Handing over to our new Editor Joe Hamm

After six years of serving as the Journal of Trust Research’s Editor-in-Chief, completing two three-year terms, I have the pleasure of handing over this role to Dr. Joseph Hamm of Michigan State University (MSU). Joe has been one of JTR’s Associate Editors, a fantastic Reviewer and highly successful Author. He is Associate Professor at MSU’s School of Criminal Justice and held a Courtesy Appointment at their Department of Political Science. Moreover, he also leads the MSU Teaching, Researching and Understanding the Social Science of Trust (TRUSST) Lab that support students and researchers from a variety of contexts and disciplines to conduct collaborative research and high-quality teaching. Many JTR readers and supporters will also know Joe as a particularly active contributor to the First International Network on Trust (FINT) Workshops. Joe is excellently positioned to extend JTR’s mission of reaching out to and connecting as many fields as possible where trusting and a better scholarly understanding of trust matters. In our troubled times, trust and trust research have become all the more relevant.

As outgoing Editor-in-Chief (EIC), I take the opportunity to thank the great number of people who have supported me in my role and contributed to cultivating this unique outlet for original insights and theoretical developments in a multi- and cross-disciplinary domain. I would like to thank the journal’s owner and founding EIC Peter Ping Li and my Co-Deputy EIC Don Ferrin for encouraging me to take the baton in 2016/17. I am grateful to Nicole Gillespie for promoting the journal as Deputy EIC during my time and leading the initiative to get us on the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List in 2019. At Witten/Herdecke University, over the years consecutively, Laura Herok, Leona Henry and Tina Azad supported me as diligently and patiently as I would let them in their role as Managing Editors.

We would rely on our Associate Editors to commission constructive reviews on the submitted papers. Hence we thank in particular: Katinka Bijlsma-Frankema, Kirsimarja Blomqvist, Shawn Burke, Cecily Cooper, Jan Delhey, Nicole Gillespie, Don Ferrin, Ashley Fulmer, Joe Hamm, Mark Hansen, Peter Kim, Dora Lau, Steven Lui, Harrison McKnight, Aneil Mishra, Kok Yee Ng, Bo Bernhard Nielsen, Ros Searle, Frédérique Six, Shay Tzafrir, Steven Van de Walle, Antoinette Weibel, Nicholas Wheeler, Michele Williams and Verner Worm as well as Ashley Fulmer and Kurt Dirks as Guest Editors of the Special Issue on ‘Multilevel Trust’ (Fulmer & Dirks, 2018). These action editors, in turn, counted on our highly diverse Editorial Review Board as well as numerous ad-hoc reviewers to all of whom we are deeply indebted for their time and thoughtful feedback to authors. Further, I am most grateful to everyone who submitted their precious work to us. I stretched their patience far too often and the whole trip with revise-and-resubmit and always a risk of rejection did not always go smoothly. Still, I think we learned a lot in the process, even when we could not accept a paper for publication in the end.

One of the benefits of editing an interdisciplinary journal like JTR is that you get to connect with a highly diverse community of researchers. Thanks to this job, I have been in touch with fantastic scholars whom I might not have encountered otherwise. It is not fair to single out any paper, but I would like to mention a few examples of contributions that really surprised me in terms of the variety of trust research out there: Timming and Perrett (2017) looked at the effects of tattoo genre on perceived trustworthiness. Kasten (2018) argued for the ‘active celebration’ of trustful behaviour. Brion et al. (2019) showed that being promoted at work might mean losing some friends. Wubs-Mrozewicz (2020) was the first historian to publish in JTR and she introduced the powerful concept of ‘language of trust and trustworthiness’. As a final example, Seligman (2021) on trust as embodied knowledge gave me the opportunity for extremely inspiring exchanges during the editorial process with one of my own heroes in our field.

In my first JTR Editorial, I remarked casually, ‘It is a blessing that trust is relevant across so many areas of social life and so many academic disciplines’ (Möllering, 2017, p. 107). Now I ask myself if it is really a blessing. By then, the journal had published only a few articles on trust in the context of crises. We had a few papers on trust breeches and repair (e.g. Chen et al., 2011; Fulmer & Gelfand, 2015; Tomlinson, 2011; Wielhouwer, 2015). However, at the time there was at best a sense of possible ‘crises within trust relations’ though not very much a perspective of ‘trusting within a crisis context’ in the pages of JTR.

During my time as Editor, this has changed. With contributions on CEO transgressions (Ferrin et al., 2018), financial crisis (Ritzer-Angerer, 2018), employee anxiety (Wang et al., 2018), distrust in media (Engelke et al., 2019), emergency management (Roud & Gausdal, 2019) and aggressive customers (Gur, 2020) we already featured the societally gloomier sides of trust (research) even before the extraordinary disruptions of COVID-19. By now, most of our published articles connect with the crises of our times, especially the Corona pandemic (Majid et al., 2021; Wollebæk et al., 2021), political and social polarisation (Bergbower & Allen, 2021; Koivula et al., 2021; Patent, 2022) and related issues such as (dis)trust in science (Dixon et al., 2022; Reif & Guenther, 2021).

Trust has always been, but is now even more obviously, societally relevant and ‘political’ (Möllering, 2021). After all, trust is a productive response to uncertainty and vulnerability that characterise human existence and which we experience nowadays in dramatically unsettling ways. The brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has been the latest and severest blow. If uncertainty and vulnerability were always recognised as preconditions for trust to be relevant (e.g. Baier, 1986), it seem to me they have now become the focal consequences of failing trust, which trust research urgently needs to investigate more deeply.

I am grateful to everyone who has taken an interest in the research we publish in this journal and glad to see the citations that show the new insights were fruitful for further research. I thank Routledge and, more generally, Taylor & Francis for giving this journal a home as well as great support. I was an Associate Editor from the foundation of the journal in 2009 and Deputy Editor-in-Chief 2014 to 2016 before taking over from Peter Ping Li in 2017. During my time as (Deputy) EIC, James Cleaver stood out as our main contact with the publisher. Since he shared our enthusiasm for JTR, it was always a pleasure to discuss with him how we could further develop this project. More recently, Zoe Sternberg has kindly supported the transition to our new EIC Joe Hamm.

Joe Hamm is the best successor I can imagine for the next stage of JTR’s journey. He is a renowned researcher in our domain and very well connected into many disciplines. Most importantly, though, Joe is a truly enthusiastic ‘trust nerd’ – and he will forgive me for calling him that. Even before it became clear that he would be my successor, we had excellent and extensive discussions on the future of trust research in general and the journal in particular, most intensely when Joe spent his sabbatical with my group at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany in 2020. As I will of course be willing to continue my support after the formal hand-over at the beginning of 2023, I wish Joe and the Journal of Trust Research much success and an ever-increasing societal impact.