Gibbert, Michael Seele, Peter Marta, Pizzetti 2016-05-10 Gift exchange is a universal, social, cultural, and economic phenomenon. Over the past 90 years, it has fascinated scholars from different disciplines within the social sciences thanks to its diffusion across societies and centuries. Since Marcel Mauss' foundational paper (1925), scholars have agreed on the social integrative function of gifts, which are tools to build and maintain relationships. Giving gifts generates a virtuous circle of reciprocity, within which gifts are exchanged to attain a balanced reciprocity between the parties. Gifts are also intrinsically associated with identity definition and influence recipients' and givers' self-view. Above all, the gift is a symbolic communication, "a language that employs objects instead of words as its lexical elements" (Caplow, 1984, p. 1320), by which the giver communicates a variety of meanings, such as affection for the recipient, image of the recipient, or intention with regard to the relationship with the recipient. application/pdf https://susi.usi.ch/global/documents/318490 https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1318490 https://susi.usi.ch/documents/318490/files/2016COM004.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/urn/urn:nbn:ch:rero-006-115161 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/ark/12658/srd1318490 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess License undefined Gift exchange gift recipients personalization ethical consumption experimental design info:eu-repo/classification/udc/159.9 Gifts, emotions and cognitive processes : an inquiry of gift receiving from a consumer psychology perspective http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06