requirement nevertheless asks for a complex interrogation of the nature of the intersubjectivity at stake. To fully understand the sources and the mechanisms of institution-based trust requires taking into account the peculiar bond that actors have with their own institutional framing as a condition of stability of their common-sense world. People rely on institutions to interact on daily basis and reflexivity is the mechanism that operates the equilibrium between individual reason and institutional routine. Neoinstitutionalist approaches in organisational theory are often understood as having integrated such modality. We believe on the contrary that they have not sufficiently taken into account the reflexive requirement where a pragmatic understanding of institutional trust does. Our contribution calls then for a research methodology based on scientific humility and for the definition of pluralist and experimental collective action principles.

Keywords:

• trust
• reflexivity
• institutionalism
• pragmatism
• rational action theory
• social phenomenology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank professors Charles Sabel and Richard J. Bernstein for their comments on the initial version of this paper. I am also deeply grateful for the discussions with Tom Dedeurwaerdere, professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain and director of the BioGov unit at the Centre for Philosophy of Law.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (F.R.S.-FNRS), Belgium.

Notes on contributor

Benjamin Six is post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Philosophy of Law (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and is benefiting from a research grant awarded by the F.R.S.-FNRS. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy, and his main areas of research are governance theory, political epistemology and contemporary pragmatism. He is the author of Confiance réflexive et institutionnalisme (English translation: Reflexive trust and institutionalism) (P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2013).

Notes

1. Here is how one of the greatest advocates of ‘public choice theory’, James Buchanan, describes this research programme: ‘any differences in the predicted results stemming from market and political interaction stem from differences in the structures of these two institutional settings rather than from any switch in the motives of persons as they move between institutional roles. The relevant difference between markets and politics does not lie in the kinds of values interests that person pursue, but in the conditions under which they pursue their various interests’ (Buchanan, 1987, p. 1434). As we will see, this precise idea that there is a separation between the realm of individual motives and the institutional structure constitutes one of the most problematic issues with the rationalist paradigm.

2. The backward induction argument pushes one player to refuse or to stop the cooperation following the idea that, at one point, the game will stop, and that the last one who has not played will loose the benefits of his/her commitment. It seems then logical to be the first one to stop and to take directly advantage of the gain realised in the defection.

3. The issue of the freedom limitation also explains why the RAT has deep roots into the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Well-known for its Leviathan figure, the Hobbesian political economy, grounded on a socio-sceptical anthropology, relies on a mutual advantage principle, through which the restriction of freedom can only be understood as the collective implication of the generalisation of individual interests (Hobbes, 1998). Because the state of nature is characterises by violence, citizens gave the power to an authority to bind themselves in order to sustain peace.

4. Möllering uses the relation between Robinson Crusoe and Friday to explain the reflexive elaboration of trust. When those two met, they both had nothing to rely on to trust each other: no current institutions, rules or habits in order to evaluate the trustworthiness of the other and to choose a strategy. ‘In other words, there is no game to start with or, at least, not one that gives a basis of trust. (…) What would be required is that, in a process of interaction, Robinson and Friday learn to trust each other through mutual experience, knowledge and rules that develop over time’ (Möllering, 2006, p. 77).

5. There are indeed trusting modalities that cannot be grounded on an interest calculus. Philip Pettit talks of the ‘cunning of trust’, the strange fact that, often, when a trusting request is put in motion, people tend to automatically respond to it positively. The fact to simply present a signal of trust raises some sort of acceptance of the relation at stake by the trustee, when this one wants simply to be in the good opinion of the trustor. ‘And so the trustor (…) may have a reason to trust someone, even when he actually has no reason to believe in the other's pre-existing trustworthiness’ (Pettit, 1995, p. 216). If this argument may still seem vaguely rational, even if it is going against the trustworthiness epistemology elaborated by Hardin, the crucial idea relies on the origin of this desire of recognition. And we think that there are diverse cases that prove that this desire to be successfully relied on is not always based on an interest. For example, what could possibly justify the credit given to the explanations about directions to follow given by a total stranger in the street? What is his/her interest in doing such a thing, and losing time in the process?

