Connecting trust and power

The Journal of Trust Research (JTR) is growing. Across indicators such as articles handled, downloaded and cited, the rate of growth is around 15% per year according to the Publisher’s Report of January 2019. Beyond plain numbers, which could be even better but are encouraging nevertheless, I am pleased to see that the journal increasingly fulfils its mission to be a truly interdisciplinary forum (Möllering, 2017). Submissions and, indeed, published articles come from an ever wider range of disciplines. Whilst in its founding years JTR relied very much on research coming out of management and organization studies, the journal now also connects strongly with sociology, political science, economics, international relations, communication studies, education research and other fields. This represents a challenge for the JTR Editorial Team in doing justice to the highly diverse submissions received, but it is through the editorial process that we can also encourage authors to integrate insights from other fields, thus to ensure that JTR is not merely multidisciplinary but interor, ideally, transdisciplinary in the new knowledge on trust developed. The current issue, JTR 9(1), is a regular issue in the sense that the articles were not specifically curated around a predefined theme but are simply the next ones in line in our publication pipeline. Nevertheless, as Editor, one looks at the collection and wonders to what extent the new articles presented this time are indicative of some overarching theme that seems to be, or should be, on trust researchers’ minds at the present time. Without claiming a perfect match for every paper included, the topic of power stands out this time. “Power” is probably even more elusive than “trust”, but – if we are prepared to take the additional headaches – it is time to connect the two concepts (again). Research explicitly connecting trust and power is surprisingly rare. Fox (1974), Zand (1997) or Bachmann (2001) can be noted as prominent exceptions. Perhaps in our preoccupation with the relationship between trust and control we have presumed that the latter, control, already includes power, but it is not as simple as that. Trust and power can be seen, for example, as contexts for each other, as functional equivalents (substitutes, supplements) or as an inseparable duality. What about the “constraining prejudice” (Simmel, 1906, p. 473; also translated as “compulsory power”, Simmel 1950, p. 348) of trust? What about the power-infused politics, façades and entrapments of trust (e.g. Hardy, Phillips & Lawrence, 1998; Möllering & Sydow, 2019; Skinner, Dietz & Weibel, 2014)? In return, all the way from Max Weber to current thinking in fields as diverse as leadership and international politics, it is recognized that power in practice requires elements of trust (e.g. in line with relational conceptions of power such as Giddens, 1984). Like trust (e.g. Fulmer & Dirks, 2018), power is a multilevel phenomenon and thus there is an opportunity to not only study their relationship at different levels but also across levels, for example, looking at how power at one level shapes trust at another. The contributions to the current JTR issue support this new interest in power. In particular, the study by Sebastien Brion, Ruo Mo and Robert Lount Jr. (2019) focuses on a very interesting effect that the Wall Street Journal (Shellenbarger, 2019) has picked up and boiled down to the notion that being promoted at work might mean losing some friends. More specifically, Brion et al. (2019) show in their longitudinal study of individuals working in teams that trust increases (or decreases) as a function of how much power individuals gain (or lose) over time. Notably,