Sociologists writing on trust are generally concerned with social mechanisms that generate trust (for example, see Luhmann 1980, 95). Luhmann supposes that the structure of trust relations requires that calculation of risk remain latent. Yet contractual relations may require that such calculation be overt and present and may therefore introduce an atmosphere unfavorable to trust. When such interdependence already exists, so that the risks are openly known to all without need of specific present discussion, mutual understanding and trust may be enhanced (Luhmann 1980, 36). This merely means that the transition from informal to formal regulation of relations may be uneasy, as the street-level epistemologist should expect. New conditions that have ill-defined prior expected probabilities generally introduce initial instability, but the result of successfully completing the transition to formal regulation can be to enhance trust.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 588