Homans, George (1910–1989)

George Caspar Homans was a major theoretical sociologist whose lucid writings helped to shape numerous developments in basic sociological research. His ideas about theoretical principles in sociology were much debated and often rejected. His undergraduate years from 1928 to 1932 were at Harvard College, where his area of concentration was English and American literature; he also took a variety of courses in other disciplines, but not sociology. His involvement with sociology began in the 1932/1933 academic year when he attended an informal faculty–student seminar, organized by the biochemist Lawrence Henderson, on the general theoretical sociology of Vilfredo Pareto. This led in 1934 to his first published work in sociology, with Charles Curtis, An Introduction to Pareto: His Sociology . From 1934 to 1939 he was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, newly organized by Henderson and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose recently published Science and the Modern World was widely read at the time. It is likely that Henderson and Whitehead shaped Homans's early views on science. As a fellow, Homans interacted often and informally with these two senior fellows as well as with other junior fellows who were to become influential academics in various fields. During the same period, his status as a fellow permitted him to undertake independent studies in a variety of subjects, including sociology, mathematics, psychology, and anthropology. He also studied historical methods and began doing original historical research, which was published in 1941 as English Villagers in the Thirteenth Century . In 1939 he became a faculty member of the Department of Sociology at Harvard, a lifelong affiliation, where he taught both sociology and medieval history until his retirement in 1976. By virtue of his later theoretical writings, he had become a major theorist by the 1960s, and in 1964 he was elected president of the American Sociological Association.