Patrick Brown is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on trust, the governance of risk, and connections between these two processes. Michael Calnan is Professor of Medical Sociology at the University of Kent. He has worked in health policy and health services research and training for over 20 years, with his current research interests including diffusion and innovation in health care and technology, trust and health care, dignity and the provision of health and social care for older people.

• Introduction: Risk and trust in late-modern society; Investigating trust: some theoretical and methodological underpinnings; Constructing knowledge through social interactions: the role of interpersonal trust in negotiating negative institutional conceptions; Bridging uncertainty by constructing trust: the rationality of irrational approaches; Vulnerability and the 'will to trust'; The difficulties of trust-work within a paradigm of risk; Trusting on the edge: Iimplications for policy.

"An important analysis of trust in relation to mental health care, showing clearly how an instrumentalised focus on 'risk' is in crucial respects antithetical to a personal focus required to build trust; and that how well trust is established at one level in an organisation strongly influences its development at others." George Szmukler, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London