ABSTRACT
The foundation of any enterprise is a transaction or exchange between individuals or corporate bodies, which is based on trust that each party will honour its obligations. In tight-knit communities trusted relationships depended and still depend on social connections, but as businesses were extended and became more complex tokens were introduced to help guarantee trust, which could be upheld by courts of law. Tight-knit communities do not necessarily have to be local: they can be international. The Masonic order and similar associations, such as the professional bodies set up in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, had and still have global connections. Particularly in the wake of the financial crisis there has been a great deal of interest in the nature of these trusted relationships by politicians, regulators, anthropologists, economists, historians, moral philosophers, sociologists and even archivists (see for example Fukuyama, 1995; Hosking, 2010; Moss, 2010; O’Neill, 2002; Selden, 2011). This has sparked an interest in the core records and their evidential value (Borland, 2009; Ellerbrock, 2005; Iacovino, 2006). Never before has there been such interest in the ‘trusted’ management of records in the corporate world, although the role and functions of records managers and archivists are rarely mentioned.
