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American sociologist (1910–1989)

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. 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." 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." 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 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. 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." 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."

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. 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. 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, or social status. He believed in the respectful discussion of academic arguments. By virtue of his various writings, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1956, a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1964, the 54th president of the American Sociological Association in 1964, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1972. He retired from teaching in 1980.

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. 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. 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.

"For all actions taken by persons, the more often a particular action of a person is rewarded, the more likely the person is to perform that action" (Homans, 1974:16). To explain this framework, Homans uses his example of the office workplace and the social interaction between "Person" and "Other". In simple terms, Homans claims that the proposition is applicable when a person seeks advice from others. In this sense, a person will go back to the "Other" for advice if they see that their aid was useful and beneficial to them. In reciprocity, this makes them more comfortable to seek out advice or help from others and in return, they feel encouraged to give that same or other advice to those who seek their help as well. Homans explains that there are three stages to this proposition: 1) a person's action, 2) a rewarded result, and 3) a repetition of the original action. Homans also lists three unique points about the success proposition. First, increasingly frequent regards will lead to increasingly frequent actions. The second point Homans made is that the shorter the amount of time between the behavior and reward, the more likely that person will repeat their behavior. Lastly, repeat behavior is more likely elicited when there are intermittent rewards rather than regular rewards.

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).