From Communal Norms to Networks∗ (从社群规范到社会网络)

Conscious concern with trust and trustworthiness seems to be a late development in civilization. It appears to come in with the move from organizing society in small communities to organizing it in larger units, such as cities. In small communities, cooperative behavior is substantially regulated by communal norms. In larger communities, especially when these are economically differentiated through extensive division of labor, individuals increasingly rely on networks of people for specific realms of activity and for specific purposes. Networks are particularly important when we need to exchange or otherwise deal with very different kinds of people for different purposes. Such networks are less relevant in very small communities, because in such communities everyone is connected to everyone else. When we move from communal organization to network organization of cooperation, we essentially switch from group-generalized exchange relations to specialized dyadic exchange relations. Our dyads can be chain connected into networks. Some recent commentaries on differences in social organization, as in Francis Fukuyama’s (1995) comparisons of China, Japan, and the United States, treat man