Resetting the Table on Institutional Trust: Institutional Logics, Stakeholder Expectations, and Cognitive Frames

Our recent review of the institutional trust literature provides a promising springboard for future studies of institutional trust development and decline. Specifically, our definition of institutional trust, our identification of the central role that institutional logics play in shaping institutional trust assessments, and our classification of cognitive frames that stakeholders use in gathering and processing institutional trust information provide scholars with new lenses to use in exploring institutional trust phenomena. Together, these ideas, combined with a focus on abductive empirical exploration, can lead scholars to generate new and more accurate observations about how stakeholders assess institutional trustworthiness and how institutional trust dynamics manifest across analytical levels and contextual environments. By providing a new approach to examining institutional trust formation, erosion, and repair, scholars are now poised to move institutional trust research toward new ways of understanding how institutional trust dynamics emerge and evolve.