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Trust, the foundation of cooperative living, is an important part of all social relationships. There is no site-institutions, organisations, nation-states-where relationships can be sustained without trust.

In India, trust has currently become an important issue. Citizens are concerned about the trustworthiness of policies and practices that lie at the intersection of governance and economy.

Transactions are at the centre of all economic activities, conducted by a variety of economic actors. Hence, trust is a vital facilitator of transaction. Trust is seen here as relational trust, trust developed from and sustained by relationships between the trusting and the trusted.

Beginning with an overview of trust analysis across disciplines, the chapters analyse a range of transaction spaces and stakeholders engaged in making, sustaining and reconfiguring trust. The spaces include: factories and financial institutions; homes, neighbourhoods and streets, where trust is a critical variable in some economic transactions taking place.

The different players and stakeholders in these transactions of trust include: organised labour, migrant workers, self-help/neighbourhood groups, domestic workers and caregivers, and street children.

The authors have used multiple research techniques in order to locate and analyse the appropriate data. This is the first social science text to address the critical issue of trust in transactions.

Contents: Introduction/Prasanta Ray and Rukmini Sen. Part I: Theoretical Engagements. 1. Two paradigms of trust/Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. Part II: Sites and Situations. 2. Trust as Relational/Prasanta Ray. 3. Domestic labour and domestic work(er): domesticity as a site of contested trust and discipline/Rukmini Sen. 4. Lifeworlds of street children in Kolkata city: trust and economic transactions/Anwesha Paul (Das). 5. Kinship, social network and the Rajbanshi Diaspora in Jaipur, Rajasthan: an examination of trust making and trust sustenance/Ushasi Basu Roy Chowdhury. 6. Capability, efficiency, trust: work experiences of persons with disabilities in India/Nandini Ghosh. 7. Do Incentives Lead to Trust? An Empirical Study of Self-Help Group Bank Linkage (SBL) Programme in West Bengal/Sujata Bera. 8. Trust and Loaning: Formal-Informal Interactions in the Indian Credit Market/Atanu Sengupta and Sanjoy De. 9. Trust and performance: a study of select small firms in West Bengal/Sharmistha Banerjee and Mousumi Roy. 10. Labour, Capital and (Dis)trust Case Studies from West Bengal/Subhanil Chowdhury and Supurna Banerjee. 11. The small farmers and the large trader in neoliberal times narratives on trust formation/Dipankar Das. 12. Trusting the ‘Unknown’ impersonal mediation and development of new business in e-commerce/Anirban Sengupta. 13. Circuits of Capital in India: Trust, ‘Informality’ and the Institution of the Family-owned Business Group/Chirashree Das Gupta. Index.