Blackwell Reference Online

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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. Homans entered Harvard College in 1928 with an area of concentration in English and American literature. Among his electives was a course with the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Thereafter, in the period from 1934 to 1939, as a Junior Fellow of the newly formed Society of Fellows at Harvard, he interacted with Whitehead and other Harvard luminaries while undertaking independent studies in a variety of subjects, including sociology, mathematics, psychology, and anthropology. He attended a special faculty-student seminar on the newly translated general theoretical sociology of Vilfredo Pareto, which led in 1934 to his first published work in sociology, with Charles Curtis, An Introduction to Pareto: His Sociology. He also studied historical methods, and began doing original historical research that was published in 1941 as English Villagers in the Thirteenth Century . In 1939 he became a Harvard faculty member, a lifelong affiliation in which he taught both sociology and medieval history. By virtue of his later theoretical writings, by the 1960s he had become a major theorist and in 1964 was elected president of the American Sociological Association. ... log in or subscribe to read full text