Abstract:

Trust in higher education is one of those issues that researchers have not paid much attention to before. But today there is more and more talk about this aspect of the functioning of organizations as a whole.

This article discusses the importance of trust in educational institutions in times of crisis, in particular during the distance learning. Trust is interpreted by the authors as the most important intangible asset for the development of higher education in a situation of crisis, social and economic uncertainty.The contemporary universities in Bulgaria face a great challenge. More and more universities are competing to attract students. This leads to the creation of a competitive model, which includes in-depth analysis and consideration of a number of factors in the development of the university institution. A significant part of these factors is trust. Research on trust in higher education relies primarily on general concepts of trust as a social phenomenon.

The study is based on interdisciplinary methodology for studying trust in higher education, developed at the intersection of sociological, psychological, socio-psychological, educational, economic and management approaches. The article presents the main directions of research on trust in higher education.

Depending on the focus on internal or external communications, two areas of trust research in the university institution are distinguished in the article: research on trust in the organization itself and research on trust in the organization.

Part of the conclusions in the article are the following: universities are more and more in need of the formation of an intra-university culture of trust and the search for social technologies of this process, which should become one of the most important tasks of university management; without solving it, all other regulatory regulators will be useless. Underestimation of trusting relationships between educational communities (including management), based on horizontal ties, only leads to an increase in destructive functions and a drop in the social effectiveness of higher education.

Keywords:

Trust, communication, university, higher education.