Social Exchange Theory under Scrutiny: A Positive Critique of its Economic-Behaviorist Formulations

Exchange theory has become one of the most ambitious social, especially socio-psychological, theories. Social exchange theory’s fundamental premise is that human behavior is an exchange of rewards between actors. This is the rationale for the claim that social exchange can serve as a general paradigm for sociology and anthropology as well as social psychology. The present critique is aimed at rational choice and behaviorist variants of social exchange theory rather than at the theory as such. First, the main assumptions of (these variants of) social exchange theory are presented. This is followed by a critique of these assumptions at two levels. The first level pertains to the treatment of social interaction as an exchange, and the second to the status of social exchange as an economic or psychological phenomenon. Other criticisms of exchange theory are also presented. The exchange approach in sociology [is] the economic analysis of noneconomic social situations (Emerson, 1976, p. 336). In recent years, one of the most ambitious sociological, particularly socio-psychological, theories has been social exchange theory (Alexander, 1990; Cook, 2000), in turn a subset of the rational choice model predicated on a “paradigm of rational action borrowed from economics ” (Coleman, 1986, p. 10), viz. expected utility models imported from microeconomics (Macy and Flache, 1995). Notably, some of its proponents see social exchange theory as a prominent instance of “sociological miniaturism ” (or sociological social psychology1) that ostensibly allows the “examination of large-scale social issues by means of the investigation of small-scale social situations”, or simply “seeing the big through the small”