Social Exchange: Reward and Punishment in Bridal Shower

Abstract

The bridal shower event as the new phenomena as the alternative of the traditional marriage ritual. As the new event are conducted by one of the couples before they enter the formal marriage ritual. The purpose of this research is to describe of the social exchange, reward, punishment, and consumptive behaviour between the bridal shower actors. Research is designed by qualitative research, it conducted in Surakarta city. The social exchange in marriage ritual occurred as the transformation process among the actors to change the traditional ritual to modern style. There are 8 peoples selected as informant. They determined by purposive sampling -based on the education, religion and economic status of their parent criteria. Primary data collected by interview and validated by the resource triangulation. The result found that the bridal shower event is expected by the actors to reduce the financial consumption in the marriage ritual, unfortunately in the reality the new event more consumptive than conventional one. But the consumptive behaviour in the bridal shower is maintained by the actors by reward and punishment manner.