Blackwell Reference Online

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Dealing with reciprocal interactions that involve groups and persons exchanging items of social and symbolic value from which they benefit, the theory originally developed from early French sociological concerns with sources of social solidarity; it has also been elaborated in Anglo-American social science as ground for power differentiation in social relationships. In a review of French sociology in the 1800s, Durkheim (1900) attributed the resurgence of the discipline in the nineteenth century to the crisis that followed France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It led sociologists to search for solutions in the societal order, ‘the facade… of the imperial [state] system [having] just collapsed’ (p. 12). In the first decades of the twentieth century, Durkheim and his disciples expanded their scope of research to nonindustrial societies, which were being opened up to scholarship by European imperialism, in the methodological faith that the principles gained from discovering how such simple societies cohered would shed light on the more complex value problems in the West (Durkheim, 1912; Durkheim and Mauss, 1903). The social exchange perspective emerged as a grounded theory of social solidarity from these enquiries. (See also D urkheim school .) Using ethnographic data from various non-Western societies, including especially Malinow-ski's (1922) documentation of Kula ... log in or subscribe to read full text