Elements and Identity

George Casper Homans must be regarded as a contradiction by contemporary standards. He majored in literature as an undergraduate and had ambitions of being a poet. His first academic publication was a criticism of Herman Melville (Homans 1932), his last publication a collection of poetry (Homans 1988). Yet, he is best known in sociology for his embrace of a seemingly antihumanistic behavioral psychology (Homans 1961) ¹ and a “scientific” approach emphasizing prediction and systematization (Homans 1967). Homans was not trained by sociologists nor did he receive a Ph.D., yet he went on to chair Harvard’s Sociology Department and serve as president of the American Sociological Association. He was introduced to sociology by a chemist, but his first publication in sociology, an exposition of Pareto’s sociological writings, was coauthored with a practicing lawyer (Homans and Curtis 1934). Homans learned calculus as part of his graduate training and advocated that the end goal of sociology should be a system of equations that would define the relationships among variables (Homans 1949a), an aim he acquired from his study of Pareto and repeated several times in print, but aside from three pages in one long book (Homans 1961: 278–81), he neither used mathematical models nor statistical analysis in his research. Nor does Homans appear to have had much involvement with the early attempts to mathematize the field even when his own work was the basis of the attempt (e.g., White 1970). Homans claimed to have loved data but, despite writing a well-cited book of English social history (Homans 1941a) and several related articles (Homans 1937, 1957a), he contributed relatively little to empirical sociology. More immediately for the present chapter, he refused the identity of an industrial sociologist, but is possibly best remembered for his work in industrial sociology, ironically for research he did not perform.