The sales process and the paradoxes of trust

Journal of Business Ethics 9 (8):671 - 679 (1990)
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Abstract

This essay explores a major ethical variable in personal sales: trust. By analyzing data drawn from life insurance sales, the essay supports the thesis that the role of the agent and the exigencies of personal sales create certain antinomies of trust that compromise the sales process. As a result, trust occupies a problematic and apparently paradoxical position in the sales process. On the one hand, success in personal sales is held to depend upon trust. On the other hand, because the techniques required to form trust in personal sales nullify the conditions under which trust is possible, these instruments of trust formation are self-defeating.

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References found in this work

Sour grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality.Jon Elster - 1983 - Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme.
Trust and Power.Niklas Luhmann - 1982 - Studies in Soviet Thought 23 (3):266-270.
Sincerity and authenticity.Lionel Trilling - 1972 - New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Trust as a Commodity.Partha Dasgupta - 1988 - In Diego Gambetta (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Blackwell. pp. 49-72.

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