George C. Homans

George Caspar Homans
Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard in 1946
Born	(1910-08-11)August 11, 1910 Boston, Massachusetts
Died	May 29, 1989(1989-05-29) (aged 78) Cambridge, Massachusetts
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Harvard University, Cambridge University (Masters)
Known for	The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, Exchange Theory
Scientific career
Fields	Sociology

George Caspar Homans (August 11, 1910 – May 29, 1989) was an American sociologist, founder of behavioral sociology, and a major contributor to the social exchange theory. Homans is best known for his research in social behavior and his works The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, his Exchange Theory and the many different propositions he made to explain social behavior.

Biography

George C. Homans was born in Boston on August 11, 1910, and grew up in a little house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Robert Homans and Abigail Adams-Homans. George did not talk about the Adamses, yet had distinctively visible features in his skull that came from the Adamses.

Personal life

Homans attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, from 1923 to 1928.

From his autobiography (Homans 1984), Homans entered Harvard College in 1928 with a concentration in English and American literature. During his undergraduate years, he pursued poetry and had developed a grand ambition to become a writer and poet. George published his original works in The Harvard Advocate, in which he was elected into the editorial board.After graduating in 1932, Homans wanted to pursue a career as a newspaperman with a "job beginning in the fall with William Allen White of the Emporia, Kansas,Gazette," but because of the Depression, the newspaper could no longer offer him the job, leaving Homans unemployed. "In 1941, he married Nancy Parshall Cooper who remained his lifelong compatible partner".

Homans served in the Naval Reserve (1941); he always had a love for the sea, as an undergraduate he assisted Samuel Eliot Morison in writing Massachusetts on the Sea, so much so that Morrison named Homans co-author. George served four and a half years on active duty, serving five years in the navy in total, more than two were spent in command of several small ships engaged in antisubmarine warfare and the escort of convoy operations. Although he served for the duration of the war, in his autobiography Coming to my Senses: The Education of Sociologist (1984), he later expressed his "impatience with the constraints of the naval hierarchy and his disdain for staff desk officers, especially those in bureaucratic branches such as the Supply Corps".

Education

While Homans was at Harvard College, where he spent most of his time along the banks of Charles, George met the person who directly influenced his life. Bernard "Benny" de Voto, "a crusty man, cantankerous in his literary feuds whose name has been largely forgotten" was a part-time member of the Harvard faculty and tutored Homans in English. "George ... was attracted to de Voto's stories about the plains and the prairies, but more, to the actuality of the lives of people and the American character as expressed in midwestern writing. In many ways, too, "George adopted the mannerisms of de Voto, the outwardly boisterous tones (but not for either the boosterist mentality) and the scorn of intellectualist rhetoric". Outwardly jaunty and self-assured, yet discreetly he was battling his own demons within his closed heart. He reserved all his pain and suffering for his poetry, which is seen in his book of poetry.

Homans became interested in sociology by living in an environment where people are highly conscious of social relations. Homans describes his entrance to sociology as "a matter of chance; or rather, I got into sociology because I had nothing better to do". Lawrence Joseph Henderson, a biochemist and sociologist who believed that all sciences should be based on a unified set of theoretical and methodological principles, was an important influencer on Homans' perspective. Homans, with no job and nothing to do, attended Henderson's seminar at Harvard one day and was immediately taken by his lecture. Homans was also influenced by Professor Elton Mayo, by whom he was assigned to readings by prominent social anthropologists. From these readings, Homans developed his belief that instead of similarities in cultures, "members of the human species working in similar circumstances had independently created the similar institutions."

