Research
Objectives
EnTrust’s research activities are geared to addressing two main questions:
(1) What does it mean conceptually that an institution is endogenously trustworthy?
(2) How should the dynamics of interaction between institutional role occupants be evaluated to assess the capacity of their interrelated action to corroborate the institution’s endogenous trustworthiness thus strengthening the normative grounds of institutional functioning?
These two related questions track the twofold aim of the project. They guide the study of the constitutive relation between office accountability and endogenous institutional trustworthiness and the contributive relation between these properties and institutional functioning. The project aims to realize three main specific research objectives.
OBJECTIVE 1: To define the conceptual contour of endogenous institutional trustworthiness by probing how the concept of trust can make sense of the dynamics of interaction between institutional role occupants in the economy of institutional functioning (endogenous institutional trustworthiness).
OBJECTIVE 2: To assess the conjecture that an institution realizing office accountability is endogenously trustworthy because its constitutive mechanisms ground officeholders’ mutual trust that their interrelated action sustains the institution’s functioning (office accountability).
OBJECTIVE 3: To understand how to activate the forces internal to an institution to contribute to sustain its functioning over time in the face of institutional dysfunctions that may undermine endogenous institutional trustworthiness (institutional functioning).
