We are delighted to have the papers from the Ruffin Summit on Public Trust in Business published in the Corporate Reputation Review. These papers and the larger dialog from the summit will contribute directly to the Project on Public Trust in Business – a broad-based initiative launched by the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics and the Arthur W. Page Society in 2009.

The Ruffin Summit on Public Trust in Business, a multi-disciplinary meeting of 25 leading scholars who specialize in the area of trust, was held on 18–20 September, 2009 at the University of Virginia's Darden School in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Summit was organized by the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics and Darden's Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, to serve as an academic response to the global economic crisis, which was at its core a crisis of trust.

The goals for the Summit were simple, but bold: to begin to fill the sizable knowledge gap in our understanding of the dynamics of public trust in the institution of business and its social and economic impacts; to initiate a cross-disciplinary conversation among academic thought leaders that will help deliver actionable, game-changing knowledge to practitioners; and to set and shape the research agenda in public trust for the next decade.

The importance of trust to business and society issues will only increase, and as this happens, the ability to build and sustain trust will become an even more critical management competency.