As a result, Homans joined a discussion group at Harvard called the Pareto Circle, which was led by Henderson and inspired by the work of Vilfredo Pareto. Henderson often discussed Vilfredo Pareto in his lectures. Pareto was a sociologist concerned with economic distribution. Pareto's theories and Henderson's lectures influenced Homans' first book, An Introduction to Pareto, co-authored with fellow Circle member Charles P. Curtis. From 1934 to 1939 Homans was selected to become a part of the Society of Fellows a newly formed institution founded by A. Lawrence Lowell at Harvard, undertaking a variety of studies in various areas, including sociology, psychology, and history. His comrades in the institution included, Van Quine, Andrew Gleason and B.F. Skinner most of whom went on to become Harvard professors. In the institution the companions educated each other, George learned the most from his companion B.F. Skinner. Skinner taught Homans about the method of meticulous observation and the idea of reinforcement. "One can say that, in nunc, George Homans's sociology was a blend of Skinnerian reinforcement with utility theory." For his junior fellowship project, Homans undertook an anthropological study of rural England, later published as English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (1941), which he wrote instead of a Ph.D. that he never received. Homans was taken into the graduate program at Harvard; Pitirim Sorokin, founder of Harvard's sociology department in 1930, was credited with bringing Homans and Robert Merton into the program. From this knowledge gained, "the key idea that Homans took away from these studies was the centrality of interaction and the way sentiments developed between individuals as a consequence on interaction."

Teaching

In 1939, Homans became a Harvard faculty member, a lifelong affiliation in which he taught both sociology and medieval history, "as well as studied poetry and small groups." This teaching brought him in contact with new works in industrial sociology and exposed him to works of functional anthropologists. He was an instructor of sociology until 1941 when he left to serve in the U.S. Navy to support the war effort. After four years away, he came back to Boston and continued his teaching as an associate professor from 1946 to 1953, and a full professor of sociology after 1953. He was a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Manchester in 1953, at Cambridge University from 1955 to 1956, and at the University of Kent in 1967. Homans was very dedicated to his students, and did not give any different treatment to neither his pupils nor those he worked with, he did not turn anyone away due to their age, sex, rank, nor social status. He, however, did not tolerate the hypocritical speech of close-minded liberals during the late 1960s. Nonetheless, he believed in the respectful discussion of academic arguments. By virtue of of his theoretical writings (discussed below), he was elected 54th president of the American Sociological Association in 1964. He retired from teaching in 1980.

The Human Group

Homans was impressed by Henderson's notion of a conceptual scheme, which consists of a classification of variables (or concepts) that need to be taken into account when studying a set of phenomena. It also consists of a sketch of the given conditions within which the phenomena are to be analyzed. It also must contain a statement that the variables are related to one another—and following Pareto, that relationship is usually seen as one of mutual dependence.

Homans was very interested in Henderson's conceptual scheme as a way of classifying phenomena and applied it to his own study of small groups. Henderson's teachings were included in Homans' work The Human Group (1950). This book's ultimate goal was to move from a study of the social system as it is exemplified in single groups toward a study of the system as it is exemplified in many groups, including groups changing in time. The work has a theme of, "the way group norms develop and the ways a group, consciously or unconsciously, seeks to maintain the cohesion of the group when members depart from group norms." Homans establishes that, "the general propositions would have to meet only one condition: in accordance with my original insight, they should apply to individual human beings as members of a species." According to Homans the sociologists goal was to “move from a study of the social system as it is exemplified in single groups toward a study of the system as it is exemplified in many groups, including groups changing in time” (Homans 1949). By the late 1950s Homans came slowly to the conclusion that human social systems were much less organic than what he had previously believed.

Homans said, "If we wanted to establish the reality of a social system as a complex of mutually dependent elements, why not begin by studying a system small enough so that we could, so to speak, see all the way around it, small enough so that all the relevant observations could be made in detail and at first hand?" He fulfilled this study throughout The Human Group. This book allowed him to make certain generalizations, including the idea that the more frequently people interact with one another, when no one individually initiates interactions more than others, the greater is their liking for one another and their feeling of ease in one another's presence. Although this wasn't Homans' greatest piece of work, it allowed him to become more familiar with this type of methodology and led him to explain elementary social behavior.

In this work, Homans also proposes that social reality should be described at three levels: social events, customs, and analytical hypotheses that describe the processes by which customs arise and are maintained or changed. Hypotheses are formulated in terms of relationships among variables such as frequency of interaction, similarity of activities, intensity of sentiment, and conformity to norms. Using notable sociological and anthropological field studies as the grounding for such general ideas, the book makes a persuasive case for treating groups as social systems that can be analyzed in terms of a verbal analogue of the mathematical method of studying equilibrium and stability of systems. In his theoretical analyses of these groups, he begins to use ideas that later loomed large in his work, e.g., reinforcement and exchange. Along the way, he treats important general phenomena such as social control, authority, reciprocity, and ritual.

