Zaufanie i ryzyko w doświadczeniu przedsiębiorców
Trust and Risk in the Entrepreneurial Experience

Author(s): Łukasz Trembaczowski
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Economy, Business Economy / Management, Sociology, Social development, Economic development, Socio-Economic Research
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: Trust; Risk; Polish law; Theoretical aspects of risk; Entrepreneur in society; Sociological theories of trust
Summary/Abstract: The main theoretical framework for the following monograph has been built around the two titular concepts: trust and risk. Due to the lack of a coherent methodology which connects the two, each concept will be discussed in greater detail in a separate chapter, which will contain a thorough overview of the major conceptions of trust and risk. This overview, in turn, will be summed up with an analysis of the mutual relationship between the two, in order to conclude that trust and risk appear to be antithetical in the praxis of the experience of a social agent. The primary subject of the study has been the way trust and risk are experienced by entrepreneurs. The choice of this particular group has been dictated by the fact that it constitutes a distinctive research “laboratory,” which combines the problems connected with engaging in business activity with the everyday dilemmas experienced by individual subjects across society.The empirical part of the monograph, apart from conceptualizing and operationalizing theanalyzed issues, consists of two parts devoted to trust and risk respectively. The primary research elaborated upon in this monograph was conducted in two parts, in 2007 and 2013. The two years differ significantly when it comes to the economic situation, since 2007 can be regarded as the height of the market boom connected with Poland’s entry into the European Union, while 2013 can be regarded, per analogiam, as the height of the market slump due to the economic crisis that started in 2008 and belatedly affected also the Polish economy. In both years, the research was conducted in Tychy, even though it did not follow the panel research structure, among randomly selected entrepreneurs who employed at least one person.In the chapter devoted to trust, the research has been conducted on the basis of Piotr Sztompka’s theory of trust. The main aspects which have been analyzed include the question of the objects of personal, positional, institutional, procedural, and systemic trust. Moreover, the author searches for immanent and contextual criteria of evaluating trustworthiness in relation to efficiency, axiological, and fiduciary expectations, as well as functional trust substitutes. The comparative study of research results from both years allows to determine the range of variability of these components of trust.The part of research devoted to risk is, in turn, based on the psychometric and axiomatic paradigm of the psychological theory of risk. However, changes have been made when it comes to the assessment and the list of risks presented to the respondents, which was constructed on the basis of Marek Ziółkowski’s hierarchy of threats and supplemented with risks which appear in the conception of risk management. On the basis of factor analysis, in both cases, the author has differentiated three main explanatory factors which bear similar characteristics and consist of similar components. Therefore, it can be concluded that the structure of risk perception among entrepreneurs is stable. Moreover, it is possible to observe the changes in perception of the particular risks within the factor space. Comparing the results of the estimated level of risk with the use of the axiomatic paradigm, extended to include the controllability dimension, allows to, on the one hand, observe the similarities between the risk profile of the particular risks, assessed on the basis of the axiomatic approach with the added controllability factor, and, on the other hand, facilitates the observation of the shifts in the rankings of business risks while maintaining the risk assessment of private risks.

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