Attending to the importance of context: Trust as a process in global microfinance

A tale of two fears: negotiating trust and neighborly relations in urbanizing Turkey

“…One such contribution in helping to bring some structure to this conversation is Möllering's (2013) framework on trust processes. In line with trust scholars like Frederiksen (2014), Grimpe (2019), and Möllering (2013) we recognize the relational, contextual and process-oriented nature of trust, and this study aims to build upon their contributions.…”

“…While the noun form of the concept is useful in some aspects, it has the unintended consequences of giving the impression that trust is a fixed constant. Analyzing trust or trusting as a process opens the door to more nuanced analyses of the complex socio-spatial factors in play (Möllering 2013;Grimpe 2019). Furthermore, although there is a plethora of trust literature, agreeing on concepts is one area in which trust research is growing, especially in recent years (Miller and Mitamura 2003;Nannestad 2008).…”

“…In general, according to the series of representative national values surveys conducted in Turkey since 1990, on average only one in ten persons answered affirmatively to being able to trust most people (Kalaycıoğlu 2012). As trust research has become increasingly more nuanced including looking at processes (Khodyakov 2007;Möllering 2013), context (Grimpe 2019), and relational approaches (Frederiksen 2014;Six, Nooteboom, and Hoogendoorn 2010), it has also enriched the broad strokes gained from large-N survey datasets. However, trust research that focuses on Turkey have been limited either to these broad strokes about trust (Kayaoğlu 2017), or to the realm of business relations of supervisors and subordinates (Wasti, Tan, and Erdil 2011).…”

Connecting trust and power

“…Moving on from how people's trust is shaped by their genes or by contextual influences, that they may trust or distrust, it is time to recognize the trustors' own power in attributing trustworthiness and contextualizing their relationships. Barbara Grimpe's (2019) article contributes very strong insights on this, illustrated in the field of microfinance. She shows, in my interpretation, the power of fund managers in their active trust strategies whereby they idiosyncratically construct the trustworthiness of investees.…”

Putting a spotlight on the trustor in trust research

“…To me, this time the articles are connected by putting the spotlight on trustors and not just trustees. This is very welcome because trust research overall should display a good balance between more trustee-focused and more trustor-focused accounts as well as a thorough understanding of dynamic, contextualised trustor-trustee interactions (see also Grimpe, 2019). The spotlight on trustors is also very much needed, in my opinion, because the public discourses feature so many trust crises, breaches of trust and manifestations of distrust where the problem seems to be attributed almost exclusively to the trustee side.…”