3 DECEMBER 2005, Page 31

Sharing the knowledge

Nicholas Harman

STREETWISE: HOW TAXI DRIVERS ESTABLISH THEIR CUSTOMERS’ TRUSTWORTHINESS by Diego Gambetta and Heather Hamill The Russell Sage Foundation on Trust, £12, pp. 243, ISBN 0871543095 The study of trust is fashionable. Politicians long for it. Brand managers want us to have it in their products. Stockand pawn-brokers cannot make a living without a little of it. Economists measure it out with intangible coffee spoons. The Russell Sage Foundation on Trust sponsors their inquiries, and this is the tenth of its published works — not a parody of sociology, but a genuine inquiry into how taxi drivers reckon the trustworthiness of those they pick up or refuse.

Unsurprisingly, they consider how people are dressed, where they want to go, whether they are drunk or sober, shifty or straight, male or female. An authorial insight is: ‘Cues of gender are visible in the face and body shape.’ But a bit more complexity was needed for the work to qualify as sociology, so the researchers picked two cities where the taxi trade is well mixed up with funny business — Belfast and New York.

Yet they do not mention the main oddity of Belfast’s black cabs, which is that, while duly supervised by the police, the licensing office and the social-security people, they are also controlled by, or pay ‘protection’ to, the criminal gangs that operate there under political labels, and want money more than they want trouble. A driver who cheats a customer risks a blow on the kneecap with a baseball bat or a hurley, and customers who cheat drivers can earn the same, so Belfast taxis (providing they have paid their dues) are unusually safe. The authors also do not seem to realise that the name Heather, to which one of them answers, is here in Ireland joke shorthand for a female tennis-playing Protestant.

Their other choice was New York, and the drivers not of its wonderfully cheap, rude and regulated yellow cabs, but of the lightly regulated ‘livery cabs’ that do most of the taxi work outside central Manhattan. They, too, are under close criminal supervision, as couriers for drugs, whores and other quick-service commodities. The authors do not mention this either. But they do admit that many of those they wished to interview were ‘unco-operative and suspicious’, fearing exposure as illegal immigrants; very few had much command of English, while the researchers spoke no Caribbean Spanish at all.

Yet the cabbies of both cities delivered some ripe anecdotes, a few of which were perhaps true. One Belfast crack was that they would not trust a would-be passenger who, on a Saturday night, was so eccentric as to be sober. Drivers are fearful of asking their way in unfamiliar parts of the segregated city, since those who do not know that district are at once suspected of being of the wrong religion, so may get stomped or worse. Small Belfast characters are dangerous: ‘It’s always the guy who is four-foot-six, and he’ll be trouble all the time. Big giant men, you’ll never have no trouble with them.’ From New York: ‘In this city nobody trusts anybody.’ And, given the prevalence of guns in robbers’ hands: ‘All they want is your money. Give them your money.’ Skip the bits of this book about ‘the theory of cognitive dissonance reduction’, and enjoy speech as Damon Runyon heard it. Who cares whether it is trustworthy?