On Invisible Exchange Cost And Disappearing Of Interpersonal Trust

The history of human being, more specifically, Marx's historical materialism tells us that as a whole, everywhere in the world must have the same experience of modernization, as with which, the producing and development of modernity in human mind, is the embodiment of way of human existence based on practices. Therefore, the Chinese modern progress didn't escape from the whole world modern process. But because of history and actuality reasons, we felled behind many western countries. With development, we are facing of the"time space- compress"situation. Many characteristics express during this process, the traditional characteristics, the modern characteristics and the post-modern characteristics are all expressing. This is the background of this thesis from which getting inspiration to investigate a typical case. In other words, this thesis tries to find out the special phenomenon during Chinese reform process nowadays, with the desire to find out the problems during the process of constructing Chinese modernity, and work hard to giving an author's own explanation.This thesis is an achievement base on the writer's observation and consideration about a property dispute of a family. Although this is a problem involving the property allotment and inheritance, it rises the dispute overstepped the scope of the economy and the law by researching deep. This phenomenon embodies many problems, for example, the family ethic, the trust of human relations, the resource of exchange or the exchange relations and exchange motivation and so on, which could be observed and explained in the view of sociology. By interviewing deep with the correlate members, the writer found that the process of dissension produced a kind of distrust among these family members. But after studied the whole affair, the writer found that the two times exchange action are all completely equal and both parties are voluntarily. It makes me thinking such a question: why the equal and voluntary exchange can lose the basic trust at last? What are the reasons concealing under the superficial phenomenon? Why the trust dropped out? This is the direct motive that the text be composed.The core standpoint of this thesis is: from the perspective of exchange action, the reason of the deficiency of trust is the function of a kind of invisible exchange cost. It is also a barrier during the process of constructing Chinese modernity.The basic standpoint of the thesis is:(1) The innate character of the society life is the communication among human being. The exchange behavior is the effective carrier of communication. The human communication can be classified with the economy exchange and the social exchange. They are different, but they are connected with each other too. The connection is the economy exchange enhances the social exchange. The trust is an important marking of the interrelationship of economy exchange and social exchange.(2) The exchange behavior contains exchange group, exchange resources, exchange cost and exchange mode. The exchange cost is the latent and important factor of the whole exchange process, because it is one of the important factors among the people's exchange motivation.(3) Exchange is a reasonable action. The exchange motivation is composed of economic factor and non-economic factor. The former includes the cost and income; the later includes the ethic factors, the custom factors and the moral factors and so on primarily. The exchange cost itself can be divided into the visible cost and the invisible cost.(4)This kind of invisible exchange cost force one side of the group exchanging in an un-voluntarily situation. The price of this kind of un-voluntarily is the trust disappearance.(5) The vanished trust will influence on the exchange activities later. The exchange activities will decrease in the social life which will result to the society depressed, lacking vitality. It will also influence on the ethic, the social interaction and the moral factors.(6) The case in the thesis took place in the key stage during Chinese modern progress, which is a so-called social transformation stage. Therefore, the construction of modernity consciousness is a necessary work on this stage and this work will relate to the future development progress directly. By analyzing the objective environment of the development of China and the Chinese traditional factors, the thesis make a connection between the problem of modernity and the invisible exchange cost as well as the vanished trust. This problem is a special phenomenon during the process of the construction of modernity. It also gives this kind of construction a negative influence. The modernity and Chinese traditional factors must occur to collision. The solution of this problem also comes from here.The core concept of this thesis is the invisible exchange cost. In this thesis, it is a kind of added cost. The cost is not only a guarantee for one time exchange but also influence the next time exchange. The innovations of this thesis are as follow:(1)By studying the case and the documents, the writer found that the current sociology theories about exchange can not apply the case in this thesis. The center contents for discussing of the current theories are the exchange behavior itself, the investigation of exchange mode and the exchange result, which neglect the exchange motivation and the exchange resources.(2) The writer put forward a new concept: the invisible exchange cost. The writer tried to establish a relationship among the exchange behaviors through this concept. And this concept embodies the study of the exchange motivation which has been neglected by the exchange theory.(3) The writer found the reason for the disappearance of trust. The current researches regard the situation of trust disappearance as a fact, but neglected to analysis the reason for the disappearance of trust through a microscopic view. This is also a work that the thesis tried to do.(4) The writer put the analysis of modernity in this thesis, it make a vaster back-ground for the problem. The writer found the special relationship between the problem of Chinese modernity construction during the process of modernization and the trust disappearance according to the invisible exchange cost, it also found out a breakthrough of microscopic view for the research of modernity.The difficult and the shortage:The sociology of exchange is the precondition and foundation of this thesis. But because of the writer's limited scholarship and experience, it is a hard work to study a flock of documents; the writer can not draw lessons from the researches concerning some related problems in other courses.Moreover, the thesis analysis sets out from a case, therefore, the general adaptability of the concept and the problem is inevitable limited.The use of interview method in this thesis is too hard to work up strictly and without any error.