Hawley, Amos

Amos H. Hawley was born in 1910 in St. Louis, Missouri. He acquired the BA degree from the University of Cincinnati (1936) and the MA (1938) and PhD (1941) degrees from the University of Michigan. He stayed on at the University of Michigan as a faculty member until 1961. Professor Hawley joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina in 1966, becoming Kenan Professor of Sociology in 1970. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past president of the Population Association of America (1971) and the American Sociological Association (1978). He is the author of over 150 articles and books.

Hawley was the major theorist in human ecology during the period from 1950, when he published Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure, until the late 1970s, when the population ecology of organizations began to dominate this branch of macrosociology. Human ecology is the study of how populations organize to adapt to their environments. Hawley argued that adaptation to the social and physical environment was always a collective phenomenon for humans, accomplished through social organization. Hawley's perspective is firmly macrosociological in that the relationships among individuals are structures that respond to changes in the social, technical, and physical environment. These structures are independent of the people who inhabit them, have properties that are not reducible to those individuals, and survive generations of successive replacements. Organization can both grow (expanding toward the maximum size that can be supported by the environment at a given technology) and evolve (add information from the environment to create new technology and thus new potential for growth). Hawley was a parsimonious, elegant thinker who believed that a unified theory composed of definitions, assumptions, and hypotheses derived from these elements could apply across systems and time periods. The latest comprehensive statement of his theory was in 1986, in a slim volume entitled Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay.

The human ecology tradition began in the Chicago school, with the work of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess. Hawley studied under R. D. McKenzie, a Chicago graduate, at the University of Michigan. His early work followed the Chicago school in focusing on spatial distributions in urban environments. Soon, however, he decided that the static, spatial emphasis of that work was less interesting than the study of change, structure, and functioning of the social system in an environmental context. He explicitly borrowed from bioecologists the idea that variation, adaptation, and selection were the processes that shaped any population in interacting with its environment.

Hawley's theory can be summarized in three general propositions covering adaptation, growth, and evolution. The first postulate states that adaptation occurs through the formation of interdependencies among the units in a population. Relationships form to increase the viability of a population in an environment. The second proposition is that system development continues until it reaches the upper limit that can be sustained by the environment, given a certain technology for communication and transportation (the cultural tools most relevant to relationship formation). The evolution proposition suggests that when systems acquire [Page 360]new information (technology), the process in the first two propositions is resumed until a new equilibrium is reached.

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