In this study, we trace the origins and development of attitudes of trust and distrust toward Russian entrepreneurial ventures. Drawing on the results of an in-depth comparative case analysis, we examine the patterns of cognition-based and affect-based trust-building efforts in Russian entrepreneurial companies and reflect on the outcomes of these efforts at various stages of the firms' life cycle. We demonstrate that trust-enhancing attempts undertaken by Russian entrepreneurial ventures can lead to a sense of trust or distrust toward entrepreneurial projects, depending upon the firms' initial resource endowment. We also show that trust can substitute for the lack of entrepreneurial resources available to nascent businesses in a transitioning environment. In addition, we present a novel evolutionary framework for the affect-based trusting attitudes.Managerial Summary: Entrepreneurial firms need to develop trust toward their business projects, particularly among their customers and employees. This is especially important when entrepreneurial ventures strive to achieve their objectives in transitioning economies, which often exhibit hostility and disbelief toward entrepreneurial initiatives. We examine the development of trust and distrust in two Russian entrepreneurial companies working in the private educational sector. We show that entrepreneurial ventures create very different types of trusting and distrusting
When young children confront a vast array of adults' testimonial claims, they should decide which testimony to endorse. If they are unable to immediately verify the content of testimonial assertions, children adopt or reject their informants' statements on the basis of forming trust in the sources of testimony. This kind of trust needs to be based on some underlying reasons. The rational choice theory, which currently dominates the social, cognitive, and psychological sciences, posits that trust should be formed on a rational basis, as a result of probabilistic assessments and utility‐maximizing calculations. In this paper, the predictions stemming from the rational choice approach to trust are systematically compared with the empirical evidence from the field of developmental psychology on how children establish their trust in testimonial statements. The results of this comparison demonstrate an obvious inadequacy of the rational choice explanation of the emergence and development of children's testimonial trust, regardless of which form of trust rationality—weighting, threshold, or ordering—is examined. As none of the three forms of rationality of children's trust in testimony squares with the empirical data, this paper introduces a new version of trust rationality, adaptively rational trust. It explores the compatibility of the concept of adaptively rational trust with the recent empirical findings in the area of developmental psychology and addresses some avenues for future research on the rationality of testimonial trust.
In this paper, I introduce an important dynamic function performed by social institutions, which consists in helping individual actors to adapt to significant changes taking place in their environment. This adapting function is juxtaposed against the statically-oriented properties of institutions, which comprise their enabling, constraining, and orienting functions. I explicate the three major adapting roles of social institutions, which correspond to the cognitive, normative, and regulatory institutional elements, and explore the nine principal mechanisms by which social institutions can accelerate the adaptation processes. I examine the main outcomes of the adaptation processes supported by social institutions, as well as the key enablers and barriers to successful adaptation. I present a co-evolutionary model of adaptive dynamics involving individuals, institutions, and the broader external environment, and discuss the major implications of the proposed framework.
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