ABSTRACT
George C. Homans is widely regarded as the father of social exchange theory in sociology. Although anthropological treatments of social exchange (Lévi-Strauss 1949; Malinowski 1922; Mauss 1925) preceded Homans’s work by several decades, it was Homans who first introduced the concept to sociologists in a 1958 essay in the American Sociological Review. He expanded his ideas in this early paper into a book-length exposition, published in 1961 as Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, which he revised in 1974. Between 1958 and 1974, other classical statements on exchange theory appeared: John W. Thibaut and Harold
