Tracing wealth, cooperation and trust: A comparison of two great plains communities

Abstract

This research examines the relationships between wealth, cooperation, and trust. Utilizing implications from the social capital literature and democratic theory, we found that trust directly affects patterns of socio-economic interactions, especially shopping. We also found that commuting was widespread and it created a rural sprawl deficit that affected trust. Specifically, the results indicated that trust of others in the community (generalized to a certain degree) tended to encourage people to shop more in town, thus contributing to the development of the community, even when controlling for commuting. Findings from this study suggest that further community level research will yield more specifics about how trust (and social capital) works to increase wealth in a community.

Notes

1 We agree with arguments, such as that made by Pawar (2006) that social capital may be a problematic term and limit our use of it in favor of emphasizing the trustworthiness and trust that is critical to effective cooperation.

2 Two qualifications should be stated here and each is based on the trenchant comments of formal theorists and others who have examined trusting relationships. One, be certain to note the nature of causes for cooperation. Are they primarily based upon norms or upon various formal and informal constraints that lead to some sort of self-interested behavior? Of course, a middle position can be found in the earlier American understanding of “self interest rightly understood” that suggested true self-interest was linked to the interests of others. A more recent expression of the fundamental argument reverses the middle position; “By investing in relationships that reduce transaction costs, we can reduce the friction in productive activities” (Rupasingha et al., 2006, p. 84). Two, be certain to examine specific relationships that neither gloss over important differences in the nature of the relationships nor the categories of people represented. Specifically, the qualifications suggest that research into trust must move to the actual places where trust and trustworthiness are used to create wealth.

3 Pooley, Cohen, and Pike (2005) have argued that “sense of community” should be used as a construct that taps the critical relationships we are examining. Perhaps, a community where members think of self-interest in the Tocquevillian, or Civic Republican, manner have a stronger “sense of community” as Pooley et al. call it. We are less convinced that the construct is helpful but we appreciate their move toward community level analysis.

4 In Geertz's (1973) seminal work, The Interpretation of Culture, he raised the matter of “thick” and “thin” qualifications of formal and informal association.

5 Regarding trust questions, we did not code the “do not know” response as a missing value, because we believe the “do not know” response captures respondents’ ambivalent attitudes toward others; therefore, we coded “do not know” as a category that located between “do not trust” and “trust a little.”

6 For verification, we cross-tabulated commuting and other dimensions of trust and found a consistent pattern, except with the case of the relationship between trusting neighbors and commuting in the less prosperous town. Overall, the negative impacts of commuting on trust in terms of its particular and generalized forms appear to be widespread.

7 We reversed the order of respondents’ answers, so that out-shopping behaviors receive higher scores. This variable is an ordinal variable with categories ranging from 1 to 5.

8 In the survey, we asked respondents the year of their birth in order to avoid the problems of directly asking their age. We created the age variable by extracting the year of birth from the survey year.

9 We coded the commuting variable so that 0 represented those respondents who did not commute and 1 indicated the respondents who commuted to their work.

10 The gender variable is a dichotomous variable with 0 signifying male respondents and 1 representing females.

11 Rorty (1989) has argued for understanding language, even social scientific language, as being contingent and metaphorical, which is what we contend here.

12 To learn more about thick and thin trust, visit the glossary of the Saguaro Seminar online at; http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/glossary.htm.

13 Names were changed to protect the anonymity of respondents.