Blackwell Reference Online

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Richard Marc Emerson, a primary architect of social exchange theory and power-dependence theory, received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1955 where his primary advisors were Don Martindale (sociological theory) and Stanley Schachter (psychology). He attended graduate school after serving during World War II in the elite 10th Army Mountain Division upon completing college at the University of Utah, where he majored in sociology and minored in philosophy. His first academic appointment was at the University of Cincinnati. He joined the faculty in 1955 and received tenure in 1957. While at Cincinnati he wrote a number of important papers and participated in research projects related to family relations (as a senior research associate in psychiatry) and in leadership training, a popular field of study post-World War II. He was recruited to the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington in 1965, where he served on the faculty until his premature death in 1982 at the peak of his academic career. Richard Emerson is best known for his work on social power. In the early 1960s he published two highly significant papers, “Power–Dependence Relations” (1962) and “Power–Dependence Relations: Two Experiments” (1964), that changed the way social scientists subsequently viewed social power. Both are now citation classics. The 1962 article is one of only 30 that have received ... log in or subscribe to read full text