| Abstract: | Notes that behavioral sociologists and psychologists have been concerned mainly with explaining elementary forms of social behavior and with building towards macrolevel from microlevel social processes. The present article attempts to add to behavioral sociology by showing how reward and cost opportunities at the microlevel are "structured by" wider social systems for most complex forms of social behavior. An analysis of colleague relations among residential real estate agents illustrates the argument. Their role as middlemen in a wider system of property exchange, and the commission system through which they are rewarded, force agents into a situation of "structural ambivalence" in their colleague relations. This structural ambivalence is dealt with by a set of collective defense mechanisms which account for the dynamics of emergent daily interaction among colleagues. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
