Given the inherent tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes that confound agency relationships, why the persistence of impersonal trust? To argue that principals in complex society have no choice but to trust is far too simple. Indeed, there is enormous variability in the extent to which, and the conditions under which, they exercise that choice. The task of discovering and teasing out explanations for that variability arouses the sociological imagination.

Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Imper…, loc. 146