Social Representations of Trust Among Teachers and Principals in Cameroonian, Indian, and Finnish Schools

Participants and Methods of Data Collection

The data was gathered using semi-structured individual and focus group interviews that focused on the theme of trust. Focus groups are an appropriate method for gathering material for studies on social representations (Sakki, Mäkiniemi, Hakoköngäs, & Pirttilä-Backman, 2015; Wagner, Duveen, Farr, et al., 1999). The method can be helpful in efforts at creating discussion contexts in which participants are able to express, support and contradict viewpoints, as well as tell their own versions of points already discussed. However, we thought that there may also be sensitive issues that participants did not feel comfortable bringing up in group contexts. We were particularly concerned that since the interview topics dealt with trusting relations in their workplaces – upon which their livelihoods depend – that they may not trust the other participants enough to discuss distrust due to, for example, fear of jeopardizing their jobs. We also thought that socially and politically polemic issues, such as those dealing with caste, ethnic, cultural and class differences may be difficult topics in potentially diverse focus groups. For this reason, we also conducted individual interviews. We therefore interviewed teachers both individually and in focus groups. Contrary to our expectations, however, focus group participants often seemed to be openly discussing those issues that we thought might be sensitive. Principals were interviewed only individually, because their busy schedules made focus groups almost impossible to coordinate.

The interviews took place between February and June of 2009. Six individual teacher interviews, six individual principal interviews, and six focus groups with teachers were conducted in Yaoundé, Cameroon as well as in a city in southern Finland. In Patna, India, five individual teacher interviews, six individual principal interviews, and seven focus group interviews were conducted. Only teachers were interviewed in focus groups. In Cameroon there were four interviewees in each focus group. In India, there were two interviewees in one focus group, three in another, and four in five of the focus groups. In Finland, the number of interviewees varied from three to six.

The sex distribution of the teachers and principals that participated in our study is as follows (the first number represents the number of females while the second represents the number of males): 10/26 (Cameroon), 28/10 (Finland), and 25/12 (India). Although there were imbalances in the schools with respect to the female-to-male ratio, they are indicative of the distributions in the teacher and principal populations in each country. The average length of the individual teachers’ interviews was 42 minutes in Cameroon, 81 minutes in Finland and 85 minutes in India. The respective lengths for the principals’ interviews were 50 minutes in Cameroon, 88 minutes in Finland and 85 minutes in India. The focus groups lasted on average, 70 minutes in Cameroon, 79 minutes in Finland, and 105 minutes in India.

The semi-structured individual and focus group interview guide (see Appendix) that the interviewers used consisted of six parts. The interview guide was the same for the individual and focus group interviews. The procedure was piloted in all three countries, which subsequently resulted in small changes. Interviewer-interviewee exchanges that dealt with the topic of trust in the school context comprised the main portion of the interviews, which started with open and broad stimulus questions (e.g., ‘What is trust between teachers based on?’). The interviews gradually proceeded towards more specific topics for discussion (e.g., asking for possible reasons in fictive cases where a previously trusted principal or teacher was no longer trusted). These more specific topics about trust in the workplace were also theory-driven, yet maintained the open-question format. Distrust and losing trust were also discussed in the interviews. The discussions of distrust are significant to our participants’ understandings of trust – and thus to our results – to the extent that we see meaning making as a process that includes drawing boundaries between what something is and what it is not (e.g., Bourdieu, 1984). In other words, our research position is that the participants draw boundaries between trust and not-trust, and between trust and distrust, in the process of imbuing trust with meaning. Although we do not feel that distrust or mistrust and trust are simply two sides of the same conceptual coin, we argue that – at least in our study – processes of social representation of trust are necessarily entangled with conceptions of distrust/mistrust to the extent that they rely on each other for their meanings. Nevertheless, in our analyses we restrict our discussions of participants’ talk about distrust to instances when it was clearly integral to their understandings of workplace trust.

In Finland, all of the interviews were conducted by a Finnish research assistant in Finnish, which is the main language used in the country. In India, all of the schools had English as a compulsory subject, while both Hindi and English were the everyday languages used. Both Hindi and English were used in the interviews, which were conducted by the third author and research assistants. In Cameroon, the interviews were conducted by the fourth author primarily in the French language, although in very limited portions the participants switched spontaneously to English. French is the main official language used in the country. All sessions were transcribed and translated into English by bi-lingual research team members before the analyses. The Hindi word used for trust was vishwas, the French word used was confiance, and the Finnish word used was luottamus.

In Cameroon, all interviews were conducted on the school premises (office or classroom), except for one individual case, in which the interview took place in the garden of the city cathedral for the convenience of the teacher. In Finland, all principals were interviewed in their offices. The teachers were interviewed either in their own school, at the university of Helsinki or a local institute of a higher education, or in a community center. One teacher was interviewed in his/her home according to her/his wishes. In India, all the principals were interviewed in their own offices. The teachers were interviewed either at their schools or, in the case of the mixed focus group, in a participating teacher’s home.

Our aim was to have participants from typical schools in each location. In Cameroon and India, the majority of the schools are private, while in Finland there are very few private schools at all. Therefore, all the teachers and principals included in our study were from private schools in Cameroon and India, and from public schools in Finland. In Cameroon, the National Baccalaureate Board (Office du Bac) publishes an annual ranking of the schools, from which two of the highest, two of the middle, and two of the lowest ranking private schools in our target region were selected. There was no school ranking information available in India and Finland, although when making the selections we nevertheless aimed for diversity in terms of how well established the schools were, as well as in terms of intra-city school location.

