International Journal of Political Science and Development
 

International Journal of Political Science and Development

Vol. 3(7), pp. 339, July, 2015.  

DOI: 10.14662/IJPSD2015.041

ISSN: 2360-784X

Book Review

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: The Free Press, 1995
Reviewed by: Ulviyya Huseynova

Accepted 28 July 2015
 

A conceptualization of trust became one of the peace building attempts in the field of Public Policy and International Relations in today’s world. A high trust between the societies and community is often becoming a risk on the behaviour of others. Trust is a basis of society which is the very important point to maintain stabilization and build an effective relationship in national and international level. A high level trust makes the conflictual society come up together and solve the problems under belief. A wide variety of literature was produced globally and each attempting to explain the possibility of trust and its emergence in society from its own perspective. Francis Fukuyama’s “Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity” is one of such book that tries to explain and compare the trustful societies in different communities of the world.
 

The author examines the common characteristics of the trust in family centered societies that, the family based companies are usually small and inefficient in the community. In the attempt to find an explanation to that argument, he uses to compare the China’s family based companies are small because of low trust inside of the society. For the author, the low trust may occur disadvantages like corruption and inefficient organisations.
 

Lastly, according to the author, those societies with a high predictive stability are able to integrate and modernise fast through scientific and especially technological advances in their companies or organisations. He has described that the cultural values and procedures have a deep influence on the ability of a society to become efficient in the sense of predictive stability in the long term. Then he continues that, the societies may survive for a long time also without being efficient.
 

China’s case could be limited if we are not going to generalize the family based societies’ characteristic aspects. However, there are too many examples for family centered companies or organisations in the whole world. We could not come up with the general conclusion to all family centered companies of different communities. China society could be unsuccessful case but, in terms of different companies, for example, Turkish family based companies are different and really successful in their development. In Turkey, the number of family based companies and organisations try to save their development and function through new technologies and professionals in the field.
 

On the second explanation about the predictive stability, the author sees the ability of predictive stability in inefficient societies. Then he argues with the opponent thought that, even inefficient societies may live long. There is no doubt that, the author through this book has been able to address the comparison of detailed points, that how inefficient societies could survive for a long period of time, what are the main advantages or disadvantages of being inefficient society in this way. The author explained the efficiency of predictive stability skilled societies as successful communities in a long term rather explaining how inefficient societies could live long.