It is friendship [and not a polis] which consists in the pursuit of a common social life. Theend and purpose of a polis is the good life, and the institutions of social life are means to thatend. A polis is constituted by the association of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing existence; and such an existence, on our definition, consists in a life of true felicityand goodness. (The Politics,1948, p. 139) [emphasis added]
It is well known among political thinkers that democratic communities require cooperation,if not kindness, among those who live in them. Aristotle knew that the bond of people in anywell-constituted state required friendliness and cooperation whereby citizens work with othersto achieve the common good (a just polity) and to some extent eschew individualized interests.Much later in the evolution of western political thought, Hume (1737/1975) recognized thatcooperation was critical to productive human interactions and that cooperation had to be based
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upon feelings of kindness toward others. De Tocqueville (1835/1981, p. 193) observed thatthe true keys to the working democracy he observed in the United States were the manners,or “customs,” of the people who constituted it. De Tocqueville (1835/1981, p. 415) noted thatresidents of the United States often referred to “self interest rightly understood” when theyspoke of their reason for the habitual practice of helping others. Writing about education,John Dewey even observed that children must learn the language of social interactions so theymay unlock “the wealth of social capital which lies beyond the possible range of his limitedindividual experience” [emphasis added] (1900/1990, p. 111). Indeed, earlier understandingsof the cooperative underpinnings of democratic communities were deep as well as complex,and they prepared social scientists to explore a vast arena of human interaction many know aseither social capital research, formal theorizing about collective action (e.g., Farrell & Knight,2003; Ostrom, 1994), or evolutionary theory (Betts, 1998).
Most scholars share the view that recent empirical research into productive collaborationbegan with James Coleman’s efforts to introduce basic economic principles into solving prob-lems in sociology (e.g., Putnam, 2000; Zupan, 1998). Coleman worked directly with GaryBecker when they were both at the University of Chicago and Coleman made the connectionbetween economic theory and his own scholarship explicit (Coleman, 1993). Most importantly,Coleman suggested that trusting networks (which create the experiences necessary for a typeof capital he called “social” to come into being) encouraged the inter-personal cooperationearlier theorists and thinkers had found so important. As Coleman put it;
For example, a group whose members manifest trustworthiness and place extensive trust inone another will be able to accomplish much more than a comparable group lacking thattrustworthiness and trust. (1990, p. 304)
Following Coleman, Robert Putnam brought social capital scholarship and theory closerto the foreground through his research in Italy (Putnam, 1993) and then in the United States(Putnam, 2000). Putnam’s (1993, p. 88) research was at least partially based upon EdwardBanfield’s earlier work in a single Italian village. In Banfield’s classic monograph, he arguedthat neither social nor political life were likely in the village he studied because of a phenomenonhe called “amoral familism.” Banfield (1958) concluded that “amoral familism,” a family basedethos, led people in the village to form manners that precluded acting in concert with othersoutside their family to obtain any public or social good. Importantly, Banfield (1958, p. 83,101) observed that civic and political engagement were severely limited by an ethos basedupon distrust of others in the village.
Theoretical claims that social capital and the trust it engenders actually increases theabilities of community members to produce wealth and provide care for other commu-nity members has not been uniformly acknowledged by researchers.1 Rather, many scholarstreat collaboration as an aggregated phenomenon. Robert Putnam argued social capi-tal produced wealth, but he did not observe it on a community level. Similarly, Knackand Keefer (1997) found a significant relationship between social capital and economicperformance—measured specifically in terms of wealth production at the national level ofanalysis. Hero’s (2007) notable criticism that social capital analyses tend to gloss overracism is based upon an aggregated analysis of states; such an analysis ignores signifi-cant variation across communities. In contrast, Francis Fukuyama (1995), argued that trust
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among employees permits capitalistic enterprises to reach a large scale of organization andthat capability to grow large organizations positively affects a nation’s ability to producewealth.
