This volume reopens the topic of trust through a conversation-analytic ethnomethodological (EM/CA) examination of the interactional construction of trustworthiness as aspects of participant identity. If trustworthiness is relevant to participant interaction, then it should be the subject of analytic interest, the authors argue. For their study, they draw on a substantial corpus of multimodal data of international business meetings and other professional activities not originally collected for the study of trustworthiness, as well as already published transcripts. The book's table of contents is minutely structured with detailed section descriptions that give a comprehensive map of the book and its argument.
Chapter 1, which serves as the introduction, discusses trustworthiness as a ‘concern for all members of society’ (1). It proposes looking at trustworthiness from an EM/CA perspective by focusing on participants’ sensorially observable actions rather than their motives, laying out the agenda for an interactional study of trustworthiness. Chapter 2 makes the argument that EM/CA research is highly suitable for analysing inferred social phenomena and proffers examples of CA studies of inferences from conduct. In chapter 3, the authors situate themselves vis-à-vis trustworthiness research conducted in the fields of rhetoric, social science, psychology, and discursive psychology before describing their basic premises and the interactional characteristics of how participants orient to trustworthiness in social situations. Chapter 4 contrasts the existing methodologies for studying trustworthiness in rhetoric and in trust research more generally against the authors’ methodology which looks for evidence of trustworthiness offered and perceived in interaction. Chapters 5 to 8 empirically demonstrate and develop the four orientations the authors propose as fundamental modes by which participants attempt to develop or ascertain trustworthiness. These are an orientation to truth and honesty (chapter 5), an orientation to stake and interest (chapter 6), an orientation to knowledge and ability (chapter 7), and an orientation to consistency and predictability (chapter 8). Chapter 9 offers a concluding discussion.
The volume offers detailed and illuminating insight into the interactional dimensions of establishing and ascertaining trustworthiness in interaction. This is welcome and important research for the phenomenon of trust which is too often treated like an essential quality of persons rather than a relational dynamic interactional effect. One shortcoming of the volume, which the authors carefully acknowledge in the conclusion, is the way in which the authors’ social context of a ‘high-trust society’ biases their presumption of what constitutes the baseline ‘normal’ of social interactions. The normative presumption of trustworthiness as a widely shared interactional goal is a significant limitation in most trust research. Within ethnomethodologically inspired studies of interaction, research on conversational norms in societies with a baseline normal of suspicion and mistrust would offer important insights into the supposed universality of conversational and interactional norms.
