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Rational Choice Theory: Exchanges
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Overall, since group formation and existence, especially of non-economic groups, is proved to be a complex process involving multifarious social factors, a single-factor, rational choice model fails to do justice to the phenomenon. For example, a study (of Quebec) shows that social conditions, especially the sociocultural construction of ethnic relations perceived as unfair and a societal context of ethnics’ independence, are more important than economic factors in group competition and/or open conflict (Belanger and Pinard, 1991). Other cases in point include (inter)ethnic exchange, competition, and related conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union, where collective charisma, effervescence and other non-rational forces (Tiryakian, 1995), as well as macrostructural conditions (Collins, 1995) have been prime (though not only) movers in these processes rather than rational individual cost-benefit calculations.
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Those features of social life that are conventionally called 'social structures' are, for rational choice theorists, simply chains of interconnected individual actions. They are the 'patterns' that result from individual actions. It is because many of these chains can be quite extensive that social life can appear to have a life of its own. Cook and her colleagues (1990) have recently drawn on arguments from social network analysis to suggest that social structures can be understood as chains of interconnection that form extensive exchange networks through which resources flow.
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In addition, empirical studies evidence the multiple social determination of labor market as opposed to its economic mono-causation assumed in rational choice models of exchange. One of these studies (Sakamato and Chen, 1991) find this model, with its assumptions of perfect competition, equilibrium, and utility maximization in labor markets, inferior to a sociological framework that focuses on their organizational constraints on and institutional embeddedness. So does another study (Hodson and Kaufman, 1982) observing that labor markets are not just direct reflections of capital or financial factors, but autonomous structures of labor resources and liabilities, as determined by the constraints of power constellations and other social relations, not only market competition. This study suggests that simple economic models of labor markets are incomplete and mis-specified relative to a multivariate model in that they overemphasize only one aspect of market exchange while neglecting its manifold sociological dimensions.
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