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Social Gift Exchange
When an employer plays an employee more than he strictly has to pay that employee, and the employee works harder than they strictly might be expected to work, economists call this a “gift exchange.” I realized today that we can narrow this and call it an “economic gift exchange” and contrast it to other forms of gift exchange.
In yesterday’s Financial Times I read this in David Pilling’s column, Modern China is yearning for a new moral code:
“Day to day, most Chinese people are able to put aside the broader moral confusion to perform the little acts of kindness and decency that make a society function.”
What Pilling describes here as the little acts that make a society function constitute what we might call a social gift exchange: in a smoothly functioning society individual citizens do more than a narrow interpretation of their social and legal duty would stipulate, and the presumptive exchange for this is to live in a society than is better than that which fulfills the minimum social and legal requirements.
There are many kinds of social gift exchange: a teacher who makes an extra effort to teach and a student to learn, a social worker who goes the extra mile for a client and a client that responds by making an extra effort, and when people yield the right of way for each other in traffic, or when pedestrians, bicyclists, and vehicles do so mutually and on the large scale of urban population densities.
There are also many instances when social gift exchange fails, and people behave rather badly with each other. I’m sure that anyone reading this can recall many instances from their own experience when others gave only the minimum but demanded an extra measure for themselves in return, or when people engage in conflict over who is and who is not abiding by the minimum social and legal standards.
This idea of social gift exchange can be used to define a healthy and fully functioning society: in a healthy society, social gift exchange is routine and unexceptional; in a pathological society, social gift exchange is mostly absent.
In the big picture, it is to be expected that most societies fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum, though it is also be expected that in smaller, culturally and ethnically homogenous societies that social gift exchange functions more easily because of shared expectations and a shared understanding — what sociologists call normative consensus.
This, then, is the challenge for the large and diverse societies of contemporary nation-states (presumptively established on the basis of nationhood, but in fact established on the basis of the territorial principle in law): how can social gift exchange be encouraged to flourish in a context in which shared expectations and shared understanding may be absent?
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