Interview Analyses

Our analyses began by reading through the transcripts a couple of times each, while all subsequent phases of coding and analyses were facilitated by the Atlas.ti (Friese, 2014) computer-assisted data analysis program. This computer program was developed for use with research based upon grounded theory, but can also be used in a wide variety of other qualitative research methods. In all of the stages of coding and analysis we followed basic tenets of grounded theory, such as creating and refining qualitative codes on the basis of what we saw in the data, and abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning entails formulating theories about the data by starting from the data, while continuously comparing and moving back and forth between the researchers’ emerging theories and interpretations on the one hand and the data on the other (see e.g. Charmaz, 2006, pp. 103-104). The material was coded primarily by the second author of this paper, although preliminary (structural and demographic) codes were done by a research assistant. Although the second author has never visited Patna or Yaoundé, he familiarised himself with basic aspects of the historical and cultural contexts there prior to conducting any coding, by reading academic, local literature. Furthermore, all interpretations were made tentatively, and the local researchers in the team were consulted throughout the analyses and interpretations. In each phase of the analysis, the first two authors had regular meetings to discuss the codes and coding processes. The first two authors identified the main themes (that could consist of several codes) in each country according to the frame (teachers’ talk about trust between teachers, teachers’ talk about trust between teachers and principals, principals’ talk about trust between principals and teachers).

The second author of this paper wrote summaries of all of the interviews. The purpose of the summaries is that they can help in preserving “the meaningful relations that the respective person deals with in the topic of the study” (Flick, 2009, p. 318). Such summaries can help to ensure that unique or counter conceptions do not get obscured by hegemonic ones. The summaries and preliminary interpretations were discussed and modified by the whole research group during a week of face to face meetings. This phase was crucial in our efforts at making culturally understandable and competent interpretations from the perspectives of both the local and foreign researchers in each country context. In our discussions, we aimed to establish shared understandings and interpretations of the focal phenomena that the participants dealt with in their talk about trust. In subsequent phases of the analysis, the relevant local members of the team were always consulted when new issues or questions came up.

The conceptual tools explicated by the theory of social representations (i.e., anchoring, objectification, and themata) guided the next phases of the analysis. Focusing on the salient conceptualizations of trust in each context, we started by conducting an extensive examination of the objectifications that were formed both metaphorically and non-metaphorically in the participants’ talk. Themata are explicated as being historically and culturally embedded; they are basic oppositional categories that are drawn upon when building the representation. Anchors are processes that are also longstanding and culturally embedded. Themata and anchors are not necessarily explicit in language (see Sakki, 2010). The manner in which we utilised the tools of anchoring and themata was therefore interpretive. In making our interpretations, we took into account the sociocultural contexts, our own cultural knowledge, and previous, relevant country specific studies in relation to the main themes that we found in the participants’ talk. This means that we went outside of the data to make our interpretations of anchors and themata. The research team and authors of this article include one local Cameroonian, one local Finn, one local Indian and one local North American (USA). Having one local from each country involved in the research and one who was not a local in any of these countries provides diverse sociocultural perspectives that include both local insight and non-local questioning and clarification.

We were also open to considering that anchors, objectifications, and themata may not have been present at all. All of these elements and processes were collected together, which then constituted our preliminary interpretations of the social representation of school-place trust in each country. During the final phase of our analyses, we returned to the uncoded interviews and read through them again, while evaluating the comprehensiveness of our analyses and interpretations. Finally, during the write-up phase, the researchers once more interacted with both the raw and coded data. These final phases led to some minor modifications in the interpretations that we discuss in the following sections.

In presenting our results, we first give a brief snapshot of the general ways that teachers and principals conceptualised trust in each country context. We then move to the three frames of talk described above. Here, we discuss the contents and objectification processes in each frame of analysis. In doing so, we present exemplary excerpts that demonstrate the primary themes and how trust was understood. Due to space limitations, we do not deal with exceptions in reporting our results. The exceptions in our data were not salient or recurring. In the discussion section, we move to more general interpretations, in which we also discuss the anchors and themata in each country context.

Indian Teachers’ Representations of Trust Between Teachers

For the Indian teachers, talk about trust between teachers focuses on themes of help and reciprocation, cooperation, and feelings of interpersonal closeness. In order to be able to trust each other, it seemed important to the teachers that they felt supported and that their best interests were looked after by their colleagues. They needed to be able to ask the other teachers for help without fearing that their ‘weaknesses’ would be reported to the principal. The following excerpt is a good example of how the Indian teachers talked about trust between teachers in terms of being able to ask for help and support. It comes from a focus group discussion and was formulated in response to the interviewer asking what trust between the teachers is grounded on.

Trust between the Indian teachers thus deals with exposing and validating vulnerabilities, and feelings that others’ support is adequate and well-intended. Trust means working through ‘shortcomings’ together, for example with other teachers who may have more experience. This type of reciprocal teacher support seemed to require that they be able to trust that their colleagues not expose their vulnerabilities publicly, particularly to the principal. They simply needed to be able to ask each other for help—to share their knowledge, expertise and even their teaching materials—without having to suffer any negative consequences.

