Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives

F14.33> Gemeinschaft. It does not give any new insight into the particularities of trusting relations. To gain such insights we need further conceptual clarification. Bernard Barber at least perceives this need. In his recent monograph The Logic and Limits of Trust (1983; see also Barber 1985) he tries for the first time to provide some kind of ordering. He proposes to distinguish between three different dimensions in which trusting expectations may fail: the continuity of the natural and the moral order, the <<95>> technical competence of actors in roles, and the fiduciary obligations of actors, that is, their duty and their motives to place the interests of others before their own. This distinction refers to the content of expectations and, indirectly, to causes of disappointment. It leaves unspecified, however, the social mechanisms which generate trust in spite of possible disappointment. It is this question, and in a more general sense the problem of the<F