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Abstract:The role of trust has long been acknowledged among economists and political scientists. It is often argued that high levels of trust among people help promote democratization, economic activity, well-performing institutions and low levels of violence. Social media has been identified as a significant vehicle in fostering social connections however the depth and significance of these connections to the creation of trust has not been well developed. According to Robert Putnam trust derives from reciprocity that is learned only in cooperation with others. Putnam is skeptical of a positive relationship between trust and digitalized social media. According to Uslaner trust is a moral issue established by family relationships early in life and therefore use of social media has no impact on creating trust. This paper is a structured literature review. The aim is to investigate if trust can be created by connections on digitalized social media. Eight articles emphasized a positive relationship between social media and trust; two articles claimed no relationship between trust and social media. We did not find any studies claiming there is a negative relation between social media and trust.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has experienced a turbulent post-independence transition. It can be argued that the level of trust is likely to have been negatively affected by this turbulence and that it is important to restore trust to achieve sustainable political and economic development. This paper looks at trust in Bosnia and Herzegovina and puts a special focus on the role of ethnicity. We find generalized trust to be low in Bosnia and Herzegovina and it seems to have declined in recent years. Moreover, generalized trust is negatively affected by the degree of ethnic heterogeneity in the region. However, a further and more detailed examination of trust reveals a more complex relationship between ethnicity and trust: people tend to show low levels of trust in all other people irrespective of their ethnic belongings. We argue that ethnic distribution might capture some other regional specific characteristics that also affect the level of trust. One possibility is that ethnically heterogeneous regions tended to be severely affected by the war and that this has negatively affected the level of trust towards all people outside of a person's family.

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Network recruitment has become an essential part of the modern labour market. However, there are significant research gaps: 1) the development of social media has been crucial to the growth of social networks, yet we know little about its influence on network recruitment; 2) studies on network recruitment generally focus on employees' rather than employers' perspectives; 3) the context of most research is the US labour market, which then identifies a need for contributions relating to other countries. The aim of this study is to analyse and discuss recruiters' use of SNS to evaluate the networks of potential candidates. To understand how and why recruiters assess online networks, we used qualitative data from a Swedish study. Our analysis showed that recruiters search the internet either to find information that helps them ascertain the candidate as trustworthy, or to evaluate the candidate's social capital through the size and composition of their networks. For certain job positions especially, active management of one's online networks thus becomes crucial. Finally, this study illustrates how network connections may undermine rather than build trust, and thereby challenges a belief in the positive impact of networks. ARTICLE HISTORY