Many of the teachers also reported that trust is visible when one is able to share and ask for help not only with their professional problems, but also with their personal problems. Representations of trust in their workplaces often included elements of interpersonal trust that extended into the private realm. Trusting relations in the school context were sometimes objectified in family metaphors. For instance, one teacher from a focus group interview explained that the positive environment in her/his school was evidenced by the fact that the other teachers treated her/him “just like their own daughter…or similar, behave very well with me.” (FG2_3).

In general, there did not seem to be a strict separation between trust in professional life and trust in their lives outside of the schools. They seemed to have to organise their professional lives such that their personal lives were not neglected. This was most evident in that the teachers often reported having family obligations that required their absence. Because of this, they needed to organise a stand in for their classes. The teachers thus reported their having many obligations inside and outside of the school context, for which they seemed to receive little support from the infrastructure of the institution. As a result, they needed to turn to each other for support. Teachers’ conceptions of trust were often objectified in covering classes for each other, as demonstrated below.

Very shortly after the talk presented above, FG4_T1 additionally expressed a metaphorical objectification of trust as being ready to do and die for one another. Trust meant doing practical things for one another in such a way that neither their personal nor their professional lives suffered. In addition to the teacher that produced the above excerpt, other teachers also mentioned that helping each other in confidence is important for the students’ wellbeing. Thus, helping relations between the teachers served the purpose of their being able to uphold their responsibilities in both the schools and in their families.

Lastly, power imbalanced social relations shaped the prevalent themes in our Indian teachers’ talk on trust between teachers. The atmosphere in which they worked was often seemingly wrought with suspicion and teacher hierarchies. Some teachers were simply described by our teacher participants as being favoured and close to the principal, and as negatively affecting trust between the teachers themselves.

The importance of support and interpersonal closeness in teachers’ social representations of trust between teachers was therefore seemingly often motivated by the suspicions and insecurities that resulted from those teachers that they reported as being close to the principal. The teacher hierarchies that shaped the teachers’ conceptions of trust between teachers were also objectified in metaphors such as playing politics, backbiting, to raise the finger on each other, to put someone to loss, leg pulling, and buttering. The practice of teachers looking after each other’s best interests was therefore an important aspect of the Indian teachers’ social representations of trust between teachers, which is evidenced in all of the excerpts in this section.

Indian Teachers’ Representations of Trust Between Teachers and Principals

For the teachers, the principal seemed to be an authoritative figure who was the motivational reference point for proper teacher conduct. S/he was both looked up to and feared, and the teachers rarely discussed the principal in a negative manner. When the direction of teachers’ talk about teacher-principal trust was geared towards their understandings of the principals’ trust in them, the themes focused on the principal recognising and appreciating their efforts, commitment, competencies and potential. The following focus group discussion was stimulated by the interviewer asking whether trust between the teachers and principal ‘just exists’ or is built.

The demonstration classes mentioned by the teacher (T3) in the above excerpt were a frequent objectification of trust between the teachers and principal. The teachers reported that having their competence and potential recognised in the demonstration classes—most explicitly evidenced by being given the job—provided the support and impetus for them to improve their professional skills, and for the principal to trust them. They thus conceptualised that trust from the principal’s perspective meant that they were committed and competent, for example by having updated knowledge.

When their talk was framed in terms of their trust in the principal, the teachers reported that it is based on whether they felt supported by her/him in their professional and personal lives. When the teachers discussed trust in the school context in relation to their ability to fulfil family obligations, they often expressed that the principal should be understanding about these needs and grant them leave, particularly when they felt that they deserved it because of their work performance. The teachers’ conceptions of a trustworthy principal were therefore often objectified in being granted leave. The teachers also expected their salary to be raised regularly. In public schools in India, employees receive a regular inflation allowance (‘dearness allowance’ or ‘increments’), although in private schools this practice may or may not be implemented by the administration. Salary increments were also an objectification of trust between the teachers and the principal.

Indian Principals’ Representations of Trust Between Principals and Teachers

As with the teachers’ conceptions of the principals’ trust in them, the principals seemed to agree that principal-teacher trust was based in the teachers’ competency and commitment, which the principals reported being important for properly ‘caring for’ the students. The following exchange comes after the interviewer asked what makes the principal able to trust a teacher.

The principals also talked about how their own conduct—such as support or discipline—affected principal-teacher trust. It seemed that the power inscribed in the principal’s position in the school institution was easily transferred into their conceptions of principal-teacher trust. A principal produced the following excerpt in response to a question about the level of trust between the teachers and the principal.

In general, the principals seemed to associate trust with the teachers obeying orders and being complacent in their inferior positions. However, who should hold the power was not always expressed so explicitly by the principals, and one principal actually talked about the need to show concern for the teachers and to allow them to have a voice.

Finnish Teachers’ Representations of Trust Between Teachers

The Finnish teachers reported that teachers’ participation in staff discussions and decision making is important for their ability to trust one another. They thought that all teachers should contribute in planning and negotiating formal agreements and school activities. They also seemed to think that those who did not uphold the agreements were bothersome, and by one teacher were even likened to children as they were thought to require monitoring. This seemed to mean that they are able to work as a team and communicate well, cooperate in decision making, and independently fulfil their agreed upon duties. They used metaphors such as being in the same boat, being on the same side, and team spirit in relation to other teachers (as well as the principal). Important to these negotiations, in addition to cooperation and communication, are feelings of openness and comfort.

