Homans, George

American social theorist of the twentieth century, George Homans (1910–1989) was the founder of behavioral sociology, the first and arguably the most prominent sociological exchange theorist, and the architect of a highly controversial approach to theory construction in sociology. Homans was the first sociologist to outline the sociological implications of psychologists’work on learning or behavioral theory, particularly the operant conditioning paradigm of B. F. Skinner. These psychological principles of behavior formed the foundation of his theory of social exchange, which was most fully explicated in Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms ([1961] 1974). A strong methodological individualist who believed that explanations of all social phenomena could be derived from axioms about the behavior of individuals, Homans promoted his conception of theory in a large number of works, including “Contemporary Theory in Sociology” (1964b), “Bringing Men Back In” (1964a), and The Nature of Social Science (1967).

In addition to his theoretical contributions, Homans is known for his insightful descriptions of the structure and processes of human groups, particularly his book of the same name, The Human Group (1950).

Homans was educated at Harvard, where he became a junior member of the Society of Fellows. The society eschewed traditional graduate training and the PhD, which Homans never received. Originally a student of literature, Homans's first introduction to the discipline of sociology was through the writings of Vilfredo Pareto. After Homans coauthored a book on Pareto, Pitiriim Sorokin invited Homans to become an instructor at Harvard, where he served [Page 382]on the faculty from 1939 to 1980 (with an interruption for service as a lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II). Along with Talcott Parsons, Homans was a founding member of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. After that department's demise, he became the first chair of the newly formed Department of Sociology at Harvard.

During these years, Homans made significant contributions to three major areas of sociological inquiry: the description and analysis of social structures and social processes in small human groups, problems of theory and methods of theory construction, and the development of an exchange theoretic approach based on the principles of behavioral psychology. The first of these contributions took place during his early years of work and was the product of an inductive strategy in which Homans abstracted theoretical generalizations from descriptive studies of actual behaviors of groups in various settings. The Human Group, published in 1950, is the exemplar of this period. The second and third contributions took place more or less coterminously, as Homans shifted to a more deductive theoretical strategy and, at the same time, applied this strategy in developing a new theory of social exchange. This theory was first outlined in his 1958 article, “Social Behavior as Exchange,” and later elaborated in Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961), which he revised in 1974. Homans's new theoretical strategy emerged from his long-standing criticism of most sociological theory, especially the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons, Émile Durkheim, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Homans's own theorizing was marked by several distinct characteristics: an emphasis on the explanation of relationships rather than mere categorization, the derivation of lower-order propositions from general axioms, and—most controversial of all—the use of principles from behavioral psychology as the general axioms.

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