George Casper Homans
August 11, 1910 – May 29, 1989
George C. Homans served as the 54th of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential address, entitled “Bringing Men Back In”, was delivered at the ASA Annual Meeting in Montreal, September 2, 1964, and was later published in the December 1964 issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR Vol. 29 No. 5, pp 809-818).
Obituary
Written by Ezra F. Vogel, published in Footnotes, December 1990
George Homans, author of The Human Group (1950), president of the American Sociological Association (1963- 1964), original member of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations (1946), and first Chairman of Harvard’s revived Department of Sociology (1970- 1975) died on May 29, 1989.
Homans was born on August 11, 1910, the eldest child of Robert and Abigail Adams Homans. Like other upper class Bostonian families, the father’s side of the family included ship-owning merchants involved in the 18th century Asian trade and soldiers who served in the Revolutionary War. All Homans’ male ancestors had studied at Harvard since 1768 and the Adams ancestors had been studying at Harvard from even as earlier time. Although the Homans family was known for a number of prominent doctors, including some who were professors at Harvard Medical School, George Homans’ father was an attorney. On George’s mother’s side, he was a direct descendent of President John Adams George’s grandfather, John Quincy Adams II, the eldest son of Charles Francis Adams, minister to England during the Civil War, was less known than his brothers Henry and Brooks. Homans never went out of his way to call attention to his ancestors nor did he shy away from discoursing about them if asked.
George acquired from his family a special interest in the sea, and perhaps one of his most revealing articles was “Sailing with Uncle Charlie;” Charles Adams had served as Secretary of the Navy under President Hoover. Homans describes the sail boat races in which he served under his uncle’s direction. ‘We did not sail to have a good time” Homans explained, “We sailed to win.” During World War II, Homans entered the U.S. Navy where he spent several formative years. He must have spent some of his lonely moments as a skipper thinking of the sociological analysis he wrote up in ‘The Small Warship” in the 1946 American Sociological Review. Those who knew him found it easy to imagine George roaring to his crew from the deck of the ship.
Homans never received a PhD. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he majored in English, but took courses from Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. Alfred North Whitehead, and L.J. Henderson, as well as from people in his own department like I. A. Richards and Lyman Kittridge, and worked closely with his tutor, Bernard De Voto. While still an undergraduate Homans assisted Samuel Eliot Morison in writing Massachusetts on the Sea and was made co-author. After college George was invited to be a junior fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. Established in 1932 by President Lowell, The Society was designed to provide talented youth the opportunity to study unencumbered by requirements. Although the Society later adapted to the academic market by taking fellows working for the PhD program, Homans, like his friends in the society, William F. Whyte, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and B.F. Skinner, was not enrolled in a PhD program.
Homans’ interest in sociology began as a college senior when L.J. Henderson began introducing in a small seminar the work of Pareto. Homans was immediately attracted to the ideas of a social system and to the idea of a scientific statement of variables, an approach that was to remain an intellectual hallmark throughout his career. In 1934, two years after his graduation from Harvard, Homans published with C.P. Curtis, An Introduction to Pareto. He combined a love of this type of theory with a respect for field work that stemmed from his experience in working for Elton Mayo along with a talented team that included Fritz Roethlisberger, whose field research skills he particularly admired, in a pioneering industrial sociology study, the Western Electric study.
While a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows, Homans chose to attempt an anthropological description of the English village community in as early a period as records permitted. His study, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, was published in 1941 after Homans was already off to the Navy.
Homans best known work was The Human Group (1950), an effort to apply a theoretical scheme to five anthropological studies of small groups: the bank wiring room of the Western Electric Company, William Foote Whyte’s corner gang, Firth’s Tikopia; Hatch’s New England town, and Arensberg’s and Macgregor’s electrical equipment company. It combined his efforts to understand the rich context with his effort to establish scientific propositions. Unlike Talcott Parsons who dominated the early years of the Social Relations Department, Homans sought to state his propositions with sufficient clarity that they could be proved or disproved. In this book he built his analysis on the distinction between external and internal systems and between sentiment, activity, an interaction.
Homans then turned to a more psychological approach for which some criticized him for being a psychological reductionist. Following B.F. Skinner an others, Homans spelled out his analysis in Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961), a work he considered superior to The Human Group even though it never received such attention. He continued to write academic studies, but he also wrote a frank autobiography, Coming to my Senses (1984), filled with sociological perspective.
Homans was a dedicated teacher who generously gave time to his students. In the way he related to students and colleagues, it was difficult to detect any difference based on their age, sex, rank, or social status. He had little patience in the late 1960s with the “wafflings of the foolish, hypocritical, and self-righteous liberals,” but he believed in civility without regard to status and numbered among his friends students and colleagues of all political persuasions.
Outside his family, Homans was not an intimate person. In 1941 he married Nancy Cooper who continued to look after him until his death. For twelve years, including the years he served as department chairman, Homan’s administrative assistant was Mrs. Nellie Miller. Mrs. Miller invariably referred to him and called him “Professor Homans,” and he invariably referred to her and called her “Mrs. Miller.” He never asked her to help with errands, even getting livrary books which he invariably went to get himself. He answered the phone himself; never used a dictating machine, and to the end wrote on a manual typewriter.
While not intimate, Homans had a good-humored puckish frankness and was invariably ready to say exactly what he thought. He was not malicious, but if anyone asked, he would without hesitation in a matter of fact manner respond, “Most sociological theorists are idiots”. His frankness did not endear him to everyone. He was not voted in to the Porcellians, the Harvard final club to which his forebearers belonged. Gordan Allport, a dedicated head of graduate studies in Social Relations, was not always amused when Homans reminded students that Allport was not their mother. In a celebration of the founding of the Department of Social Relations, after Parsons gave a breathtaking tour of the horizon, extolling theoretical convergences, Homans said, “Now, Talcott, that’s not the way I remember it at all. The department was founded because of hate, and I mean personal hate.” He went on to mention Parson’s relations with Sorokin, Clyde Kluckhohn’s relations with Ernest A. Hooten, Allport’s with Edwin G. Boring. Even before it was published, Homans made it clear that he did not feel that all department members had to subscribe to Parson’s effort to erect a common behavioral science, embodied in Toward a General Theory of Action. While Parsons and Homans were invariably courteous in referring to each other, students sensed a bite to their intellectual differences.
Like his ancestors who walked to work from Beacon Hill, Homans walked to work from his Francis Avenue residence and spent a full day at the office every day, before and after his retirement. Many colleagues and students, including those more cautious than George in their public pronouncements, took great delight in Homans’ good-humored, readiness to bellow out his views and admired his never ending search not for policy guidelines but for scientific explanations.
