The violence in trusting trust chief executives: glimpsing trust in the UK National Health Service

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate about the utility of the work of Jacques Derrida for qualitative interview research. It consists of a case study in which Derridean ideas are exemplified: a set of interviews with people called Trust Chief Executives—top managers of U.K. National Health Service hospitals. In ways that echo Derrida’s approach to the analysis of Platonic texts, the article repeatedly interrogates the word trust in the interview transcripts. Reading interview texts in a Derridean way brings to attention matters that would have been unseen in a conventional reading of the empirical material. Managers’ talk can be read as a form of violence in that it has come to constitute a version of what can be thought and known, in the most part, by the elision of alternatives. Recognizing the violence of language is therefore one of Derrida’s principal contributions to critique, an insight of particular importance in qualitative research.