Abstract
Trust is communication based. It influences and is the outcome of communication behaviors. In the social sciences, the subtleties of trust are a subject of ongoing research. This book is an edited collection of papers on discursive construction of trust or distrust across social and professional domains as diverse as health and social care, education, finance, law, business, and science and technology. It brings together a team of researchers, practitioners and postgraduate students specializing in such disciplines as linguistics, sociology, psychology, medicine, education, finance and communication to develop a discourse analysis approach to analyze the issue of trust. The book is divided into six parts, providing a revealing insight into research questions such as what trust is in different contexts, how to build up and maintain trust, why distrust arises and how to avoid and dissolve it.
In Part I (Chapters 1–6), ethnographic research is presented which examines interactions between health and social care professionals and the people they serve. Analysis of their interactions identifies displays of distrust and methods to reestablish trust (Chapters 1 and 3), clarifies ways of building and expressing trust as well as practices that may break trust or generate distrust (Chapters 2, 5 and 6), and explores reasons why distrust is regained and worsened (Chapter 4). The practical relevance drawn from these research studies is significant, shedding light on better care of those needing help (Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 5), and giving readers inspiration for efficient communication (Chapters 4 and 6).
Part II (Chapters 7 and 8) looks at trust in educational organizations, and shows that social backgrounds play a considerable role in the trust between education workers. In Chapter 7, commercialization of education greatly influences the integrity of professional practice and organizational trust. In Chapter 8, the role of trust and distrust in establishing and maintaining a cooperative working environment is examined in intercultural education. In both chapters, discourse collected for analysis occurs throughout the process of an incident, illustrating the dynamic feature of trust.
Part III (Chapters 9–11) concerns finance. As stated in Chapter 10, trust has become ‘a requisite driver of new profit and growth’ (p. 167). Financial workers and entities are all faced with the need to gain trust from their customers or the public as a whole. Communicative strategies and activities are undoubtedly essential in achieving the aim. Chapter 9 identifies specific forms of communicative expertise through which accounting professionals achieve trustworthiness. In Chapter 10, economists at Goldman Sachs deploy two communicative activities, proprietary research and ‘thought leadership’, to build people’s trust in the BRIC nations (i.e. Brazil, Russia, India and China). Chapter 11 proves that a correct understanding of customer types and their trust levels is central to a bank’s strategic decisions.
Part IV (Chapters 12 and 13) examines discursive construction of trust or distrust in legal processes. Chapter 12 explores how trust materializes in a police interview through challenges with a position–justification–conclusion structure. Chapter 13 demonstrates how the media, by manipulating language to report a lawyer’s illegal act, generate distrust of the public in lawyers as a whole and thus affect the court verdict.
Part V (Chapters 14 and 15) covers the domain of science and technology. Since the public may have faint understanding of new science and technologies, such as nanotechnology in Chapter 14, and unreasonable fear towards natural phenomena requiring scientific explanation, such as global warming in Chapter 15, trust is usually gained through the provision of ‘full and accurate information’ (p. 242) from experts, who are perceived by the public as having great authority.
Part VI (Chapters 16–19) reveals that, in business practice, whether trust can be achieved depends greatly on linguistic features. In Chapter 16, internationally educated engineers often encounter distrust in the job market in alien cultures. Those who accept the ideology and its associated discourse tend to get trust from employers. Chapters 17 and 18 examine a privatized company and marketing, respectively, and in Chapter 19, a community liaison group develop interpersonal trust with the help of communication with ‘marked similarity in the linguistic choices and the semantic orientation’ (p. 326).
Trust has become an important topic of inquiry in a variety of disciplines of social science. This multidisciplinary perspective has created a breadth that strengthens the trust literature. As applied linguistic research, Discourses of Trust provides a timely addition to the emerging literature on trust. The strengths of the book lie in the diversity of the topics investigated and methods of analysis deployed. The discourse under study takes different forms, both spoken and written, including excerpts, transcripts or extracts from interviews, dialogues, narratives, accounts, internal reports, media reports of court hearings, court verdicts, medical records, field notes, conference minutes, journals, documents, email exchanges and internet-published texts. In order to account for the discursive practices of trust in various domains, diversified methods and techniques of data collection (e.g. investigation, semi-structured interviews, case study, observation, questionnaire survey) and data analysis (e.g. narrative analysis, conversational analysis, pragmatic analysis, metaphor analysis, interactional sociolinguistic analysis, social/psychological analysis and document analysis) are employed.
Admittedly, this book also has some shortcomings. Discourse for analysis is presented in a variety of formats, and there are some editorial – including grammatical – errors, which can be distracting for readers. While the book covers a range of domains, discourses of trust in other domains such as politics, diplomacy and charity also deserve to be explored.
In all, the book offers readers interpretive analysis of discursive practices of trust in naturally occurring encounters. In this sense, it not only appeals to multidisciplinary researchers of trust, but also caters for the interest of general readers who are keen to know how trust is discursively constructed and how it affects human relationships in professional domains. It is an important contribution to the study of professional and organizational discourses and an enlightening reference for trust-related or trust-bearing professional practices.