Sociologická teorie důvěry Piotra Sztompky

The theme has been gaining in popularity in the social sciences roughly since the 1980s, and in the 90s there was a real boom in sociological studies of trust, a development undoubtedly springing from the rediscovery of the theme of civic society in the context of the construction of new democracies in post-communist countries. It is in this context that trust has been explored by the Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka, who in his work Trust: A Sociological Theory (1991) not only offers a summary and systematisation of previous approaches and conceptual and typological explanations of the concept of trust, but also proposes his own explanatory model of the social realisation of a culture of trust. Sztompka sees his model as just one examples of models of a more general process of social realisation based on the following assumptions: human activity is the motor force of social process; this force consequently has both the features of actors and the features of structures in which action is realised; the structural context is remoulded by the activity of actors, and finally, traditions of established practices form the initial conditions for further social events. Four kinds of variable figure in Sztompka's model: the initial variable is the existing tradition; the independent variable consists of structural conditions that reduce or increase the likelihood of trust; the third, mediating variable is the equipment of the actors, which influences the extent to which the actors can exploit the structural conditions and connects the preceding variables with the resulting level of trust, which then becomes the initial variable in another cycle of development of a culture of trust. Sztompka applies this theoretical model in a case study of Polish society undergoing processes of transformation. The author compares Sztompka's concept with those of other theoreticians of trust, i.e. Francis Fukuyama and Anthony Giddens, and tries to assess Sztompka's value for further investigation of the phenomenon of trust, both at a purely theoretical level, and at the level of empirical research.