Collective narratives to question assumptions of trust in social entrepreneurship

Within the social entrepreneurship literature, trust is often assumed to hold togetherrelations which are based upon shared values [GHK 2005; Murdock 2005, 2012; Pharoah2007]. The nature of the trusting relations is viewed to exist within and betweenorganizations and between organizations and their clients/beneficiaries with rarely anydiscontent in the narrative. Our title borrows from Steyaert [2007] and seeks to‘compexify’ the simple story of trust told in the social entrepreneurship narrative. Wedraw upon three independent empirical studies and participants’ stories to offer a morecritical perspective of trust in social entrepreneurship in the third sector to show thefragile nature of this construct between those in social organizations and the publicsector. From the empirical work, we highlight three predominate paradoxical notions oftrust and control: 1] mechanistic and/or narrative based, 2] sequential/evolutionary and/oran interruption in the flow of past-present-future; 3] quiet resistance and/or opposition.