The following excerpt, taken from a focus group interview, demonstrates the important elements in Finnish teachers’ conceptions of trust between teachers.

The above excerpt also demonstrates another main component of our interpretations of Finnish social representations of workplace trust in the school context: Finnish teachers’ conceptions of trust between teachers were shaped by the assumption that interpersonal social relations—i.e. the communication, negotiation and teamwork that are important in their representations of teacher-teacher trust—are, or should be, egalitarian. Teachers were generally expected to psychologically place themselves on the same level as others, and to not try to ‘be better than the rest’. When describing deviant and non-conformist, or non-cooperative teachers, teachers used metaphors such as flying solo, making a mountain out of a molehill, and making noise. Teachers’ understandings of trust between teachers were thus linked to interplay between egalitarian social relations and conforming to norms and rules. Those who did things differently, therefore, were seen as “showing off” and placing themselves above others.

Finnish Teachers’ Representations of Trust Between Teachers and Principals

As with their conceptions of trust between teachers, the teachers reported that smooth social interactions and negotiations were important for trust between themselves and the principal. The teachers seemed to have a dialogical understanding of teacher-principal trust, such that both teacher voice and principal leadership were important. They wanted the principal to be a “skipper who steers the ship” (T2), yet in many ways they wanted their leader to consider them as colleagues who simply had different roles and responsibilities than those of the principal. They wanted to be heard, such that even if “the principal would still make a decision that was ((laughing)) not what the teachers wanted, it still generates more trust than just announcing decisions from above” (T5). The teachers considered it their right to participate in decision-making, while also reporting that the principal should be competent and decisive.

The Finnish teachers’ representations of trust between the teachers and principal concern how the principal enacts his/her position of authority. As one participant put it, “does he come [to meetings] playing God or as one of us” (T4). Their conceptions of teacher-principal trust revolved around how egalitarian and democratic they thought the principals’ methods were. This seemed to be particularly true in terms of the teachers feeling that the principal should create a climate for them to express their ideas and opinions, acknowledge and, at least sometimes, put their voice into action. Unless asked directly, the teachers rarely framed their principal-teacher trust talk in terms of the principals’ trust in them. However, when framed in that way the teachers reported that the principals’ trust in them was simply based upon the principal’s perceptions of the teachers’ competency and fulfilment of their agreed-upon duties. For the teachers, being heard seemed to mean that the principal had confidence in their professional skills.

Finnish Principals’ Representations of Trust Between Principals and Teachers

We found that the Finnish principals’ talk about trust between themselves and the teachers was very much in line with the teachers’ talk. The central themes in Finnish principals’ talk about trust between themselves and the teachers were: having open and transparent communication, cooperating with each other, negotiating school activities together, and the teachers fulfilling their agreed-upon duties in an independent and reliable way.

The principal who produced the above excerpt categorized the teachers as her/his colleagues. The principals were often working to discursively dismantle the hierarchies that are imposed by the workplace structures in which they operate. Thus, as with the Finnish teachers in our study, the principals also expressed an interest in sidestepping the formal hierarchies inherent in their job positions. Some of the principals also seemed to have some internal conflicts with their roles as principals. One of the Finnish principals reported that trust between themselves and the teachers meant that they “face each other as human beings, at the point when we are talking privately like we are doing here now, the role disappears. And that is what I aim at, to make it disappear” (P1). At the same time, they accepted their formal role as ‘the skipper’ such that “the principal is member of the work community in the same way as teachers are but s/he also has her/his management duties (P2)”. They therefore sought to fulfil their responsibilities, yet simultaneously had an interest in being an equal participant in the workplace community.

Cameroonian Teachers’ Representations of Trust Between Teachers

For the Cameroonian teachers, trust between them means collaborating, communication, and solidarity. Also important for teacher-teacher trust are competency, knowledge, and feelings of closeness and respect. The following excerpt is a good example of how the Cameroonian teachers conceptualised trust between them. It was formulated in response to the interviewer asking what kinds of things make the interviewee feel that s/he is trusted, or not trusted, by her/his colleagues.

The Cameroonian teachers often objectified trust between teachers in concepts related to friendship, family, and collaboration. The following excerpt is a good example of how our teacher participants in Cameroon talked about trust between them.

The metaphorical objectifications of trust in the phrases “the spirit of the house” and “like hand in glove” are interesting as they symbolise how trust was often made sense of through positive emotions and conceptions of interdependency, closeness, and completing each other. The teachers also reported that trust in schools where teachers work on a part-time basis is more difficult to build because they meet each other less. They seemed to feel that because of this, communication and interaction were also important for building trust between teachers.

For our Cameroonian teachers, trust between them seems to depend upon a type of camaraderie that is less central in the other two countries’ contexts. The text produced by participant FG1_T4 in the above excerpt is also interesting in the sense that it demonstrates the ease in which our Cameroonian participants conceptualised trust in the workplace by relating it to the private sphere and close relations. While the participant accepted that there were professional links between the teachers, s/he at the same time did not unambiguously relate these links to workplace trust. S/he found some difficulties with the non-professional relations in the workplace that s/he seemed to base conceptions of trust upon.

