Reciprocal Relationships and Well-being

Implications for Social Work and Social Policy

Maritta Törrönen, Carol Munn-Giddings, Laura Tarkiainen, Maritta Törrönen, Carol Munn-Giddings, Laura Tarkiainen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367431068
• eBook ISBN: 9781317240808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

A sense of participation and opportunities to share and participate in activities or groups that are important to them are crucial factors in human wellbeing.

This book provides a robust empirical and theoretical analysis of reciprocity and its implications for social work and social policy practices by discussing how ideas of reciprocity can be understood and applied to welfare policy and social care practices, as well as how the act of reciprocity supports the wellbeing of citizens. Contributions from Finland, Germany, Russia, the UK, the USA and Canada illuminate the ways in which socio-political contexts influence the power relations between citizens, practitioners and the state, and the potential (or otherwise) for reciprocity to flourish.

It will be essential reading for social care practitioners, researchers and educationalists as well as postgraduate students in social work and related social care and community-oriented professions and social policy makers.

Part I
Reciprocity

Theoretical conceptualisations

1 Reciprocity and well-being

Antti Karisto

Introduction

[E]ach gift is part of a system of reciprocity in which the honours of giver and recipient are engaged. It is a total system in that every item of status or of spiritual or material possession is implicated for everyone in the whole community. The system is quite simple: just the rule that every gift has to be returned in some specified way sets up a perceptual cycle of exchanges within and between generations. In some cases the specified return is of equal value, producing a stable system of statuses; in others it must exceed the value of the earlier gift, producing an escalating contest of honour. The whole society can be described by the catalogue of transfers that map all the obligations between its members. The cycling gift system is the society.

(Douglas 1990, viii–ix)

The quote above by Mary Douglas reflects the ethos of the present chapter, in which I explore the essence of reciprocity from the viewpoint of well-being. Let me, however, begin by recollecting a personal memory that led me to consider the theme. A quarter of a century ago, I visited the School for Advanced Urban Studies, which operates under the auspices of the University of Bristol. At the end of the week, the researchers had the habit of going down to the pub. The evening proceeded in such a way that one would offer a round to everyone, and then it would be the turn of the next. There were around ten of us, and I became restless when I thought about when it would be my turn. Why on earth should I offer drinks to such a large group of people, most of whom I hardly knew? Perhaps I would buy a round next Friday or the Friday after. Or should I offer to buy it now to avoid being labelled a freeloader and risk losing face?

I decided to raise the topic of buying rounds, and the rules of the game were explained to me. Naturally, no record was kept of who had bought what; you simply trusted that everyone would commit, more or less, to the principle of reciprocity. If one Friday night did turn out to be expensive, you got to drink for free on many following Fridays, and in the long run, everything would work out fair and square. As a temporary guest, I wasn’t expected to buy a round, but these urban sociologists in the pub were extremely surprised at my description of Finnish pub culture, where everyone buys their own drinks, or, if not, they settle up during the same night.

My pub experience gave me food for thought; it forced me to ponder offering and reciprocity. Offering can be an empty word; reciprocity can be spurious. If accounts are immediately settled, then the bother of paying is just passed from one person to another, in turn. With mechanical reciprocity, the boozing continues, but the kind of reciprocity that really sweetens life seems to require something else: disinterested willingness to give, spontaneous broad-mindedness, tactful understanding of the situation and appreciation of the nature of the good life.

In this chapter, I investigate reciprocity and its importance in the creation of well-being. I begin by making a few observations about cultural variation in everyday social intercourse and then move on to the level of concepts. If reciprocity is a difficult notion open to many interpretations, then so is well-being. A confusing factor is that there are several competing discourses on well-being, and the significance of reciprocity varies between them. I will give particular thought to well-being in human relationships as reciprocity is connected to them almost by definition. I will also examine the kind of ‘general reciprocity’ that occurs in social policy and social work. Finally, I investigate reciprocity in old age and in intergenerational relations. When we are old, we are particularly dependent on one another, and the sustainability of our well-being requires a ‘generationally intelligent’ social policy.

Culturally defined forms of reciprocity

As a Finn, I am accustomed to the exchange of words in everyday comings and goings being rather terse. In his novel, Hannu Raittila presents this in an indisputable way:

In speech in foreign languages a Finn is always disturbed by the fact that sentences have all kinds of unnecessary phrases and politeness forms. They make the language difficult and awkward to speak and obscure its meaning. In Finnish, the matter is said in the simplest and most unambiguous way possible, and then we wait to see what the other replies. If there is nothing to say, we are silent.

