7 - Compensation in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

This chapter discusses compensation in cross-cultural perspective. Compensation is considered in the context of several broader modes of social control: reciprocity oriented, negotiative, meditative-arbitrative, and adjudicative. Each of these modes can be seen in relation to a characteristic sociocultural system. Compensation encompasses a wide variety of behavior, including the making up for an injury, a misdeed, or a crime. Within this variety of possibilities, compensation as social control includes the right of a publicly sanctioned person, or group of officials, to demand the payment—create a debt—of something to set to rights an infraction on the part of the debtor. Four modes or subtypes of compensation from the simplest social organization to the most complex, are (1) reciprocity-oriented compensation, (2) negotiative compensation, (3) mediative-arbitrative compensation, and (4) adjudicative compensation. The concept of compensation has a number of dominant ways of finding expression within systems of social control. Such ways or modes have correlates in the sociocultural system. It remains for future research to determine more precisely the significant conditions or independent variables that are related to one or another mode of compensation.