Peter Blau

Peter Blau was an Austrian-born American sociologist known for extending social exchange theory from face-to-face interaction to the analysis of large-scale social structures and organizations. In Exchange and Power in Social Life (1964) he argued that the same exchange processes that govern relations between individuals also generate emergent structures of power, status, and opposition at the level of groups and institutions. He also carried out influential empirical studies of bureaucracy and formal organizations, and his later work developed a general theory of social structure built around patterns of association among people differentiated by social position.