Other problems with much work on trust and social capital relates to theorizing. Gametheorists contend that the work does not adequately describe causal relationships (Farrell &Knight, 2003, p. 538). Mostly, the complaints about social capital theory come from formaltheorists who rightly understand that certain assumptions ought to be explicitly stated bytheorists and researchers (e.g., Ostrom, 1994). Of course, one specific problem with specificityin theorizing occurs when social capital is not adequately representative; or, when trustingnetworks work to the advantage of a minority (Fiorina, 1999). Another problem with specificityoccurs when the work of groups, and their members, does not engender trust among othersoutside the group. As Theda Skocpol observed, the importance of earlier civic groups was thatthey created reasons for participation that, “went beyond the personal, familial, and the local,for membership in translocal federations offered connections to—and organizational routesinto—broader social and political endeavors” (2003, p. 85). What may be most essential hereis to note that associational life in the United States seems to be decentralizing (Ladd, 1999,p. 26); and, that means that vital links that engender trust and cooperation with others outsideimmediate experience may be waning.
Despite questions concerning social capital research, considerable evidence and strong argu-ments suggest that networks that foster trust are related to wealth and health at a local orcommunity level. In fact, some scholars have posited that social capital and its relationship towealth is specifically a community-level phenomenon (e.g., Rupasingha, Goetz, & Freshwater,2006). Also, research suggests that the presence of civically engaged groups and the existenceof family farms in an area can be linked to local economic growth in rural areas (Tolbert et al.,1998). In terms of health, which we believe is closely related to wealth, research has shownthat an accurate assessment of social capital helps “a community determine the extent of coop-erative and mutually beneficial behaviors occurring within the community” (Hendryx, Ahern,Lovrich, & McCurdy, 2002, p. 85). Similarly, a relationship between increased per capitaincome and the presence of numerous civic groups in towns on the Great Plains of the UnitedStates has been shown; but that same study found considerable variation from community tocommunity within that geographic region (2004).2
1. The research
In this paper we bore into the relationship between trust and wealth accumulation in a mannerthat explores more than the micro-level of transactional efficiency described by Rupasingha etal. We specifically examined how trust might be related to the shopping activities of communityresidents. As noted above, Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that residents of the United Statesin 1833 and 1834 engaged in cooperative activities based upon their notion of “self interestrightly understood.” He made that observation on the basis of people working together incommunities where they premised their actions upon a notion that what was good for otherswas also good for each of them (1835/1981, pp. 415–6).3 The research reported here examineshow people who trust each other make decisions about their retail shopping activities in two
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communities. If trust encourages people to cooperate in their unique economic activities, asHume argued, we would expect a small positive effect on community wealth. For instance, ifcommunity members helped their neighbors harvest, such mutual assistance would be moreproductive but that kind of assistance would only have a limited economic impact. If, on theother hand, people in trusting communities were more likely to engage in broader forms ofeconomic cooperation, such as doing most of their retail shopping in town in order to help thecommunity, it would mean that trusting relationships can help produce wealth in more thanone-way. In effect, community members who both shopped in town because of their communityethos (based on some notion we might typify as “self interest rightly understood”) and in ordercut transaction costs (by providing mutual assistance) both would lend to a more substantialimpact upon community wealth.
Not all forms of trust produce the same results, especially in the way they affect communitylife and wealth. As Eric Uslaner (2002) has correctly suggested, we need to be cognizant ofat least two forms of trust, particularized trust and generalized trust. Particularized trust islearned in settings where face-to-face participation in associational life occurs, and it is mostoften engendered in families as well as religious organizations. Most often, particularized trusteither comes from or generates bonding forms of social capital (Uslaner & Brown, 2005, p.871).
In contrast, generalized trust must be learned and sustained in multiple settings that leadpeople to think of themselves as a part of a larger whole comprised of others—others beingpersons one may never have met or even seen. Generalized trust works particularly well if itlinks people to others they do not know, and that type of trust is necessary for the formationof what Putnam (2000, pp. 22–23) termed “bridging” social capital. Theda Skocpol (2003)argued that civic and fraternal organizations specifically worked to establish the kind of trustingrelationships necessary for democracies. Skocpol suggested that the constitutional nature ofcivic groups (Elks, Moose, Oddfellows, etc.) in the United States schooled members on trustingthose they did not know, such as other Americans and group members from other places. EricUslaner (2005, pp. 4–5) also posited that education often served to extend trust to people we donot know and that normally included the inculcation of some moral framework that promptedtrust.