In Cameroon, teachers often imbued the concept of trust between teachers through talk about its lack. Thus, teachers’ social representations of trust between teachers in the school context were often envisioned, rather than congruent with the experiences they had in their daily lives in the workplace. When teachers reflected upon trust and strategies for improving trust, the focus of their talk was often on teacher collaboration. The discussion presented below demonstrates this.

The teacher (T1) uses metaphors “a single hand can’t tie a parcel” and “union makes strength,” which help concretise the role of collaboration in the meaning of trust. The teacher seemed to think that trust can be built when teachers are able to supersede their cultural differences, focus on their capabilities, and work together. For the Cameroonian teachers, collaboration seemed to act as a conceptual bridge between the personal and professional. The teachers also often talked about commitment to the development and well-being of the students. Collaboration seemed to play a central role in these discussions as well. The motivation to collaborate was based in an acute concern for the students, and the teachers’ conceptualisations of trust in the school context were often expressed in terms of completing each other.

Cameroonian Teachers’ Representations of Trust Between Teachers and Principals

Cameroonian teachers’ understandings of trust between the teachers and principals focuses on themes of carrying out their responsibilities, teacher competency, student success, respect, and an open and non-authoritarian working environment. The teachers seem to value their capabilities and efforts being appreciated by the principal, and being treated well. They reported that student results, job stability, and financial compensation are both the basis, and outcome, of trust between teachers and principals. The teachers often objectified their understandings of the principals’ trust in them in the renewal of their employment contract. As one participant puts it, “the clue of the principal’s trust is when he allows you to continue, when he renews the contract, it means he trusts you” (T4). It also seems that being paid on time – or being paid at all – is an issue that is not self-evident. Being paid is important for teachers’ trust in the principal.

They also expect the principal to be caring and treat them respectfully, despite the principal’s superior role. Conversely, authoritarian principals are seen as disrespectful and untrustworthy. One of the Cameroonian teachers discussed this difference in methods and trust between the current and a previous principal.

The teachers wish for the principals to foster a supportive working environment that boosts their morale and motivates them to do their jobs well. They seem to conceptualise teacher-principal trust largely in terms of this type of work environment, which they reported as fostering both teacher commitment and having a positive effect upon the students’ learning and development. Reciprocally, they also conceptualise the principals’ trust in them as being based in their competence and in their teaching having a positive influence on student results; on their level of learning as indicated by year end student exams. They reported that if the teaching conditions are supportive and financially rewarding, the result is increased teacher motivation, which subsequently has a positive effect upon the students. The ‘success’ of the students was a frequent objectification of teachers’ understandings of teacher-principal trust; it solidifies the representation and imbues it with a figurative component.

Cameroonian Principals’ Representations of Trust Between Principals and Teachers

The Cameroonian principals’ talk about trust between themselves and the teachers focused on the principals’ trust in teachers. They seemed to understand principal-teacher trust primarily in terms of the teachers’ behaviour; their commitment, performance and competence, and fulfilling their responsibilities. From the Cameroonian principals’ perspectives, principal-teacher trust was conceptualised in terms of students’ academic development and achievement. The principals’ talk on trust differed somewhat from the teachers in that it did not habitually refer to solidarity or the closeness of relationships in conceptualising workplace trust in the schools. Among the principals, this type of talk focused on the effect of teacher commitment on student success, as demonstrated by the text below.

Although the above text deals with elements from the professional sphere, such as the school ranking and results, there is also a reference to the success of the students, with objectifications in family members. It is interesting that the principal positioned himself as the subject when discussing the success of the school, but used an all-inclusive ‘we’ when discussing the students as family members. This concurs with our finding that while the teachers focused upon the positive effects of teacher-principal trust on students’ learning, the principals seemed to be just as concerned with school prosperity and the school ranking at the end of the year. As another principal put it, “The consequence of trust is the good results of the school. Everything done in the institution is for the results to be good” (P6).

Most of the principals also seemed to think that their trust in the teachers required maintaining a sense of control over the teachers. In the principals’ talk it seemed that this sense of control was maintained by monitoring them and their classroom conduct. Many of the principals also reported that evidence of the teachers trusting them was that they supported the principals’ authority and decisions: “Indicators of trust come from a majority of teachers supporting a decision I have taken” (P1). The principals also talked about collaboration in relation to trust. However, here, ‘collaboration’ seems to mean teachers obeying rules and fulfilling the obligations and tasks set by the administration and principal; it is conceptualised as a helper in the project of student success.

Interpretation of our Main Findings According to Country Context

In the Indian schools, trust was actively conceptualised within the hierarchical relations and competitive environment that our interviewees seemed to work in. Sinha (1990) discusses the tendency for Indians to organise everything in the entire cosmos – for example plants, rivers, animals and human beings – hierarchically. We interpret the cultural basis, or anchor, of social representations of workplace trust in the Patna, Indian schools as being within the social hierarchies that have evolved from the caste systems in India. The principal was clearly an authority figure for whom the teachers worked. There was also an unofficial, but seemingly common, practice of the teachers reporting others’ mistakes or perceived shortcomings to the principal. This was done either in order to fulfil the role of being a teacher that was ‘close to the principal’, or otherwise in an attempt to get the principal’s attention. When considering our analyses and interpretations as a whole, we conclude that the main themata used to build social representations of trust amongst our Indian participants is help/harm. The Indian teachers materialised the conception of trust through their need to receive help from one another in order to navigate through the formal and informal interpersonal hierarchies in the workplace, particularly in order to fulfil their family responsibilities outside of work. Trust was also objectified most often in relation to reciprocation and helping.

