George C. Homans

George Caspar Homans (August 11, 1910 – May 29, 1989) was an American sociologist, founder of behavioral sociology, the 54th president of the American Sociological Association, and one of the architects of social exchange theory.

Homans is best known in science for his research in social behavior and his works The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, his contributions to exchange theory, and the different propositions he developed to explain social behavior.

He is also the third great grandson of the second President of the United States, John Adams.

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.

He was a direct descendant of American Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, on his mother's side.

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

Homans entered Harvard College in 1928 with a concentration in English and American literature.

Although Homans came from a long line of lawyers and politicians, during his undergraduate years, he pursued poetry and developed a grand ambition to become a writer and poet.

George published his original works in The Harvard Advocate, in which he was elected to the editorial board.

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."

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.

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.

Skinner taught Homans about methods of 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."

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 the works of functional anthropologists.

"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.

He 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.

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.

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.

Additionally, Homans graduated in 1955 with a Masters degree from Cambridge University.

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."

While Homans was at Harvard College, Homans met Bernard "Benny" de Voto, "a crusty man, cantankerous in his literary feuds whose name has been largely forgotten," who was a part-time member of the Harvard faculty and who 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, "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 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 influence on Homans' perspective.

Homans attended Henderson's seminar one day at Harvard and was taken by his lecture.

Homans was also influenced by Professor Elton Mayo, a psychologist studying human factors.

Whom, Homans was assigned readings by prominent social anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Raymond Firth.

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 similar institutions."

Homans argued, contrary to Anthropology that "cultures were not unique and what was more, their similarities could only be explained on the assumption that human nature was the same over the world."

Homans then 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 Pareto in his lectures.

Pareto was a social scientist who was 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.