Abstract
Over the past three decades, social scientists have questioned the stability and confidence associated with modern institutions such as science and medicine, the market, media or education. Considering the general need to restore trust in an age of institutional uncertainty, it should be no surprise that efforts to understand how trust is created and communicated have received increasing attention. Trust and Discourse comes to offer insights into the matter of trust building, more specifically, how trust is accomplished, performed and communicated.
Divided into 10 chapters, this collective work challenges the idea that trust can be conceived as a resource that someone owns or bestows upon others. Instead, the underlying assumption (or perhaps main argument?) of the book is that trust is a contingent work-in-progress, a dialogical process grounded on complex discursive operations. The implicit connecting thread between the chapters lies precisely in this understanding of trust that owes much to Harold Garfinkel’s (1963) conceptualization: trust is a relational and tacit sine qua non condition that constitutes and normalizes social order and informs individuals’ (inter)action, as discussed in the introductory chapter by the volume editors.
Despite the title referencing both trust and discourse, the contributors have made more effort to conceptualize and problematize the former than the latter. Although some authors explicitly define what they understand by discourse, in most cases this is left for the reader to infer. Yet the overall notion already signalled in the first chapter is that it has something to do with ‘real language use’ (p. 9), which includes body language such as gesture, gaze, posture, as well as written texts and utterances. Because we are dealing with such a broad understanding of discourse, the book is organized in a way that includes a variety of empirical cases and methodological approaches to investigate the discursive making of trust.
Chapters 3, 4 and 7 all focus on educational settings. In Chapter 3, Elsey and colleagues claim that, within bedside teaching encounters between doctor, patient and medical apprentice, trust is achieved through a delicate and sometimes unpredictable triadic relational dynamic that unfolds throughout the course of the interaction. Investigating how English adult numeracy students engage with pedagogic texts, Oughton’s Chapter 4 shows that trust-making within the classroom environment is a relational process that is mediated by a third party (in this case, the trusted teacher). Chapter 7 provides empirical insights on the relationship between self-disparaging humour and the speaker’s trustworthiness in public educational presentations. Here, Wackers and colleagues claim that resorting to self-disparagement as a technique to engage audiences may inadvertently undermine the communicator’s credibility.
Trust in the media is also examined. Through interviews and document analysis, Van Praet and colleagues (Chapter 5) explore the basis of trust-making from the standpoint of the trustee, as well as the difficulties that foreign correspondents face to establish trust with their readers. The authors suggest that socio-political context, correspondent’s speaking language and community structure all play decisive roles in perceptions of objectivity, balance and factuality. From a purely text-based perspective, Temmerman’s Chapter 8 focuses on the tone of communication rather than on its content, finding that the communication of trustworthiness in women’s magazines often entails resorting to instructive tones (repetitive use of imperatives) and pseudo-dialogue (an implicit authoritative advice that resembles a dialogue). The author concludes that one way of conveying trustworthiness is through the adoption of an expert position.
Other authors focus on corporate settings. Working primarily from the analysis of video recordings, Kusmierczyk’s Chapter 2 explores how the establishment of trust in a job interview is an embodied process that can only be fully grasped by a multimodal analysis. In Chapter 6, Jackson conducts a discourse-oriented ethnographic study of trust strategies set up by small–medium enterprises, in order to investigate organizational initiatives whose mandate is to develop a trusting culture between managers and employees. Adopting a multidimensional view of trust (one that accepts that an entity/actor or a relationship can be simultaneously trusting and distrusting), Jackson concludes that trust strategies, far from being straightforward solutions to trust problems, only artificially solve them.
The last two chapters engage in an historical analysis of trust-making by taking into account the socio-historical context. Chapter 9, by Dossena, scrutinizes 19th-century Scottish correspondence and non-literary prose in order to unveil how trust is constructed linguistically. Hiroma Tanaka and Takanori Kawamata devote Chapter 10 to investigate how the grand narrative of trust on nuclear energy dramatically changed in the aftermath of a nuclear accident in Japan. Their chapter sheds light on historical and institutional factors that influenced both trust and the erosion thereof.
This book is certainly a stepping stone for those who seek a better glimpse of the different ways that trust is discursively built within and across organizations. It reinforces a research agenda that prioritizes a pragmatic study of trust. It is also a valuable source of information on the minutiae of trust-making, and it offers a compendium of insightful methodological strategies to grasp these interactional details. The potential audience of the book goes beyond those solely interested in academic discussions on trust and discourse. Human resource professionals and job applicants, media professionals, health care practitioners, risk assessing professionals, teachers and public speaking communicators can all benefit one way or another from the research findings and arguments of this book. However, the reader may finish the book with the impression that, despite the title, an effective and systematic discussion about discourses remained in the background or confined in the obscurity of methodological choices.