Unpacking the Paradoxes of Trust in Uncertain Times

Trust has been recognized as a foundational pillar underpinning the functioning of organizations and society. However, contemporary developments have unleashed unprecedented uncertainty, challenging established notions of social order and raising urgent questions about how trust will operate in the years to come. A deeper understanding of the interface between uncertainty and trust is needed, elaborating how institutions and advanced technologies offer pathways for building and maintaining trust. Our analysis identifies three core paradoxes: trust–uncertainty, trust–institution, and trust–technology. These paradoxes highlight that trust proves indispensable where it is hardest to build, that trusted institutions falter when uncertainty is high and they are needed most, and that technologies designed to reduce uncertainty can in fact increase it. This special issue curates five studies that illuminate these paradoxes. A qualitative study of whistleblowing reveals tensions in how organizations signal ability, benevolence, integrity, transparency, and identification across stakeholders and over time (trust–uncertainty). A mixed‑methods study of a high court theorizes fidelity mechanisms—recognition, selection, socialization—that stabilize the production of “trust objects” (trust–institution). A multilevel network analysis of a corporate top‑management team shows that shared organizational vocabularies foster trust; when those words align with organizational identity, trust ties traverse unit boundaries (trust–institution). A study of a Covid‑19 mutual‑aid platform shows how digital affordances catalyze institution‑based trust that seeds emotional trust among strangers (trust–technology). Finally, a study of a peer‑to‑peer market shows that accreditation (technology verification) and reputation have opposite effects as cultural distance grows—accreditation narrows trust gaps while reputation can widen them—with implications for inequality (trust–technology). Building on these insights, our editorial articulates across the piece a forward-looking research agenda emphasizing the recursive interplay between trust and uncertainty and calling for research to illuminate the emergent, paradoxical, and often nonlinear patterns of trust development.