Trust and regulatory organisations: The role of local knowledge and facework in research ethics review

While trust is seen as central to most social relations, most writers, including sociologists of science, assume that modern trust relations – especially those in regulatory relationships – tend towards the impersonal. Drawing on ethnographic material from one kind of scientific oversight body – research ethics committees based in the UK NHS – this paper argues that interpersonal trust is crucial to regulatory decision-making and intimately bound up with the way in which these oversight bodies work, and that as such they build on, rather than challenge, the trust-based nature of the scientific community.