Teaching, Tasks, and Trust: Functions of the Public Executive

6. Trust Brokering

111 Chapter 6 Trust Brokering T RUST IS a central aspect of human relations, and within the context of organizations it plays a particularly strong role. Of course, just what one means by the notion of trust is decidedly unclear. One approach, quite popular with survey researchers, had been to use trust of government or of people in general as proxies for some generalized concept. Indeed, a mini-industry sprang up in the mid-1990s seeking to explain what appeared to be a cataclysmic decline in trust, particularly of governments but also to a degree of people in general. The typical analysis of declining trust in government would examine the marginals of questions such as, Generally speaking, do you trust the government in Washington to do the right thing? Where once, in the 1960s, supermajorities of respondents answered in the affirmative, by about 1995, they answered in the negative. Robert Putnam (1995, 2000) is surely the most famous of these scholars, but there are quite a few more. The argument, they held, was that a decline in general trust in government inhibited economic exchange and political growth of social capital in its own right.1 Scholars affiliated with the Russell Sage Foundation—Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi among them—embarked on a series of significant studies in the 1990s to elaborate on the meaning of this concept and to identify the conditions in which trust might be more informative . Such a generalized notion of trust was to them largely vacuous: without a notion of which part of government, what the right thing might actually be, or under what conditions, the concept is a void. For example, we know that trust appeared to soar after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the valiant efforts of firefighters and police officers to rescue occupants of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But what were respondents thinking of when they answered the generallyspeaking question? Were they thinking of the firefighters or police officers , or Mayor Giuliani, or President Bush, or the seeming unity among Democrats and Republicans at all levels of government? Was there a sudden clarity to the meaning of the right thing at that moment, or a sudden absence of conflict? Indeed, even the meaning of the word trust appears to vary considerably by nationality and language. According to Russell Hardin, French lacks a direct equivalent of the term, and both Norwegian and Egyptian lack the verb form, and in Chinese, Hebrew, and perhaps English as well there are considerable ambiguities about the meaning of the word (2002, 57–58). So instead, the Russell Sage group offers Hardin’s notion of trust as encapsulated self–interest: I trust you to do some task when I believe that you see completion of that task as in your own interest. Note what has happened here: there are an explicit self, an explicit other, and an explicit task. I may trust my neighbor to offer sound medical advice because I know that my neighbor is a thoracic surgeon (has the capacity and the will to do so). There have been some exceptional studies of trust in this form, and these studies lend considerable insight into how people behave within organizations. The success of hierarchical relationships between supervisors and subordinates may hinge on mutual trust, and trust also permeates professional-client relationships. Public bureaucracies, especially characterized by “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 1980) exhibit aspects of both types of relationships. Consider a social work bureaucracy: the social worker and client maintain a professional-client relationship, whereas the social worker and supervisor maintain a hierarchical organizational relationship. Mutual trust in either relationship is shaped by the nature of the other; to consider one, we must consider both. To better understand trust in a public bureaucracy, and more particularly within the context of a social work bureaucracy, we proceed with two steps. The first is to explicate a formal model of trust in a social work bureaucracy. This model, though quite simple, illustrates the heightened problem of trust in social work supervision. We then identify a series of testable propositions consistent with both the extant organizational psychology literature and the specifics of our game theoretic treatment. For our second step, we analyze a mail-back survey of social workers and case workers in the North Carolina Departments of Social Services to explore organizational trust between both the frontline social workers and their supervisors and between the...