Transaction

A transaction is an interaction that builds nothing, and the definition is precise about what is not built, since neither empathic conduits carrying understanding nor euphoric conduits carrying energy are established. What happens instead is an energy exchange, and because no conduit forms the exchange settles nothing and leaves the stronger agent with power. That last clause is the reason the framework treats transactions as the unit of the power economy rather than as neutral exchanges, since an economy in which every interaction is a transaction accumulates power at the strong end by construction. The contrast is with connection, a balanced interaction and an anima conduit constructed from balanced interactions. Marsh's account of how power sustains itself runs through this term. Once power is established it provides the unequal force which can be used to turn every interaction into a transaction in which the powerful gain more power, so the conversion of interactions into transactions is both the effect of power and its means of growth. Her examples are institutional. Bureaucracy is invasion of privacy and enforced reflection of authority, and every interaction with it is of this kind, which is why she says bureaucracy is torture and why people react to it with extreme boredom. Historically she traces the direction of travel, since exchange once occurred on a transactional basis between two autonomous entities and sublation to ever higher endogroups negated the need for balanced transactions altogether.

Transaction cost economics after Coase and Williamson studies why firms exist rather than markets handling everything, treating the transaction as the basic unit of economic analysis. Social exchange theory in sociology models relationships as cost and benefit calculations. Buber's I-It names an encounter that treats the other as an object, which is closest to Marsh's sense. Her definition inverts the economic usage, since where transaction cost economics treats the transaction as the neutral primitive from which institutions are explained, she treats it as a degraded form of interaction whose prevalence is what needs explaining.