A Comparative Analysis of Trust among Megacities: The Case of Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo

Abstract

In recent decades, trust has become a major issue in social science and the lay media, as globalization has become pervasive, in turn connecting peoples and nations more so than ever before. Accompanying this phenomenon is an apparent growing level of uncertainty about the trustfulness of strangers. Hence the study of generalized social trust has become essential in terms of the need to understand and cope with the serious impacts of globalization, especially as expressed through interpersonal communication.This is especially the case for contemporary globalized "megacities," where great numbers of people flow both into and out of countries, such as newcomers coming to live in a new country or visitors conducting business or touring for leisure. While these people would certainly like to have the expectation that they will be safe, events in recent decades make that expectation less tenable. That is, for the most part, the security and interpersonal trustworthiness of life in the village has been supplanted by something much different, where people move about and are now an amalgam from a variety of cultures and social systems. The former social structure, the village (or smaller city), involves particularized (personal) trust, whereas the latter, i.e. mega-scale society, involves generalized trust as the personal element fades in the face of industrialization and globalization.Trust, as addressed by sociologists such as Ferdinand Tonnies, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons, was deemed essential to social relationships. Simmel (1950, p. 326) stated that "trust is one of the most important synthetic forces in the society." Today, many scholars are taking yet another closer look at trust. For instance, Blau (1964, p. 99) stated that trust is "essential for stable social relationships." Many other scholars emphasize that trust plays a critical role in interpersonal and group relationships (e.g., Golembiewski and McConkie 1975; Lewis and Weigart 1985; Zucker 1986). Our economic system is in many ways entirely dependent upon trust because if there were no trust there could be no economic transactions (cf. Hirsch 1978). Thus trust has profound implications for interpersonal and social cooperation. Indeed, without trust, societies really could not exist (Bok 1978, p. 26). Nikolas Luhmann comes to mind as perhaps one of the most important scholars to have considered the role of trust in social systems, or in sociology for that matter. To Luhmann (1979, p. 8) trust "reduces [social system] complexity." Unquestionably, social systems are becoming increasingly complex and confounded, and for Luhmann this means that trust plays an ever-increasingly critical role.Today, it has been observed that trust levels are declining among many industrialized nations (e.g., Dalton 2004; Hardin 2006; Putnam 1993), thus calling for greater attention and concern. Social isolation brought about by modernization is frequently cited as one of many reasons to reexamine social trust. Other reasons include dramatic changes in demographics, politics, cultures, institutional structures and all that these influence.As a consequence of trust's ostensibly unique position, there is often a temptation to leave it undefined. Of course, there is a considerable degree of complexity, and controversy, when it comes to defining trust. Should one merely attempt to define trust, or should one focus on its contextual implications and roles? Unquestionably, there has been a distinct lack of empirical studies of trust and its determinants (cf. Butler 1991). For instance, is trust perceptual or attitudinal at the individual level, or is it an essential component of the social structure itself? If the latter is true, then social trust must be looked upon with reference to social norms and expectations. Hence, trust must then be "understood sociologically, just as social institutions, social stratification, and social change must be" (Wuthnow 2004, pp. …