Generalized trust is important because it encourages citizens to collaborate with people theyhave not seen—to move beyond friendliness. Those who know how to trust and strive to betrustworthy can interact with others they do not know to the mutual benefit of all in a givencommunity. One problem with generalized trust is that its wellspring is found in the regular,structured interactions among group members in groups that explicitly inform members aboutthe value of others, and that is not easy to come by. In effect, generalized trust is engenderedin settings that are more or less thin when compared to thick forms of trust found in familial orother close associational groupings.4 Robert Putnam’s explained “thick” and “thin” trust likethis:
Trust embedded in personal relations that are strong, frequent, and nested in wider networksis sometimes called “thick trust.” On the other hand, a thinner trust in ‘the generalized other,’like your new acquaintance from the coffee shop, also rests implicitly on some backgroundof shared social networks and expectations of reciprocity. Thin trust is even more useful than
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thick trust, because it extends the radius of trust beyond the roster of people whom we canknow personally. As the social fabric of a community becomes more threadbare, however, itseffectiveness in transmitting and sustaining reputations declines and its power to undergirdnorms of honesty, generalized reciprocity and thin trust is enfeebled. (2000, p. 136)
It would seem, then, that particularized trust might have different effects on cooperation ineconomic relationships than we would find with generalized trust; and, that those effects oncooperation are influenced by the thick and thin forms of experience that generate trust.
We specifically wanted to explore the relationship between wealth accumulation and trustin its general and particular forms. To examine the relationship between wealth and trust, weconducted research in two towns. We employed a multi-method approach to our research thatemployed both qualitative and quantitative tools. In particular, we explored wealth accumu-lation by investigating “outshopping” behavior. Consumer out-shopping has been defined as“the behavior of consumers who live in one area, but travel to another to make retail purchases”(LaForge, Reese, & Stanton, 1984, p. 22). Out-shopping by consumers often leads to a consid-erable loss of retail dollars from local communities to neighboring large towns (Miller & Kean,1997). This one-way retail leakage can have a considerable impact on both the businesses andgovernmental structures of small towns (Bromley & Thomas, 1995).
Understanding how trust and friendliness among community members might mitigate theleakage of dollars from local economies could be valuable knowledge for scholars and practi-tioners of state and local governance. If building trusting networks can work to stem the flowof dollars out of a local community then efforts in that direction would be commendable. Wehypothesized that out-shopping would be less prevalent among people who express higherlevels of trust. Further, we expected that out-shopping would be less prevalent among peoplewith high levels of the types of trust (especially generalized trust) that social capital and gametheorists believe are most important in communities.
2. Community characteristics
To assess our hypothesized relationship, the research was carried out in two communitiesin a rural region of the northern Great Plains. It is worth noting that Robert Putnam found thatpeople living in the northern Great Plains exhibited high levels of trust as compared to theircountrymen elsewhere across the United States (see, Putnam, 2000, p. 293). The two smalltowns selected for study had populations of around 1000. One of the towns was relativelyprosperous and had a per capita income in 2000 of $19,673, and the other town was among thepoorer communities in the region and the nation; its per capita income in 2000 was only $13,325while the state’s average was $19,613 and the national average per capita income was $21,587,all according to U.S. Census data. It was our intention to study a prosperous community and onethat was struggling, in terms of its economic wealth, hoping that this selection strategy wouldhelp us isolate some of the effects of social capital on wealth creation. The two communitiesare also close to each other geographically, only separated by about 130 miles, and both arelocated in a region where the farm economy provided most of each community’s wealth. Withthe communities located in close proximity, we did not have to worry that community wealth
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Table 1Selected demographic characteristics of respondents in two towns (percentages).
