TRUST AND ALL THOSE GOOD THINGS

I have been reading Anthony Williams papers from Digital4Sight’s Leadership in the Networked Economy Project. He makes the point that Trust makes the networked economy work. You don’t engage in e-commerce without trust, nor in online banking. Businesses don’t share information online without Trust. You don’t want to give information electronically to a government you don’t trust, nor do you want to do online transactions with such a government. Indeed, you don’t want to fund an NGO to work in the networked society unless you trust it.

All very well, but in the U.S. there are currently major scandals in business. government seems to be permanently under suspicion. And indeed there have been some very sad cases of charitable organizations showing up as lead by people I find hard to trust. And I think of the U.S. as one of the more ethical countries. There are certainly developing countries where I trust business and government institutions less than I trust those of the U.S.

Williams, correctly, pointed out that if organizations are open and transparent they are more trustworthy. But for an organization to open itself and its transactions to public scrutiny, it better be ethical. Ethics may then in a networked society become a vehicle to business and governmental success.

“Openness” in the context of international development is often used in the context of open to outside ideas. Rodriguez and Wilson in their paper several years ago suggested that openness was a very strong predictor of Internet penetration in developing countries. That might be causal, that countries that are open seek the Internet. I suspect it may be that countries that are more “modern” are both more open and more accepting of communication technologies. It of course is conceivable that openness grows with more exposure to outside information, or even more likely that there is a triple link, with openness leading to connectivity, connectivity leading to openness, and modernity encouraging both.

It does occur to me that the unethical and exploitive will probably reject openness and transparency, as getting in the way of graft, corruption and exploitation. So too will the reactionary reject openness to new ideas, as unlikely to be helpful in the road to the past that they would prefer to take.

There would seem to be much less nefarious reasons that elites might reject openness and transparency. Theirs is a good life, perhaps to be threatened by change. If you are not enthusiastic about change, you might not be enthusiastic about openness to new ideas. Even if ethical, you need not be enthusiastic about making your transactions open and transparent to others; what if those competing with you for power or wealth utilize the information against you.

Moreover, the World Values Survey results have suggested that there are deep cultural nd economic roots underlying differences on two dimensions: traditional versus secular authority, and survival versus self-expression. I would expect those sharing secular values to be more open to outside ideas than those sharing traditional values; those concerned with self-expression to be more willing to be open and transparent than those concerned with survival values.

If Trust is a linchpin of Knowledge for Development, and if openness and transparency, based on ethical behavior in institutions are the road to Trust, then that road may be quite long in some places.