![]() ![]() Note the kind of inference Fukuyama is making. The large, hierarchical, publically owned, professionally managed corporation … does not exist in culturally Chinese societies” ( Fukuyama 1995: 74). ![]() “irtually all private-sector businesses are family owned and family managed …. When the pool of competent kin is exhausted, and non-kin are distrusted, the result is that the great majority of firms in Taiwan are small or medium size, with few large-scale enterprises. In order to expand its scale, a firm must find competent new high level management. Firms in Taiwan are more often family businesses the inability to trust non-kin acts as a brake on the expansion of the size of the enterprise. Fukuyama contends that the size distribution of firms in Japan is larger than that in Taiwan. This has implications for the formation of business firms. The essence of Chinese Confucianism is the elevation of kinship bonds above all other social loyalties. Fukuyama cites Banfield’s (1967) study of Italy, where “amoral familism” hindered economic growth. Unrelated people have no basis for trusting one another. In such societies, family and kinship ties are particularly strong, but generalized trust of people one does not know is not very developed. He broadly characterizes the United States, Japan and Germany as high-trust societies, in contrast to Italy, France, China and China-type societies – Taiwan and Hong Kong – as low-trust societies.įor Fukuyama, a key characteristic of low-trust societies is that they are “familistic”. His key concept is “spontaneous sociability”, which can take alternative forms: interpersonal trust between kin, work associates, neighbors, strangers and others organizational participation and other forms of social capital. The thrust of his argument is that “certain societies can save substantially on transaction costs because economic agents trust one another in their interactions and therefore can be more efficient than low-trust societies, which require detailed contracts and enforcement mechanisms” ( Fukuyama 1995: 352). ![]() My study will introduce such data.įukuyama is interested in the effect of societal trust on economic development. What disturbed me when I recently read Fukuyama’s 1995 book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Generation of Prosperity, was that he deployed certain types of evidence to support this claim, but did not have the advantage of more recently collected data from survey research on people’s attitudes and behavior concerning trust in Japan and Taiwan. The present study is designed to test Francis Fukuyama’s claim that Japan has a higher level of generalized interpersonal trust than Taiwan, and to reconsider what he sees as the causes and consequences of this. Zak and Knack (2001), for example, used data on generalized trust from 41 societies in the World Values Surveys to demonstrate that formal institutions (property rights and contract enforceability), the relative absence of corruption, lower levels of income and land inequality, and social homogeneity increase economic growth in part by building on the trust that exists among people. Economists interested in economic growth have also begun to empirically examine the role of trust. Freitag (2003) compared the development of generalized trust in Japan and Switzerland. The causal mechanisms through which trust, generated by participation in voluntary organizations, is generalized to trust of strangers, in Sweden, Germany and the United States, were analyzed by Stolle (2001). Paxton (1999) suggested that generalized trust (of strangers) is low in societies where the rule of law is weak and corruption rampant. The present study uses the last of these methods in order to answer the question: when the people of two or more societies have similar or different levels of trust, what are the causes and consequences of this? In earlier research, Hall (1999) sought explanations for the decline of trust in both Britain and the United States. The profusion of recent studies of trust contains a variety of methodologies, ranging from psychological approaches to trust as a personality attribute and experiments using Prisoner’s Dilemma games, to historical, ethnographic and survey research, with the last of these divided into studies of particular communities or a single society and cross-societal comparative surveys. This was a response to two things: the perception that social and political trust are in decline, and the argument that trust is essential to a good society ( Levi 2001). Beginning around 1980, a new wave of theoretical concern with trust emerged ( Sztompka 2001). ![]()
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