the same status level, allowing for an equal potential for exchange and benefit throughout the relationship. He also studied the social exchange of partners, and how these relationships come together in the first place. Blau explains how loving relationships come to existence through the exchange of certain favorable traits that would attract one person to another. Blau discusses how status, beauty, and wealth are some of the key characteristics that people search for in a partner, and that the most successful relationships occur when both partners have valuable attributes that they can benefit from. Organizational theory Some of Blau's first major contributions to sociology were in the field of organizations. His first publication, Dynamics of Bureaucracy (1955), prompted a wave of post-Weberian organizational studies. Organizational research consisted in exploring to what extent the received image of the Weberian bureaucracy—an efficient, mechanical system of roles—held up under close scrutiny in the empirical study of social interaction within organizations. Blau, in his research and study, highlighted the ways in which the real life of the organization was structured along informal channels of interaction and socio-emotional exchange. Blau conducted a different approach in the main subject group for organizational sociology, focusing far more on white-collar workers rather than those of the blue-collar status, concentrating on the relationships between workers. He also discussed how the incipient status systems formed were important to the continued functioning of these organizations as the formal status structure. Hence, much of Blau's work involving organizations centered on the interplay between formal structure, informal practices, and bureaucratic pressures and how these processes affect organizational change. Blau's second major contribution to organizational analysis revolved around the study of determinants of the "bureaucratic components" of organizations. He collected data on 53 Employment Security Agencies in the US and 1,201 local offices. The result of this research was Blau's (1970) general theory of differentiation in organizations. This piece had an immediate impact in the field of organizations and more importantly American sociology. Blau derived several generalizations, the most important which are (1) increasing size results in an increase in the number of distinct positions (differentiation) in an organization at a decreasing rate, and (2) as size increases the administrative component (personnel not directly engaged in production but in coordination) decreases. This specific work, however, had a brief influence as organization sociology moved away from monothetic generalizations about determinants of intra-organizational structure and to