Towards an Interdisciplinary Conceptualization of Trust: A Typological Approach

Adopting a diversity-in-unity perspective that identifies all shared dimensions and typical delineations, both as structure-similar yet content-diverse configurations, this paper proposes an interdisciplinary conceptualization of trust with primary trust ideal-types. This conceptualization contains three components: (i) a typology of four trust dimensions related to trust conditions and trust functions; (ii) a typology of four trust delineations derived from the four trust dimensions; and (iii) a typology of four trust ideal-types built upon the first two typologies. These typologies joindy serve as a salient platform to unify the fragmented trust literature.