Trust in anthropology

The article explores some of the assumptions behind the current valence of the notion of trust and in particular its entanglement in discourses of social robustness, the management and reporting of (corporate) knowledge, and its underlying culture and systems of responsibility. It unfolds by contrasting classic and contemporary anthropological work on cultures of suspicion, culpability and spiritual ambiguity with the new vocabulary of capitalist corporate ethics. Finally, the argument examines the work that relationships do when moving in and out of the occult, and contrasts it with the kind of temporal work that capitalism demands from relationships to remain diaphanous. If public trust functions as the political epistemology of neoliberal society, an anthropological theory of trust ought perhaps to reaffirm instead our trust in anthropological theory and comparison.Peer reviewe

The ethics of information transparency

“The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com”. Copyright Springer [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]The paper investigates the ethics of information transparency (henceforth transparency). It argues that transparency is not an ethical principle in itself but a pro-ethical condition for enabling or impairing other ethical practices or principles. A new definition of transparency is offered in order to take into account the dynamics of information production and the differences between data and information. It is then argued that the proposed definition provides a better understanding of what sort of information should be disclosed and what sort of information should be used in order to implement and make effective the ethical practices and principles to which an organisation is committed. The concepts of "heterogeneous organisation" and "autonomous computational artefact" are further defined in order to clarify the ethical implications of the technology used in implementing information transparency. It is argued that explicit ethical designs, which describe how ethical principles are embedded into the practice of software design, would represent valuable information that could be disclosed by organisations in order to support their ethical standing.Peer reviewe