(Raittila 2001, p. 40)

We are often silent. Linguists have characterised reticence and ‘minimal politeness’ as being typical of Finns. We react to open rudeness, but we do not expect language to be particularly polite (e.g. Jaakkola 2008, pp. 113–115). Does Finland suffer from a particular deficit of politeness and respect of the kind that Richard Sennett (2003) considers to be a unifying feature of modern societies? Finns are certainly capable of saying ‘thank you’, but one symptom of the paucity of explicitly polite reciprocity that is embedded in the Finnish language or mind is our lack of an equivalent for the useful word ‘please’. Well, of course, we have the phrasal equivalents ole hyvä and olkaa hyvä (literally ‘be good’), but using them is already something of an effort: You need to use two words and choose between the formal and informal form of address. Perhaps for this reason, these words are used far less than quickly delivered words in many other languages (Karisto 2010, pp. 74–77). In Finnish, kiitos (‘thank you’) is like a full stop. You can reply to it with eipä kestä (‘no problem’) or the more ceremonious kiitos on minun puolellani (‘my pleasure’; literally, ‘the gratitude is on my side’), but those phrases have the same tone: That’s enough thanking! Obligatory phrases are recited, but reciprocity is not expected to continue over and above this point.

Finland is considered a low context culture in which people typically attempt to produce so-called first-level descriptions. Things are said ‘the way they are’; the relationship between speech and its subject is considered unambiguous. This contrasts with second-level descriptions or high context cultures in which speech does not refer so much to reality as to other speech concerning that reality (Daun 1989, Baudrillard 1991, see Alapuro 1997, pp. 184–186).

The division between low or high contexts or first and second levels is, of course, a generalising typology that may exaggerate cultural differences. There is no reason to consider a paucity of reciprocity to be an essential characteristic of Finnish culture or brand Finnish manners as shoddier or coarser than those of other cultures. While in other cultures, politeness is cultivated more intensely, social interaction is not necessarily more warm-hearted. It is unlikely that Brits are always as thoroughly broad-minded and generous as they implied in that Bristol pub. And perhaps it is an example of ‘orientalism’ (Said 2011) to think that reciprocity is always the spice of life in Eastern cultures. For example, benevolence and sympathy (amae) are said to be at the centre of the Japanese way of life. Gifts are given in many situations, for instance, when a colleague’s daughter gets married, irrespective of whether one personally knows the individual concerned or not. A gift is always followed by a reciprocal gift, but the exchange of gifts is normatively regulated and carefully apportioned. A reciprocal gift cannot be too modest or too extravagant; in some situations, it must be a defined fraction of the value of the gift received. This even obliges people to keep a written record of the gifts they have received and discover their monetary value (Davies and Ikeno 2002, pp. 238–239). But doesn’t norm-driven, carefully calculated reciprocity feel more like an obligation than real reciprocity (see also Becker 1986, pp. 73–74)?

Forms of reciprocity are culturally specific, and it is difficult to place them in rank order. Forms of reciprocity are also malleable. In recent years, there has been a greater abundance of Finnish phrases and expressions; linguistic reciprocity has clearly become richer. The new generation of service sector workers draws its influences from practices abroad, and presumably people in Finnish pubs also behave differently from my generation in its youth.

Organic reciprocity, not a mechanistic exchange

The kind of reciprocity that boosts well-being does not need to be of the expressive, effusive kind; rather, it can also be realised in a restrained Finnish way, without melodrama. Nonetheless, in some way, it must be flexible and organic. Reciprocity includes giving, even if we do not immediately receive something in return. Reciprocity can only be realised over the course of time, and it does not always need to occur. It can be more of a disposition: a general willingness to do good for others. For example, the core of friendship is just this willingness. We have friends, so we can turn to them, even if we don’t actually turn to them, and although they cannot always help. The modern understanding of friendship, in contrast, is freedom from binding obligations (Pahl 2000, p. 37). Hospitality is another model for reciprocity and searching for a good life. For example, the sharing of meals is meant to be continual. The pattern ‘give, receive, give in return…’ identifies an open-ended process in which some imbalance is always present (Boisvert and Heldke 2016, p. 51).

In reciprocity that occurs in social interaction, there must be space for situational sensitivity (Naukkarinen 2011). Spontaneity and surprise are good – there is little enjoyment in getting something one was already certain of receiving. It feels much better to receive something unexpectedly and from an unlikely source.

