The study of trust presented in this book is predominantly theoretical innature, though our analyses of the concept are nevertheless grounded in, andillustrated through, qualitative data collected in our research withincommunity-based services that deliver healthcare for people experiencingserious mental health problems – especially those with diagnoses ofpsychosis – in Southern England. The empirical research that informsthe theoretical frameworks we develop not only serves to enable more robust,empirically relevant conceptualisations, but also allows us to consider therelevance of trust where it is most vital and yet potentially mostproblematic – amidst especially heightened levels of vulnerabilityand uncertainty. Thus, our research in these settings was in part motivatedby the potential utility of emerging insights for mental health services,but furthermore because this setting represents a crucibleof conditions pertinent to informing our understandings of the concept oftrust. Correspondingly, this book is intended as both an extension of socialtheories of trust, while simultaneously offering more practical insightsinto the relevance and functioning of trust within mental healthcare andother services seeking to meet the needs of vulnerable people.

Following understandings of theory development as an extension out of carefulexploration of cases (Burawoy, 1998), and in relating the micro to the macrothrough ‘forensic analysis’ (Inglis, 2010), our account oftrust takes place at the level of social theory, pertaining to moregenerally occurring social processes, yet this analysis is very muchinformed through the ‘clues, episodes and events’ of amicro-investigation of social relations in a particular context. As touchedupon already, and as we will go on to argue later in this Introduction andin following chapters, there are many features of the social experiences andrelations visible in our data that render this research context pertinent tounderstandings of trust in late-modern societies at the more general andeven macro-level. In this sense, our presentation of trust is very relevantto considerations of broader dynamics occurring across many late-modernwelfare states in the global North.

Late-modernity and the illumination of uncertainties

The concept of late-modernity that is being invoked here isone pertaining chiefly to ‘crisis’. While Habermas (1976: 1)makes this connection with particular regard to political institutions,economic and welfare management, and legitimacy, the‘lateness’ or destabilising of modernity can be conceptualisedas a much broader phenomenon.