George C. Homans

George C. Homans (born in Boston, Massachusetts August 11, 1910. Died in Cambridge, Massachusetts May 29, 1989) was the American founder of behavioral sociology and the exchange theory.

Outside the academic discipline of sociology, Homans is perhaps best known for his model of work group behavior where the "emergent behavior" (informal organisations) comes between the requirements and plans of the management, derived from technological, social and economic environment, and work productivity and satisfaction.

Within sociology and social psychology, Homans is regarded as one of the major sociological theorists in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. His ideas about theoretical principles in sociology were much debated and often rejected.

Biography

From his autobiography (Homans 1984), we learn that Homans entered Harvard College in 1928 with an area of concentration in English and American literature. From 1934 to 1939 he was a Junior Fellow of the newly formed Society of Fellows at Harvard, undertaking a variety of studies in various areas, including sociology, psychology and history. He attended a special faculty-student seminar on the general sociology of Vilfredo Pareto. In 1939 he became a Harvard faculty member, a lifelong affiliation in which he taught both sociology and medieval history. By virtue of his later theoretical writings (discussed below), he became a major theorist and in 1964 was elected President of the American Sociological Association.

Works

• English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century , (1941)
• The Human Group (1950)
• Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, (1961, rev. ed. 1974)
• Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist (1984)