Cooperation Without Trust?

3. Trust and Power

40 Chapter 3 Trust and Power O NE OF the most important achievements of many societies, and especially of modern democratic societies, is the regulation of various kinds of organizational relations to make them less subject to the caprices of power. Such regulation is partly spontaneous rather than politically determined. People in ostensibly powerful positions often need cooperation from those under them if they are to succeed in their organization ’s purposes and in their own personal interests. When such regulation exists in the background, the less powerful might well be able to trust the more powerful. Even in the most sanguine cases, however, the onesidedness of power relations must often cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the more powerful partner. Even in democratic societies and organizations designed to give voice to the less powerful, great power differences can undercut the possibility of voluntary and uncoerced participation. Power inequalities are ubiquitous in modern societies; thus, any treatise on trust must take them seriously (Baier 1986; Hardin 2002b, ch. 4). They cannot be assumed away in any theory that deals with the world of social relations and social institutions . Power inequalities also create fertile ground for distrust (see chapter 4), especially when institutional constraints on abuses of power are weak or nonexistent. In general, trust in the encapsulated interest model is more likely to occur in relationships in which there is not a marked power difference between the actors involved. Much of the trust literature assumes equal power relations, as would be typical among peers, friends, colleagues, and the subjects in standard experiments and surveys on trust. Although some of the research focuses on hierarchical relations and the possibility of trust emerging among parties of unequal power (see, for example, Kramer 1996), that literature largely ignores the potential impact of power differences. The general view of the distinctive features of trust and power in relationships , however, is captured in Mark Granovetter’s (2002, 36) state- ment that “horizontal relationships may involve trust and cooperation, and vertical relationships power and compliance.”1 Trust and power are typically viewed as orthogonal. In this chapter, we wish to present a more complex view of the links between power and trust. We discuss the ways in which power inequality serves primarily as an obstacle to building trust in relationships between actors who would often benefit from mutual exchange or cooperation. More generally, the management of power relations in a society is a key factor in determining the capacity for trust. If powerful actors have few constraints on the exercise of their power, our capacity for trust in them is limited. Later in the book, we identify organizational and institutional devices that constrain the unchecked use of power and create the social space for cooperative relations . In addition, we discuss some of the obstacles to building trust that are related to power differences, such as the lack of transparency and the failure of distributive or procedural justice. We begin with a discussion of power and then examine a number of cases in which the link between power and trust is important, including in physician-patient relations, employer-employee relations, and relations between representatives or agents of different firms. Power, Dependence, and Trust Power is commonly defined as if it were independent of the relationships in which it is exercised. In the political science literature, for example , power is often treated as an attribute or a resource of an actor or social unit rather than as a characteristic of a relationship between actors .2 We treat both power and trust as relational constructs. Let us begin with a standard definition of power—based on the conception of power developed by Richard Emerson (1962, 1964, 1972)—that is especially useful in the analysis of personal relationships. For Emerson, power in a relationship between actors is based on the degree of dependence of the actors on one another. Dependence is determined by two factors: the degree to which actor A values what B offers in the relation, and the degree to which A has access to these resources from sources other than B. High value and low access to alternatives mean that A is highly dependent on B, and thus that B has high power over A. In contrast, low value and high levels of access to alternative sources for A generate low dependence on B, and thus low levels of power for B in the relationship. The main power-dependence proposition is that dependence is the...