The Exchange Theory

The Exchange Theory is the "perspective that individuals seek to maximize their own private gratifications. It assumes that these rewards can only be found in social interactions and thus people seek rewards in their interactions with each other". Homans' Exchange Theory propositions are partially based on B.F. Skinner's behaviorism. Homans took B.F. Skinner's propositions about pigeon behavior and applied it to human interactions.

The heart of Homans' Exchange Theory lies in propositions based on economic and psychological principles. According to Homans, they are psychological for two reasons: first, because they are usually tested on people who call themselves psychologists and second, because of the level at which they deal with the individual in society. He believed that a sociology built on his principles would be able to explain all social behavior. Homans said, "An incidental advantage of an exchange theory is that it might bring sociology closer to economics" (Homans 1958:598). Overall, Homans' exchange theory, "can be condensed to a view of the actor as a rational profit seeker."

He regretted that his theory was labeled "Exchange Theory" because he saw this theory of social behavior as a behavioral psychology applied to specific situations. Homans looked to Émile Durkheim's work for guidance as well, but often disagreed in the end with particular components of Durkheim's theories. For example, Durkheim believed that although individuals are the parts of society, society is more than the individuals who constitute it. He believed that society could be studied without reducing it to individuals and their motivations. Homans, through his Exchange Theory, believed that individual beings and behavior are relevant to understanding society.

Albert Chavannes and the Exchange Theory

Although George Homans contributed greatly to the Exchange Theory and his work on it is greatly admired, he was not the first person to study this theory. "From 1883 to 1885 Albert Chavannes published in The Sociologist a series of papers titled 'Studies in Sociology' which treated 'The Law of Exchange' and three other social laws." Chavannes' work on the theory was similar to what Homans did. However, he focused more on empirical sociology, and he did not contribute to it in the same way as Homans (Knox 1963: 341). Although Homans may have not have been the first to work on this theory, his contributions make the Exchange Theory what it is today.

Social Behavior

Homans's next major work was Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. He wrote this book in 1961 and revised it in 1974. This was based on the principles of behavioral psychology, and helped explain the "sub-institutional," or elementary, forms of social behavior in small groups. This explanation of social behavior first appeared in an article Homans published titled "Social Behavior as Exchange" in 1958. He believed his Exchange Theory was derived from both behavioral psychology and elementary economics.

Homans had come to the view that theory should be expressed as a deductive system (deductive reasoning, a researcher tests a theory by collecting and examining empirical evidence to see if the theory is true.), in this respect falling under the influence of the logical empiricist philosophers of that period. Substantively, he argued that a satisfactory explanation in the social sciences is based upon "propositions"—principles—about individual behavior that are drawn from the behavioral psychology of the time. Homans didn't believe that new propositions are needed to explain social behavior. The laws of individual behavior developed by Skinner in his study of pigeons explain social behavior as long as we take into account the complications of mutual reinforcement.

Legacy

He died of a heart ailment on May 29, 1989, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. George C. Homans left to the sociological world many works on social theory, and is best known for his Exchange Theory and his works on social behavior. The impact he had on his students and colleagues and people he came in contact with is described by Charles Tilly in "George Caspar Homans and the Rest of Us": "His students inherited distrust of theory for its own sake and theories about theories. Even when they disagreed, his students and readers came away stimulated and refreshed. George was a vivifier, a life-giver" (Tilly, 1990:264).

Selected works

• English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (1941)
• The Human Group (1950)
• Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961) [rev. ed. 1974]
• The Nature of Social Science (1967; gathers the Walker-Ames Lectures at the University of Washington in the summer of 1965)
• Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist (1984)
• Certainties and Doubts (1987)
• Sentiments & Activities: Essays in Social Science (1962)

External links

• "Two Boston Brahmins" (Summer 1985). The extended recording of Homans with Tom Adams in discussion for the sociological documentary American Tongues.
• George C. Homans at Find a Grave