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"Dieses Papier beschäftigt sich mit den Funktionen von Institutionen im Prozess der Vertrauensgenese in Beziehungen zwischen individuellen Akteuren (Managern) und kollektiven Akteuren (Firmen). Es werden mehrere Ansätze zur Konzeptualisierung von Vertrauen in organisationalen Kontexten und deren Annahmen darüber diskutiert, wie institutionelle Arrangements Prozesse der Vertrauensbildung beeinflussen. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Diskussion wird eine tragfähige Perspektive zur Analyse des Verhältnisses zwischen Vertrauen und institutionellen Strukturen entwickelt. Vier Szenarien, in welchen der Einfluss von Institutionen für die Genese von Vertrauen besonders wichtig sein kann, werden genauer betrachtet: das frühe Entwicklungsstadium von Geschäftsbeziehungen; Fälle, in denen Institutionen relativ stark und verlässlich sind; Fälle, in denen Vertrauen schnell aufgebaut werden muss; und Fälle, in denen idiosynkratische Transaktionen stattfinden." (Autorenreferat)

"Several contributions of the special issue 'Conventions and institutions from a historical perspective' (HSR 36.4) show that the dynamics of institutions and conventions are different and therefore the analysis of their interactions is of crucial issue, as the author will show in a first part. In a second part, he proposes to analyze the use of the notion of 'convention of quality' and in particular, the link between this notion and the capabilities of experts, in a distributed cognition perspective." (author's abstract)

"The pandemic has brought into sharp relief the fundamental relationship between institution and human life: at the very moment when the virus was threatening to destroy life, human beings called upon institutions - on governments, on health systems, on new norms of behavior - to combat the virus and preserve life. Drawing on this and other examples, Roberto Esposito argues that institutions and human life are not opposed to one another but rather two sides of a single figure that, together, delineate the vital character of institutions and the instituting power of life. What else is life, after all, if not a continuous institution, a capacity for self-regeneration along new and unexplored paths? No human life is reducible to pure survival, to "bare life." There is always a point at which life reaches out beyond primary needs, entering into the realm of desires and choices, passions and projects, and at that point human life becomes instituted: it becomes part of the web of relations that constitute social, political, and cultural life."--

A precise model of social institutions is described comprising four dimensions: first, a macro-level of groups, types of actions, and related notions, second, a micro-level of underlying individuals and actions, together with suitable relations of intention, causal belief and power. Power is characterized in a new way emending proposals discussed recently. Third, the model contains intellectual representations of items on the macro- and micro-level. Fourth, it contains a dimension including the origin and development of what we call "social practices" (smallest units of socially relevant behaviour) which gives the model some historical depth. By putting all these items together, a powerful model with a wide range of applications is created. The claim associated with this model is that it applies to all social institutions which are similar to systems listed up in the introduction. The way of applying the model is discussed in detail on the basis of an abstract example.