ABSTRACT
In the 25 years since the publication of “The Social Control of impersonal Trust” in The American Journal of Sociology (Shapiro 1987), there has been an explosion of social scientific work on trust. The Social Sciences Citation Index lists more than 46,000 articles alone on the theme of trust (more than 15,000 with trust in the title) published in the last quarter century, compared to fewer than 4500 articles in the previous 100 years. 1 Indeed, there are more than half as many citations in sociological journals to the AJS article in the last quarter century as to all publications about trust in the century that preceded it. 2
