The political economy of trust: Exploring cooperation between mechanical engineering firms in Emilia-Romagna and Baden-Wuerttemberg (Italy, Germany).

摘要

In recent years, a great amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to the political, social, and economic consequences of trust. In particular, one can point to the recent burgeoning of interest in the concept of "social capital." In this dissertation, I set out to examine the political economy of trust in so-called "industrial districts," geographically concentrated clusters of small firms, which, it has been argued, rely heavily on cooperation between firms in order to survive and prosper. These districts are clearly of considerable interest for the study of how trust may impact on economic cooperation. In particular, I examine two case studies, one in the packaging machinery district of Bologna, in Italy and another in the machine tool industry of Stuttgart in Germany. I rely primarily on a series of interviews conducted with firms and other relevant actors in these districts in 1998--1999. Through analysis of these case studies I seek to test the merits of a version of the so-called "encapsulated interest" account of trust in explaining cooperation. I find that this account of trust provides a better fit with the data than competing accounts which refer to identity or culture as sources of trust. I then go on to argue that one may apply recent advances in the rational choice theory of institutions to understand why it is that individual actors come to trust each other as they do. Not only does an institutional theory of this sort provide a good explanation of the forms of cooperation observed in the two case studies, but it helps us understand why there are important differences in cooperation between the two cases. Study of industrial districts provides good reason to believe that the encapsulated interest account of trust, when combined with institutional theory, provides a good basis for the comparative analysis of trust.