Interview with professor Guido Möllering, director and Chair of Management at the Reinhard Mohn Institute at the Witten-Herdecke University in Witten, Germany, and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Trust Research”. Is trust a useful subject for research as it is so elusive and hard to define? We talk about his 2006 book “Trust, Reason, Routine, Reflexivity”. Inspired by the German sociologist Georg Simmel he reflects on trust as the ability to believe in someone without being able to really say what it is you believe. He mentions trusting versus trust and how pharmaceutical companies and the HIV/AIDS community finally got to trust each other. About the “trust gap” where longtime business partners like Apple and Qualcomm and Microsoft and Intel had to readjust their relationship, once very successful but went sour because they realized too late that their relationships had become locked-in.

The full interview can also be watched as a video with subtitles, on the TrustTalk YouTube channel