Trusting your guardian: relational trust in high-risk services

Abstract In markets characterized by informality and weak institutional guarantees, cultural solutions play a crucial role in helping actors assess, manage, and foster trust. This ethnographic study examines how participants in Mexico City’s private security sector use symbolic signaling, stigma management, and relational work to evaluate and establish trust in high-risk exchanges. Based on 6 months of fieldwork and 42 interviews with stakeholders, the study introduces the concept of the trust triangle to explore trust as a networked negotiation between entrepreneurs, guards, and clients—rather than a simple dyadic relationship. The findings show that when markets lack formal assurances and institutional mechanisms for trust assessment fail, actors rely on embodied dispositions, heuristics, and stereotypes to navigate distrust, underscoring the role of habitus in both assessing and projecting trustworthiness. Despite widespread distrust, the study highlights how relational work reconfigures market relations by drawing on non-market ties. By centering on everyday cultural practices, the study demonstrates how trust is sustained in informal and precarious markets through culturally embedded forms of decision-making.