6. Quéré is one of the sociologists who adopted the pragmatist approach in France during the 1980s. As Daniel Cefaï explains, the French pragmatist sociology paradigm has a lot in common with American cultural sociology, focusing on meaning-making activities and ‘trying not to start, by any means, (…) analysis with macro-structures’ (Cefaï, 2009). This research programme is strongly influenced by the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur, the pragmatism of John Dewey and the ethno-methodology of Erving Goffman. This paradigm created a new analytical scheme in the field of collective action, while mixing concepts such as situational analysis, experience, meaning and collective entities (Cefaï, 2009).

7. On the issue of recognition, Quéré refers to the well-known work of Axel Honneth, for whom, following the Kantian tradition, to recognise someone is to give him/her an intrinsic value and a moral authority (Honneth, 1996). Quéré explains then the fundamental difference between the fact of estimating someone trustworthy on the basis of a truth or on the basis of a value: in the first case we use a knowledge judgement, and in the second a moral judgement (Quéré, 2009, pp. 50–51). Applied to our example of asking a stranger for directions in the street, we then understand why this fact implies a strong moral perspective in order to give credit to his/her answer.

8. It is interesting to underline how such approach of trust operates a critical return on the transcendental inclination of the phenomenological research methodology. By inverting the Husserlian essentialist phenomenological methodology of the life-world, Schütz unearthed the principle of existentialist phenomenology, afterwards mostly taken over and theorised by sociological thought and its neoinstitutionalist and ethno-methodological movements (Möllering, 2006, pp. 51–75). Cefaï describes the work of Schütz more as a philosophical anthropology, essentially focusing on the elucidation of the action conditions. What are the natural and relative actor views, and how to grasp them and treat them as such concrete, contextualised and idiosyncratic elements, became then the new research programme undertaken by sociologists inspired by his phenomenology of the natural attitude (Cefaï, 1998).

9. Quéré borrows some reflections on the principle of ‘commitment’ and on the ‘fiduciary frames’ concept from Michael Polanyi (Polanyi, 1958), but gives the last concept a slightly different interpretation by insisting on its normative aspect.

10. This is the paradoxical but incredibly powerful movement created by the contemporary neoliberal political economy and its capitalist programme which, on a rationalist account, have been able to spread their core set of beliefs where the success of one is the success of all, and, at the same time, to take back the individual propensity to actively revise this exact set of beliefs. Through the secularisation of the principles of financial liquidity and consumerism, neoliberal thought has powerfully generated the idea that only contractual negotiation is able to generate trust, but has made it almost impossible for any collective reflexive process to take place on its institutional issues. This is why, facing greater social complexity due to globalisation and technicisation, the legal perceptual regime of socio-political issues has mutated towards a surveillance scheme. The postmodern idea is less to organise the definition of risk than to organise behaviours in order to reduce uncertainty. And this neoliberal movement of ‘socialisation through fears’ (Rouvroy, 2008) is precisely at the basis of the functionalist institutionalism that we are criticising.

11. We can perceive at this point the methodological stake expressed during the second part of this essay. Indeed, it seems meaningful to link the previous reference to ethno-methodological claim of Garfinkel with this pragmatist project. The analyst of fiduciary frames must be conscious of his own external posture in order to focus on the active processes of social normativity at stake. The point of view should be able to go beyond the deliberative outcomes by grasping the representational particularities of the trust maintenance and distrust appearance.

12. This idea relies on a pragmatic perspective called ‘meliorism’ (James, 1977), stating a progressive principle, between blind optimism and paralysing defeatism, about our own abilities, whatever they might be, to improve our life conditions.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (F.R.S.-FNRS), Belgium.