In Finland, the social representation of trust in the school context was firmly anchored in the contract. Conceptions of trust were often objectified in processes of negotiating and fulfilling duties, practices which were intricately linked to both egalitarianism and conforming to established practices. Our participants wanted everyone to participate equally in decision making, yet dissenting voices were seen as troublesome. These interpretations are in line with other recent Finnish studies. For example, Törrönen and Maunu (2005) show that their participants had a strong distaste for those they thought were ‘standing out’ or ‘showing off’. Such people were seen as placing themselves above others. Menard (2016) has also shown that both the historical path and some contemporary discourses on Finnish equality are entangled with elements of non-conflict, moderation, and sameness. Thus, the boundaries between equality and continuity of traditional practices are often fluid in Finland.

The relationship of authority between the teachers and the principal seemed to be somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, the teachers wanted to be heard and the principals were ready to listen to them, while on the other, the teachers were aware of the principals’ right to make certain decisions. They also wanted the principal to be able to take the lead and make the final and best decision for everyone involved. In this sense, the Finnish participants’ talk exemplified what Billig et al. (1988) have referred to as one of the basic ideological dilemmas of our time, which is that between equality and authority. Sulkunen (2010) describes late modern societies in terms of a new contractualism, in which the agency of managers, as well as their subjects, are stressed. It also stresses transparency. Moreover, the social bond has taken on characteristics of the contract, such that negotiations and agreements seem to be the only permissible way for us to submit to authority. These arguments are in line with our Finnish results. From our analyses, and in consideration of the above discussion, we conclude that the main thema operating in our Finnish data is egalitarianism/authority.

In Cameroon, teachers commonly hold teaching positions simultaneously in more than one school. The Cameroonian teacher participants in our study seemed to be constantly coming and going. This means that face-to-face interactions among the same teachers are inconsistent. The mobility in their work may also be related to the seemingly fluid conceptual boundaries between the professional and personal spheres that seem to operate in the Cameroonian teachers’ representations of trust. These fluid boundaries are also reflected in the objectifications of workplace trust in images of hands-on collaboration and interpersonal solidarity. There is a sense of physical closeness and togetherness that is unique in the Cameroonians’ talk of trust. We suggest that in Cameroon trust in schools is anchored in precolonial, yet enduring, traditions of complementarity, which refers to the idea that different parts complete each other and form a harmonious whole (see also Sakki & Salminen, 2015 for their interpretation of the thematic importance of complementarity in the ongoing stabilisation of gendered dichotomies between domestic and political realms in Cameroon).

Cameroonian teachers’ conceptions of teacher-principal trust focuses on the one hand on principals’ trust in them as being based in their own knowledge and skills. On the other hand, it focuses on their trust in the principals as being grounded in the principals’ methods of executing their authority. The power gap between the teachers and principals is evident in both the teachers’ and the principals’ talk. The principals’ talk about trust focused on teacher commitment and competency, which seemed related to their interest in student results being competitive with other local schools. A primary motivation of the teachers’ commitment lied in the development of the children. For the principals, commitment and competency were tied to both student success and the prosperity of the school.

Commitment to work and competency may be concepts that people in individualist, market-oriented nations often associate with personal success and achievement. Yet, our Cameroonian participants link commitment and competency to notions of success and achievement that clearly extend into collaborative community development. Taking into account the main themes and meaning making processes in the Cameroonian material, as well as our knowledge of the sociocultural context in Yaoundé, we have interpreted the main themata operating in the Cameroonian participants’ talk to be family/not-family and solidarity/distance. Numerous authors (e.g., Kassea, 2006; Marie, 1997; Mpofu, 1994; Pirttilä-Backman, Kassea, & Ikonen, 2004) have suggested a socially relevant co-existence of pre-modern and modern cultural practices in Cameroon. We propose that the objectifications of trust in collaborative practices works in decreasing psychosocial distance between the personal and professional, the family and the extra-familial, and pre-modern and modern cultural practices. The objectification is therefore very pragmatic and functional.

Common in the Indian and Cameroonian teachers’ talk about teacher-principal trust is the issue of fair wages and being paid. They seemed unable to count on any agreements they may have had defining their salary or wage. This, in turn, seemed to create a both a sense of insecurity and a saliency regarding salary and payment in their conceptions of teacher-principal trust.

Cooperation: Similar Element, Divergent Meanings

Cooperation is a common element in the data from all three countries in our study, particularly among teachers’ conceptions of teacher-teacher trust. Yet, the meaning of cooperation takes shape differently in the three country contexts through the teachers’ day-to-day school place interpersonal interactions. In Finland, cooperation means something akin to ‘independent teamwork’. The participants expressed that agreements were to be negotiated in a participatory manner but executed independently. It also meant conforming to the majority voice and to pre-established methods. In Cameroon, cooperation means collaboration. The teachers reported doing hands-on work together, such as grading exams and constructing the course syllabi. In India, cooperation means that the teachers literally construct amongst themselves a support network – explicitly exclusive of spying on or betraying each other – that provides them with the capacity to fulfil their duties both in the workplace and at home.