Characteristic Prosperous town Less prosperous town
Born before 1946? 48.5% 50.2%Lived in town more than 5 years? 82.8% 87.9%Completed college or higher? 32.0% 26.6%Commute out of town to work? 25.8% 33.2%
was a product of different types of agricultural activities practiced there. Choosing these twocommunities also helped us control for other factors that might help produce wealth, suchas being located near a major transportation route or by being blessed with valuable mineralresources nearby.
Most of our information concerning citizen attitudes and behaviors came from surveyswe completed in both towns—one in 2005 and the second in 2006. We employed a form ofDillman’s (2002) “Tailored Design Method” to maximize response rates. In the more prosper-ous community, we gathered 248 completed questionnaires and that produced a response rateof about 70%, while in the less prosperous community we received 283 completed question-naires which provided a response rate of 60.1% (this itself might be an indication of relativetrust levels). Since the towns were not large, we surveyed every household in both townsand asked for one completed questionnaire per household. Help in distributing and collectingthe questionnaires was forthcoming in the prosperous community, and that fact undoubtedlyhelped us generate a higher response rate there. We suspect that both the level of communityassistance and response rates indicate something about the relative levels of social capital inthe two towns. The questionnaires contained a few open-ended questions and allowed for self-framed comments from respondents which allowed us to more clearly assess how inter-personalrelationships in both communities worked. In both towns we also employed other qualitativemethods, including elite interviews wherein we asked questions similar to the open-ended onesfound on the individual questionnaires. We also completed ethnographic “windshield surveys”of each town every time we visited them and that helped provide us a sense of wealth, activityand the geography of each place.
Certain demographic characteristics of both towns provide a useful background for ourresearch. As Table 1 shows, there were several characteristics of survey respondents from eachtown that were quite similar. When you consider the data, it is easy to understand why thereare only a few important differences, since the towns are so similar in terms of geography,size and economic settings. With high response rates, we can have considerable confidencethat the aggregate demographic data represent the towns well; the similarity in the numbers forthose who were born before 1946, lived in the town more than 5 years, and the percentage withcollege degrees suggest that these are two comparable communities. In general, the data fromour surveys indicate that respondents in the town were generally older, less mobile, poorer andnot as well educated as people in the United States on average.
We also asked respondents to report whether they commuted to work outside town. Datafrom the questions about commuting out of town to work present an interesting situation. First,it is surprising that so many people in both towns commute to work—roughly a quarter to athird reported they commuted to work (see Table 1). Also, there is a theoretical reason why we
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Table 2Commuting/not commuting by trust people in town (prosperous town).
Trust people in town
Do not trust Do not know Trust a little Trust some Trust a lot Total
Pearson Chi-square (d.f. = 4) is 21.3826, p < 0.001.
should expect that commuting negatively affects community life. As Putnam (2000, p. 214)put it; “More time spent in the car means less time for friends and neighbors, for meetings,for community projects, and so on.” Putnam (2000, p. 215) also argued that commuting hasled to an “urban sprawl deficit” for social capital, and this deficit entails the reality that peoplewho commute are less likely to connect with others within a sprawling metro area. A similar“commuting effect” might be expected among rural commuters and we found some evidencethat there might even be a “rural sprawl deficit.”
Evidence we gathered suggests a picture that is consistent with Putnam’s view. Table 2 isa cross-tabulation of responses to our questions about commuting and trust of town residentsin the prosperous community. The table shows that respondents who marked “trust some”or “trust a lot” also often marked that they did not commute; however, among those whomarked that they commuted to work we found they were much less likely to mark “trust alot.” While 34.2% of the non-commuting respondents in the prosperous community markedthe “trust a lot” response, the number dropped to 6.3% among commuters and that result wassignificant.5 We found a similar pattern in the less prosperous town (Table 3). In the case of theless prosperous town, we found a Pearson’s Chi-Square that was also significant. When lookingat the percentages of the respondents’ trust of others in the less prosperous town (including“trust a little,” “trust some,” and “trust a lot”), it is clear that non-commuters trusted their fellowresidents in town significantly more than commuters did. For instance, in the less prosperoustown 17.1% of non-commuters said they could trust their fellow residents “a lot” while only6.6% of commuters marked that response.
