Social Organization And Expert Trust In Risk Society

The modern society is not only a risk society, but a society in which trustmechanism changes significantly. It changes from trust on personality to trust onstrangers and systems. In modern society, expert system plays an important role, andexpert trust is a key part of system trust. However, expert trust does not developnaturally, but produced in certain social environment. China is currently undergoingprofound social transformation process, during which the traditional acquaintancesociety breaks up, and the modern society with high anonymity and mobility. Alongwith this process, the traditional trust mechanism is impacted, and the new trustmechanism is not yet built. Under this circumstances, trust crisis becomes a commonproblem, including expert trust crisis, which results in ineffectiveness of expert systemwhen faced with risks. What factors affect expert trust in a risk society? What are theinfluencing mechanisms of these factors? Is there any effective way in improving experttrust? Based on risk society theory, system trust theory, and civil society theory, thisresearch use food safety problem as an instance and employ both quantitative andqualitative methods to explore the formation and development mechanism of experttrust. At first, according to the roles and functions of expert system, this researchexamines the effects of two main factors, risk perception level and other dimensions ofsocial trust. Using structural equation model to analyze data from investigation inBeijing and Seoul, the research draws the influence paths of these two factors towardsexpert trust. On this basis, a field research on a civil group which aims to solve the foodsafety problem is implemented, with participant observation and depth interview. Itaims to explore the influencing mechanism of civil groups towards expert trust.The research has two main conclusions. First, both of the level of risk perceptionand other dimensions of social trust have influence on expert trust, among which therole of civil group cannot be neglected. Second, although civil groups can improveexpert trust through inner interactions and cooperation, the influencing mechanism stillconforms to rules of personality trust. How to construct generalized trust and systemtrust in civil group is needed to be explored.