The different everyday practices and processes attributable to the common element of cooperation reflect the individualistic versus collectivist historical cultural contexts of the countries. However, our interpretations extend past such dichotomies as the teachers and principals articulated the practices and processes where trust was negotiated, built, and evaluated in the schools in each country. Our analyses have highlighted these processes as crucial elements of the social representations of trust in the school context in Cameroon, Finland, and India.

Structural Constraints on Social Representations of Trust in Schools

Social representations do not come from nowhere. Rather, they are strained by their social and cultural embeddedness, as well as by institutionalised structures. Schools are a specific type of workplace. Teaching as a profession has a long history, and educational institutions are often relatively well established and regulated. The ultimate goal of schools is to transfer to, share, or jointly build collective knowledge and skills with younger generations; a task of high importance in any society. These factors, as well as the ongoing interaction and collaboration of the staff, may contribute to the formulation of predictable relationships. These are among the reasons why we began our qualitative studies on trust in the school place context – we thought that common understandings of workplace trust may be more likely here than in many other types of workplaces.

In all of the country contexts there is evidence of institutionally determined hierarchies between teachers and principals. Similar principal–teacher trust building elements in all of the national contexts are teacher commitment and competence. Beyond this, the differences between the national contexts in social representations of workplace trust in schools are more apparent. In Finland, common negotiations and maintaining common agreements are important for both teachers and principals for building and keeping trust. However, the principals must also negotiate their double role. On the one hand they are positioned by the teachers, and take up the position, of being co-equals with the teachers. On the other hand, their job description positions them with authority and obligations. In India and Cameroon, trust conceptions between principals and teachers are built more consistently through hierarchical structures of viewpoint. In India, the formative moments of building trust take place in the context of pre-hiring demonstration classes. In both India and Cameroon, the renewal of the teachers’ work contracts is important. Particularly important in India are teachers’ expectations for principals to understand and be responsive to their needs. In Cameroon, the emphasis is on principals treating teachers with respect. In both of these countries, teachers’ structurally inferior positions in relation to the principals seemed to more often frame both teachers’ and principals’ talk about trust than they did in the Finnish interviews. It is evident that the structural hierarchies and economic arrangements, which are part of the local institutional practices and cultures, are significant in conceptualising and building trust.

Future Directions

Social representations are formulated through people’s interactions. Differences in the interpersonal practices involved in building trust are likely to result in differences in how social representations take shape. Finnish culture is often argued to be relatively homogenous, although the extent of that homogeneity is debatable (see e.g. Häkkinen & Tervonen, 2004 on the concept of Finnish homogeneity as a mythical product of nation-building projects). Nevertheless, immigration rates in Finland have been historically and comparatively low. Additionally, the building of the welfare state included policies aimed at universality in policies and public services. Working practices in the standardised Finnish public school system are likely comparable from region to region. We thus suspect somewhat similar representations of workplace trust in schools in other parts of Finland; such that negotiations and contracts are likely salient in meanings and implementations of trust among teachers and principals. It is worth emphasising that the contracts that teachers formulate and carry out among themselves, and with the principals, are not legally binding. Neither are they ‘psychological contracts’ (see e.g., Robinson, 1996), which have been studied extensively by organisational psychologists and described as employee expectations of employers due to implicit or explicit employer promises. Rather, our Finnish participants described a type of contract that was made together in order to organise and fulfil the everyday requirements of the job. As discussed earlier, Sulkunen (2010) has conceptualised late modern societies as being saturated by contractual processes, which leads to the question of how our Finnish results would compare with other national contexts. We wonder if the contractual processes of negotiating and being heard are more salient in the Finnish context, due to the historical and contemporary strength of trade unions there, as well as the transformation from an authoritarian government to the current social democracy.

In India, we gathered data in the capital of the least developed state. The cultural characteristics of the city of Patna have been summarized by Panda and Gupta (2004) as “patronizing”. In comparison to some other Indian cities included in empirical studies, in Patna high importance is given to status and power. Family and social obligations are regarded as more important than work obligations. The organisational climate has been described as boss-oriented, with juniors attempting to develop personalised relationships with superiors with the aim to become protected or promoted. Organisations are seen as both familial and exploitative (Panda & Gupta, 2004). Rather than claiming that social representations of trust would be similar in Indian schools throughout the country, we suggest that further studies should be continued in various regions of India – perhaps starting with those that are described very differently in the literature. For example, Ahmedabad has been described as “growth-oriented professional” (Panda & Gupta, 2004) and, in many respects, is quite different than Patna. It would therefore be worthwhile to explore the differences between social representations in Patna and those formulated in a different setting such as Ahmedabad, where the social contexts and workplace practices could be quite different.

The Cameroonian interviews were conducted in the capital Yaoundé, located in the centre area of the country, which is less collectivistic than the northern and western areas (Pirttilä-Backman et al., 2004). Locations in northern Cameroon, where collectivism was the highest of the three regions studied and which is more isolated than other parts of the country, would offer additional unique settings to study trust in the school context. We assume that the social representation of trust would be even more strongly grounded in complementarity than they were in Yaoundé. In Cameroon and India, a comparison between public and private schools is also an area in which further studies should be conducted.

