It may still be true that trust and trustworthiness are fundamentally important in making large-scale activities and, especially, large social institutions function. To show how they do this, however, requires substantial unpacking of the relationships within those institutions to understand how trust plays a role at the micro level. Trust is inherently a micro-level phenomenon. It is individuals who trust, and it is individuals who, under institutional and other constraints, are trustworthy to some, perhaps limited, extent in particular contexts. Trust and trustworthiness may permeate the social structure, but they do so bit by bit. And much of that structure is a response to the difficulties of relying on trust and trustworthiness to motivate cooperation.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 884