George Homans Theory of Social Behavior
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George Homans was born in 1910. He was educated at Harvard and received an A.B. in 1932. He received an M.A. at Cambridge in 1955. He was an instructor at Harvard University from 1939 to 1941, an associate professor from 1946 to 1953, and a professor of sociology after 1953. He was a visiting professor at the University of Manchester in 1953, at Cambridge University from 1955-1956, and at the University of Kent in 1967. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Sociological Association, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. He was a junior fellow at Harvard from 1934 to 1939 and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences from 1958 to 1959. He has written numerous books, including The Human Group, The Nature of Social Science, and English Villagers in the Thirteenth Century (Contemporary authors, 1983, 213). He died in 1989, having left his place as professor of sociology at harvard in 1980 and having served thereafter as department chair and dean for undergraduate education (Contemporary Authors, 1994, 189). The work of George Homans is tied to the psychological behaviorism of B.F. Skinner while the work of Peter Blau is more influenced by Simmel, but both Homans and Blau express concerns about the reliance of functionalism on values and norms to explain social behavior. Homans is especially critical of the work of Durkheim and Parso
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cted returns from other--indeed, more than we usually think--not all of it is (Blau, 1968, 453).
Homans published his seminal work in this area in 1958 under the title "Social Behavior as Exchange," and he elaborated on the issues raised more fully in his book Social behavior: Its elementary forms in 1961. One of the distinguishing characteristics of his work is its reliance on the language and propositions of behavioral psychology and specifically operant conditioning:
The use of operant psychology as the behavioral basis of the theory created much of the early controversy surrounding the utility of this perspective for sociologists. In particular, the corresponding claim made by Homans that laws of social behavior could be "reduced to" the basic underlying principles of psychological behaviorism generated much debate ("Exchange Theory" [2], 606-607).
Homans' approach was related to that of B.F. Skinner, though there were also differences. Skinner's behaviorism builds on the behaviorist principles of earlier researchers. The intent is to explain human behavior, and the behaviorist approach seeks a scientific cause-and-effect answer to the question of what causes human behavior. Skinner notes that there is a universe wit
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Approximate Word count = 1506
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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