Calculative trust: Oxymoron or tautology?

Abstract

The Williamsonian model of trust (Williamson, O. E. [1993]. Calculativeness, trust, and economic organization. The Journal of Law and Economics, 36, 453–486) makes the claim that the term ‘trust’ is regularly misused in social sciences research for behavioural phenomena which are better explained in terms of ‘calculativeness’. This essay explores the inescapably calculative nature of trust, organises the multiplex layers of calculative reciprocities and strategic preferences developed by trust parties and further explains how such individual and collectivised trust expectations and premises are ‘bullet-proofed’ into the self-referential and autopoietic process of the trust exchange. Humans are conditioned to calculatively trust for purposes of (economic) cooperation – a process that crucially requires the masking of calculativeness in their trust exchanges. Trust may therefore be best understood as double-blind calculativeness. Given the carefully shielded (self-)deceptive nature of trust relations – and as a conceptual and semantical consequence of such nature – it is not calculative trust, but its opposite, non-calculative trust, which is oxymoronic, i.e., a contradiction in terms.