In sum, there is evidence that a “rural sprawl deficit” affects both communities.6 WhilePutnam estimated a 20% sprawl deficit in the suburbs, it would be difficult for us to assignsuch a number for rural communities in the United States—we would venture to suggest therural sprawl deficit is smaller than the sprawl deficit in metropolitan areas since most residentsof rural towns only work elsewhere but join organizations and shop in their home towns.
Table 3Commuting/not commuting by trust people in town (less prosperous town).
Trust people in town
Do not trust Do not know Trust a little Trust some Trust a lot Total
Pearson Chi-square (d.f. = 4) is 12.1995, p < 0.05.
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Understanding that commuting negatively affects trust suggests that it might have someeffect on shopping behavior. It also makes sense that commuting typically occurs in placeswhere more shopping opportunities are present, such as in communities near regional shoppingcenters. Furthermore, if commuting negatively impacts trusting relationships, it could just aswell help us understand another way that trusting networks help insure that communities prosperwhen they have networks that support local shopping by commuters rather than out-shopping.
3. Analysis of the research question
To see if trust partially mitigates the problems for out-shopping via encouragement ofshopping locally, we did a multivariate analysis of how commuting, shopping and selecteddemographic variables affected shopping behavior. To do this analysis, we asked respondentshow often they shopped in town during the last week. Utilizing this question, we createda variable representing respondents’ out-shopping behavior, with higher numbers indicatingpeople’s stronger tendency to shop outside of their town.7 We also included each of the threetrust variables, an age variable, the commuting variable, and a gender variable as independentvariables. We entered the independent variables into an ordinal logit regression model to helpus estimate the likelihood of the effect each independent variable had on respondents’ shoppingbehavior.
The three trust variables were derived from responses (ranging from 0 to 4) that indicatedhow much respondents trusted (1) their neighbors, (2) others in town, and (3) other people inthe U.S. The third question was specifically included as a measure of generalized trust. Askingrespondents how much they trusted others in town probably worked as a measure of both typesof trust (generalized and particularized), since some in a town of 1000 would likely knowother people with whom they have had no particular experiences. Of course, asking about trustof neighbors ought to be considered as a measure of a particularized nature; however, it isimportant to understand that this measure taps a kind of trust that was not likely derived fromthick forms of association—being neighborly does not entail the same kind of associations asthose experienced within the thick bonds of kin.
The questions about trusting people in town gave us a better sense of how trust worked,but we also learned something about trust from the open-ended comments. We assumed thattrusting your neighbor might not have as much effect on shopping locally since neighborsmost often would not be retailers in town. Conversely, we assumed that trust of others in townmight have some effect on shopping since local retailers would often be in our category of“people in town.” In fact, it may be that lack of trust in others in town could spring from theway that retailers do business, among other factors—some of it could result from a lack ofcustomer loyalty but that inevitably came from merchants losing the trust of shoppers. In writtencomments, more than a handful of respondents from the less prosperous community wrote thatlocal retailers were to blame for the town’s woes. In the writers’ views, local retailers werelargely blamed for making it difficult to bring in new businesses into the community, which isa common lament in struggling communities across the United States.
In Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000, pp. 282–284) argued that generational change was themost significant reason that people in the United States were less engaged in civic, political
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and other forms of community life. Also, older residents are often less capable of travel-ing distances to shop in other towns, especially in comparison to younger residents. To helpcontrol for generational effects and difficulties traveling, we included respondents’ age as acontrol variable.8 The commuting variable also had to be entered to help control for its effectswhen attempting to measure the likelihood that trust affected shopping behavior.9 Finally, wecontrolled for respondents’ gender. Considering the existing gender inequality in occupations(e.g., Baunach, 2002), it seems reasonable to hypothesize that gender could significantly affectshopping behavior.10
The trust questions all had response patterns that forced respondents to mark either “donot trust,” “do not know,” “trust a little,” “trust some,” or “trust a lot.” In effect, three of thefive measures indicated some level of trust of others. The answer “do not know” is thought toindicate somewhat ambivalent attitudes toward other people. Only the first category indicatedthe strongest disinclination to trust others. If trust variables work to affect shopping behaviorit may be that some forms of trust actually ought to have a positive effect on out-shopping,which might be especially true for generalized trust because it may be based upon experienceswith people elsewhere. In fact, that was exactly what we found through our analyses.