Limitations

It is important to address the potential limitations of the study. Our research is situated in three specific locations, in which trust is imbued with meaning in terms of the historically embedded, local, and cultural practices of those locations. As such, our findings cannot be generalised or considered indicative of any global understanding of work place trust. However, our findings provide a generalisable argument for why trust needs to be approached as a social representation. Furthermore, we interviewed only teachers and principals, while there are also many other staff members working in schools. Parents, administrators and pupils, for example, also contribute to constructing trust in schools. Including contributors such as these was beyond the scope of our study, but could nevertheless be considered a limitation. Our school and participant samples were not selected randomly, which also makes our study open to criticism. However, qualitative methodologies – particularly those used to conduct social representations research – do not typically call for randomisation, which relies on the assumption that the research team aims at statistical generalisability. Social representations are never generalizable but are rather locally, culturally, and socially specific. However, we conducted purposeful sampling which is in line with our aims, research questions, and the epistemological assumptions in our approach to social representations (see Marková, 2008). Nevertheless, we maximized the heterogeneity of the respondents in each country to the best of our ability.

In Finland we included only public schools in the study, while in Cameroon and India all the schools were private for reasons that we explained above. Thus, comparing public and private schools could be considered another limitation. However, we find this issue of little significance to our findings when accounting for the vast social and cultural differences between the national contexts. In other words, we were not trying to find ‘similar’ types of schools in the country contexts as we do not believe that such comparative contexts exist. Rather, the schools that we included in our study reflect the types of schools that are typical in each country. Lastly, and incidentally, as with any research whether it be qualitative or quantitative, the findings are interpretations of the authors. Another research team may have come to somewhat different conclusions. However, we have made our methodology as transparent as possible.

Contributions and Concluding Remarks

Our study offers an alternative way to understand and study trust. First of all, it indicates how trust is embedded in the social context in which it is created, maintained, lost, and repaired. If we take, for example, Mayer et al.’s (1995, p. 712) definition of trust as the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, we can say that this definition also corresponds to our interpretations. However, in our study, the grounds for willingness to be vulnerable differed in each socio-cultural context. For the Indian teachers, it is based in reciprocal helping with demands that come from both work and family. For the Finnish participants, the grounds for that willingness are built in making plans together and following through with those plans. In both cases, when everyday activities are built on positive expectations of the actions of others – i.e. when actors operate on bases of trust – they put themselves in positions of vulnerability. Yet, even when fulfilling the relatively universal task of passing knowledge to younger generations in schools, the core processes involved in making oneself vulnerable can be quite different. They can be anything from fulfilling a common school project together to being able to take care of family responsibilities outside of the school.

We claim that without understanding the kinds of tasks and practices in which the foundations for trust are built, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to formulate general trust scales that would work well enough in all work contexts. Similarly, as the predecessors of trust, trustworthiness evaluations are based on different kinds of merits. In one case trustworthiness can mean a high level of conformity – in another it can mean a lack of backbiting. We suggest that instead of taking as a starting point a model that is argued to be more or less universal, one may want to consider a more constructivist approach when beginning research in a new context. Improving trust relations in socially and culturally diverse workplaces will be difficult if one does not understand the relevant processes and conceptual elements in building trust in that specific context.

Our results clearly support approaching trust as a versatile concept. More than having just cognitive and affective forms as McAllister (1995) and Dirks and Ferrin (2002) have suggested, more extensive typologies, such as that of Dietz and Den Hartog’s (2006), are more compatible with our study. Specifically, our analyses indicate that trust that can be categorized as knowledge-based, relational-based, and identification-based and can easily co-exist among co-workers, as well as within individuals and within one narrative. At the same time, when studying trust as a contextualised and locally produced phenomenon, it is difficult to neatly compartmentalise findings into a typology – regardless of how extensive the typology may be.

It seems that our analyses resonate with Dietz and Den Hartog’s (2006) model while simultaneously pointing to some of its shortcomings. For example, knowledge-based trust (positive confidence based on prior predictability) was important in each national context, regardless of whether the interpersonal context was between teachers, or between teachers and principals. At the same time, we saw that predictability was built into processes that varied in each national context. In terms of relational-based trust, our analyses suggest that in one place the principal talking about a teacher like his or her own child can be an indication of very high trust. In another context it could be seen as too intimate, unprofessional, and thus suspicious or untrustworthy. Therefore, in order to understand trust more comprehensively it is vital that we account for the practices and interpersonal processes in which its meanings are entangled, and what the locally and situationally constructed meanings consist of.

In this study, we have tried to show that research on trust needs to be concerned not only with magnitude, but also with the manner in which trust is conceptualised and understood. Social representations of trust are formulated in the various context-dependent processes and practices of specific people’s interactions. Without taking into consideration these processes and practices, the manner in which they are intricately linked to conceptions of trust, as well as the conceptions themselves, will likely result in difficulties in attempts at building or improving trust. In other words, there must be a common point of reference in order for those involved to be able to deal with the topic without encountering a continuum of misunderstandings. Our study offers valuable insight to researchers and practitioners whose aim is to promote workplace trust; perhaps particularly those with workers from different cultural backgrounds.