Because employment is simultaneously an economic and a social relationship, one cannot prof-itably study it as one or the other in isolation. To understand employment relationships requirestaking into account both economic and social-psychological dimensions of their content andcontext and, especially, how economic and social forces interact. This is true of many economicexchanges, but particularly of employment: Fraught with the complexities of time, uncertainty,and ambiguity, employment contracts are often massively incomplete. “Market discipline” islikely to become less and less acute the longer an employment relationship endures. Althoughsupply-equals-demand may be informative in the aggregate, at the level of the relationships be-tween an organization and its employees—the level of greatest interest to practitioners and ofincreasing interest to scholars—more nuanced and, to some extent, quite different ways of think-ing should be employed. In particular, insights from social psycholog y and sociolog y about whatdrives employee behavior—about what employees value, what they expect, and how they assesstheir situations—are essential to a full and useful understanding of employment relationships.Economics by itself is far from sufficient