Richard Emerson

Richard Emerson was an American sociologist who developed power-dependence theory, a formal account of how power arises from the relative dependence of actors on each other for valued resources. His 1962 article Power-Dependence Relations argued that an actor's power over another is a direct function of the other's dependence on them, and he went on to build exchange network theory, which models how power is distributed across connected exchange relations in a social network. His work gave social exchange theory a more rigorous, structural form and shaped later research on power and exchange in networks.