In this note, Roy Lewicki considers Settle's "practitioner's translation" of his work. He reveals something about the scholar's process which creates a problem for any translator -- the "new edition" arrives faster than the translator can respond:

John Settle’s abstract of our paper is reasonably accurate, and I think he has done a pretty good job (in a short, popular piece) of summarizing it for mediators.

But my thinking has moved beyond this paper to some degree, and I am now retrenching. In a new theory paper that was just published in the Academy of Management Review, I (with coauthors from Georgetown) argue that trust and distrust are fundamentally different animals.

Rather than being a unidimensional construct, we argue that trust and distrust can coexist within the same relationship (parties can trust each other on some dimensions and distrust each other on others). Most complex relationships are thereby characterized by ambivalence, in which we trust others on some dimensions and distrust on others, and that we engage in fundamentally different action strategies to enhance trust and to manage (control) distrust.

Abstracting from what I said in that paper, the trick for mediators may not necessarily build trust (a desirable goal) but to manage DISTRUST in a way to keep it within bounds and limits. The calculus-based, knowledge based and identification-based trust "levels" may overlay on this fundamental trust/distrust distinction. Scott Dewhurst helped to organize the CREnet conference that was here in Columbus last month, and I tried these ideas out on a group of mediators, who found them interesting; we had a great discussion........