Overall, the trust variables worked in a manner quite similar to what we had hypothesized.In Table 4, the coefficients for trust of others in town were negative, as hypothesized, but thelikelihood was only significant in the prosperous town. Among respondents from the moreprosperous town, trust of others in town worked to curtail people’s out-shopping behavior;however, in the less prosperous town, none of the trust variables had a significant impact onpeople’s out-shopping behavior. As we ought to expect, trust worked differently in differenttowns. Furthermore, age was significant and worked as we expected in both towns. The negativesign of the age variable indicates that those who were older were less likely to shop outside oftheir town. Also, the ordinal logit showed that commuting had a positive effect on out-shoppingin the less prosperous town—the mitigating effects of trust of others in town were not evidentthere. The results did not indicate that our measure of generalized trust, trusting other U.S.residents, had a statistically significant affect on out-shopping; however, respondents’ trust ofU.S. residents generated a positive likelihood estimate in the less prosperous town. Apparently,
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generalized trust did not work in any significant manner to encourage people to shop in townin either case.
These findings from the statistical analyses are fairly consistent with our theoretical expec-tation even when you control for a series of different factors, such as the wealth of the town.Obviously, variables included in the analyses worked quite differently in different towns. In themore prosperous town, we found that trusting others in town tended to mitigate out-shoppingbehavior among respondents; however, the same impact was missing in the less prosperoustown. Similarly, commuting also generated divergent impacts on people’s out-shopping behav-ior. While commuting did not seem to create a significant impact on out-shopping in the moreprosperous town, commuting apparently encouraged people from the less prosperous commu-nity to shop more outside of their town. Interpreting these different outcomes, it seems thattrusting others in town mitigated the effects of “rural sprawl” in the more prosperous townalone. In this way, the statistical analyses clearly suggested that trust of other people in townis one of the key variables determining people’s shopping behavior and thus trust did impactthe generation of wealth in communities.
4. Conclusions
Several conclusions may be drawn from our research in these two communities but amongthem one may be most important. Finding that the two communities from one small region(recall that the two towns are only about 130 miles apart and have similar economic bases) ofthe northern Great Plains are quite distinct implies that aggregations of social capital and trustdata from a large area ought to be viewed with some care. While the region of the northernGreat Plains is high on the commonly used measures of trust, that measure masks consider-able variation at the level of smaller communities or even neighborhoods. In those communalsettings, wealth and trust both vary, and so do the ways trust works to make communities suc-cessful. Researchers ought to continue to use measures of trusting networks that are available,but findings derived from aggregated data ought to be understood as being less than ideal.11
Some elements of the disconnectedness formed in regions with “urban sprawl” are alsofound in rural towns but generalizations about the nature of “rural sprawl” should also beviewed with some caution. We found that commuting can have significant effects on trustand shopping behavior, but at this point it is difficult to generalize about how commutingmatters; the impact of commuting would seem to depend on the unique circumstances of thecommunities studied. While commuting may hurt trust in general, it may not necessarily harmthe community’s economy because it consistently engendered out-shopping.
It is well worth noting that trust generated by networks (social capital) likely mitigates thenegative effects of out-shopping in small, rural communities. We suspect that trust mitigatesout-shopping when people have high levels of trust that include others in their town, especiallymembers of the business community. While it might be argued that consumer loyalty is at workhere, that is not what our questions measured; and, we believe that consumer loyalty is one partof what we have identified more broadly as trust. In fact, we believe that the research showsjust how important it is that business leaders engage in activities to support community lifeand the public good, because it helps build a more prosperous life for them and others—being
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“self interest rightly understood”. Earlier research has indicated that the “struggling commu-nity” had far fewer formal organizations that worked to complete community projects than the“prosperous community” (2004). If people learn trust in organizations, as well as trust in thepeople running businesses in their town, that learning may have to occur in civic associationsdedicated to some form of public interest; or, public and private speech has to impart somenotion that everyone in town is linked together in their efforts to maintain a vital community.Such civic groups work on the basis of “thin” trust that is engendered by structured interactionsdriven by meeting times and constitutions or by-laws that emphasize some larger public goal.12
“Thick” groups among the people in the “struggling community” often worked for more nar-rowly construed interests—similar to what we find in families, cliques and some exclusive,religious organizations.
