The question of public trust in business

Jared D. Harris, Brian T. Moriarty, and Andrew C. Wicks’ recent book collects eleven chapters by well-known scholars on the question of public trust in business, published along with an introduction and conclusion by the editors. But the collection doesn’t make progress on what this reviewer takes to be the two essential questions. This review outlines those questions and then addresses a further, more technical difficulty with the conceptualizations of trust at work across the chapters. The central theme here is that business as an institution has obligations to society; we—the public—trust business to act on those obligations; and when business violates those obligations our trust is betrayed. The essays collected in this volume do not directly address the question of what those obligations are, but this should be the starting point for an investigation of public trust in business.