Social capital in food economics: trust, organisation and cooperation

Tóth, Anikó

Keywords: collective agrarian marketing, defence of common interest, willingness to accept sacrifice, organisation

Research has shown that trust and contribution to common action is positively related to an individual’s self-assessment. People who favourably judge the level of trust are willing to make sacrifices of their time. However, an adequate level of trust is not sufficient for money contributions because in this case the above positive relationship is absent. The relationship between the level of trust and others’ willingness to contribute time and money is not unambiguous. An increase in trust level does not automatically follow a positive increase in judging the willingness of other economic partners to contribute. From studies involving organisation levels and frequency of defending common interest it has been shown that people who are better organised do not necessarily judge more positively the efficiency with which their interests are defended. When investigation the relationship between organisational level and trust we have shown that this relationship is not significant, that is just because people are better organised, it does not unambiguously follow that they necessarily trust each other more.

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