Nonetheless, an entirely predictable, mechanistic exchange, or what Serge-Christophe Kolm (2000a, p. 14) terms ‘self-sustained sequential exchange’, also has its uses. It is better that norms oblige us to perform friendly gestures rather than entice us to engage in misanthropy. Even mechanical or superficial reciprocity maintains a sense of community, and neglecting it can be fatal in the same way that open arrogance is. However, mechanical reciprocity is hardly a bottomless wellspring of well-being, and neither is simply refraining from impoliteness. Well-being is something more than a lack of problems and grievances or their successful regulation – contrary to common thinking in social policy and social work, where well-being and welfare are often conflated. In Finnish, there is also confusion due to the fact that the word hyvinvointi is used to describe the good life of an individual (well-being), the good produced by the welfare state (welfare) and any form of indulgent and momentary gratification (wellness). Even actual well-being has many forms, and the Finnish sociologist Erik Allardt (1976), for example, divides it into three broad dimensions: Having, Loving and Being.

The many forms of well-being

Not all forms of reciprocity are good as reciprocity can also involve revenge for ill treatment. However, my focus here is on reciprocity that is beneficial in one way or other – but beneficial for what? Well-being, like reciprocity, is a multifaceted and slippery concept. Although the nature of the good life has been pondered for millennia and the multiplicity of well-being has often been emphasised, in public discourse, it is basically understood as Having, i.e. the material goods that a person possesses. In publicity, well-being is embedded in the economy. It is believed that well-being is produced when the economy is left to function free from interference. The well-being of the economy is an issue of absolute primacy because it is considered to trickle down to create individual well-being.

Even if the economic approach to well-being has become dominant, it is by no means the only perspective. There are several competing discourses on well-being, and the significance of reciprocity varies between them. For promoters of health, well-being, above all, means a healthy and well-functioning body. In social policy, it is the good produced by the welfare state, the regulation of poverty and other problems – at bottom, security. From an ecological perspective, sustainability is the crucial precondition of well-being. It may mean transcendental or aesthetic peak experiences and so on. Well-being is much discussed, but one person understands it one way and the next in a different way. Politicians and other actors are quick to appeal to well-being because it is the magic word that also seems to legitimise the pursuit of their particular interests (Karisto 2010, pp. 15–19).

Reciprocity has been highly prominent in economic notions of well-being (e.g. Gérard-Varet et al. 2000, Gintis 2000a, 2000b). In fact, it has been economists who have developed the formal theory of reciprocity – game theory – the furthest. In particular, the theme of reciprocity has been cultivated in discussions on alternatives to a pure market economy: caring economy, social enterprises and corporate social responsibility, women’s banks and microcredit and finance, fair trade practices and time banking, in which the transfer of services does not involve the exchange of money but the exchange of time and services provided for others (Bruni 2008, Koskiaho 2014, Hirvilammi 2015).

Nevertheless, reciprocity has been even more widely discussed in the social sciences, psychology, anthropology and moral philosophy. In these disciplines, reciprocity and economic exchange are considered two different, even mutually exclusive, principles of exchange (Polanyi 2001, p. 47, Kujala and Danielsbacka 2015, pp. 20–21 and 39–43). For example, the Swedish sociologist Sten Johansson has warned about mixing the rules of private and economic life, terming it ‘prostitution’, the confusing of political and economic spheres ‘corruption’ and the intermingling of political and private life ‘nepotism’ (Johansson 1979, pp. 101–103). According to Niklas Luhmann, social subsystems – the economy, politics, the welfare state, science, art, the media and others – are ‘autopoietic’, i.e. self-referential. There is interaction between them, but each has its own way of communicating, its own ‘medium’ and its own ‘code’ (Jalava and Kangas 2013). Things turn out badly if the medium of one subsystem becomes dominant in the other subsystems, with corruption and prostitution being among the consequences when ‘money talks’.

Loving, of course, is closer to reciprocity than the other dimensions of well-being distinguished by Allardt (1976). Some level of reciprocity is an absolute precondition for well-being based on human relations. The kind of partnership or friendship where flows of support and emotion only travel in one direction is doomed to fail. The social exchange that occurs among family and friends is sometimes considered the only genuine form of reciprocity (see Kolm 2000a, p. 28, Bruni 2008, p. xii). Perceived well-being is strongly affected by the reciprocity that occurs in social interaction: whether we receive love and whether we give it, and how we value and treat one another. In people’s own interpretations of their well-being, human relationships, alongside health, are considered the most significant factors (e.g. Haapola et al. 2013, p. 84).

Well-being accumulates in different ways in its different dimensions. While hankering after Having, it might feel that well-being grows at the expense of others as there is only a certain amount of material goods to be divided at any one time. Well-being built on human relationships, in contrast, does not diminish, even if ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Lists of figures and table
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Reciprocity: theoretical conceptualisations
• PART II Reciprocity in practice and community settings
• PART III Reciprocity: methodological and educational issues
• Reciprocal social work and social policy: conclusions