Networks of trust

Ross Mayfield has a good summary of a discussion about cognitive and emotional dimensions of trust.
As I said in the comments to that post, I like the notions that:
* trust is built over time
* trust is a parametric space, with different kinds of trust (personal trust that a friend will be reliable and sympathetic; professional trust that a colleague will produce quality work).
But I start getting suspicious about social science methodologies that attempt to quantify and parameterize trust. Organizations that rely heavily on this kind of analysis in Professor Stephenson’s work may have more problems than a consulting sociologist can help with.
My first market research job involved writing up the results of HR surveys in a large telecommunications company.
The results showed that employees did not trust managers and managers did not trust employees. The HR survey was repeated on an annual basis, showing that managers and employees continued to distrust each other.
This company had big problems with management and human relationships. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on survey research to quantify the distrust between managers and employees wasn’t the best use of money.
Pages full of survey results and armies of consultants don’t replace and can’t create honest leadership, aligned incentives, and day-to-day warmth and respect.