In the less prosperous community, “thick” trust seemed to be the predominant way of gettingthings done. When we asked respondents how to get things done in that community, we gota variety of responses that indicated the importance of “thick” trust and personal or familyrelationships. When we asked how to get things done in that community, one respondentsimply wrote, “depends on what you are wanting to get done—should have the OK of theMcQueens, Dominiques and Normans.”13 Another respondent put it more directly; “Same oldpeople—because of “them” many don’t volunteer.” Apparently, better ways of determining theway “thick” and “thin” trust works in communities are needed, but local officials and activistsought to understand that “thin” trust developed by community organizations is most likelypreferable. The true felicity Aristotle supported likely still works because it engenders the trustof others in town and most easily supports the building of wealthy and healthy communities.
Notes
1. We agree with arguments, such as that made by Pawar (2006) that social capital may bea problematic term and limit our use of it in favor of emphasizing the trustworthinessand trust that is critical to effective cooperation.
2. Two qualifications should be stated here and each is based on the trenchant comments offormal theorists and others who have examined trusting relationships. One, be certain tonote the nature of causes for cooperation. Are they primarily based upon norms or uponvarious formal and informal constraints that lead to some sort of self-interested behavior?Of course, a middle position can be found in the earlier American understanding of “selfinterest rightly understood” that suggested true self-interest was linked to the interestsof others. A more recent expression of the fundamental argument reverses the middleposition; “By investing in relationships that reduce transaction costs, we can reducethe friction in productive activities” (Rupasingha et al., 2006, p. 84). Two, be certainto examine specific relationships that neither gloss over important differences in thenature of the relationships nor the categories of people represented. Specifically, thequalifications suggest that research into trust must move to the actual places where trustand trustworthiness are used to create wealth.
3. Pooley, Cohen, and Pike (2005) have argued that “sense of community” should be usedas a construct that taps the critical relationships we are examining. Perhaps, a community
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where members think of self-interest in the Tocquevillian, or Civic Republican, mannerhave a stronger “sense of community” as Pooley et al. call it. We are less convinced thatthe construct is helpful but we appreciate their move toward community level analysis.
4. In Geertz’s (1973) seminal work, The Interpretation of Culture, he raised the matter of“thick” and “thin” qualifications of formal and informal association.
5. Regarding trust questions, we did not code the “do not know” response as a missingvalue, because we believe the “do not know” response captures respondents’ ambivalentattitudes toward others; therefore, we coded “do not know” as a category that locatedbetween “do not trust” and “trust a little.”
6. For verification, we cross-tabulated commuting and other dimensions of trust and founda consistent pattern, except with the case of the relationship between trusting neighborsand commuting in the less prosperous town. Overall, the negative impacts of commutingon trust in terms of its particular and generalized forms appear to be widespread.
7. We reversed the order of respondents’ answers, so that out-shopping behaviors receivehigher scores. This variable is an ordinal variable with categories ranging from 1 to 5.
8. In the survey, we asked respondents the year of their birth in order to avoid the problemsof directly asking their age. We created the age variable by extracting the year of birthfrom the survey year.
9. We coded the commuting variable so that 0 represented those respondents who did notcommute and 1 indicated the respondents who commuted to their work.
10. The gender variable is a dichotomous variable with 0 signifying male respondents and 1representing females.
11. Rorty (1989) has argued for understanding language, even social scientific language, asbeing contingent and metaphorical, which is what we contend here.
12. To learn more about thick and thin trust, visit the glossary of the Saguaro Seminar onlineat; http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/glossary.htm#thick.
13. Names were changed to protect the anonymity of respondents.
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