Working the Boardwalk

Abstract

This article argues that trust emerges as a key interactional mechanism through which vendors, artists, and performers that work in a public marketplace turn daily conditions of uncertainty into enduring stability. Drawing on four years of ethnographic data, I empirically illustrate a process of building, maintaining, and protecting trust. Following trust from the level of one-on-one interaction through to the level of a community, I expose the particular interactional work trust does for different people across different situations. In the end, the way a social psychological mechanism plays out over time has significant social and material consequences for people working under highly uncertain conditions.