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This chapter shows that currently popular conceptions of social exchange do not establish their authors’ and advocates’ claim to provide an account of the fundamental mode of organization for face-to-face interaction. Social interaction is a goal directed process in which people interact with others in order to secure various treatments that they require in order to satisfy specific social-psychological needs. Obligations for treatment production dictate courses of action outright, irrespective of the utilities that might be realized by their performance. The chapter demonstrates that social exchange in its standard, rationalistic conception does have a place in the theory of face-to-face interaction, but that its place is a restricted one. Social-exchange theory seems to us to be one of the theories least susceptible to these criticisms and thus, from the perspective of an action theorist, one to be developed.
Athay et al. (Tue,) studied this question.