Who came up with the social exchange theory?
Social Exchange Theory Although Social Exchange Theory has generated a great deal of research, it does have its detractors and has received some serious criticisms. We will review four major critiques of the theory and its assumptions. The first criticism is that Social Exchange Theory is not testable. As we discussed in Chapter 3, one important criterion of a theory is that it is testable and capable of being proven false. The difficulty with social exchange is that its central concepts—costs and rewards—are not clearly defined. As Sabatelli and Shehan (1993) note: It becomes impossible to make an operational distinction between what people value, what they perceive as rewarding, and how they behave. Rewards, values, and actions appear to be defined in terms of each other (Turner, 1978). Thus, it is impossible to find an instance when a person does not act in ways so as to obtain rewards. (p. 396) When the theory argues that people do what they can to maximize rewards and then also ar
