ABSTRACT
Closely related to the objection that certain markets make people more selfish is the objection that certain markets crowd out or reduce our intrinsic motivation. There may be a useful distinction between gifts and commodities, but that distinction does not distinguish markets from non-markets. In 1954, Marcel Mauss argued that there exist two types or kinds of exchanges that grounded different kinds of relations, commodity exchange, and gift exchange. Anti-commodification theorists rest their case on a deep division between a gift and commodity exchange. Commodity exchanges represent impersonal and distant relations between the exchanging parties. Social and personal relationships are irrelevant, only the price of the object of exchange matters. Andrej Rus concludes, social scientists take commodity exchange to represent 'economic rationality and commercial profit making'. Charles W. Smith, an economic sociologist who produced the seminal work on the sociology of auctions.
