ABSTRACT
In 1996, the year after Fukuyama (1995) published his major work on the role of social trust in the economic development of various societies, Kramer and Tyler edited an important collection of articles in the book, Trust in Organizations. In this volume Meyerson, Weick and Kramer introduced the concept ‘swift trust’, which they argued applied to the rapid emergence of trust in temporary groups or what they referred to colloquially as ‘organizational one-night stands’, during which important, but finite, tasks are accomplished often by relative strangers with varying degrees of success. They list the significant characteristics of such groups and indicate how traditional conceptions of the development of trust generally fail to capture the ways trust functions in these more temporary forms of organizing.
