Sentiments and Activities

George Caspar Homans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415175159
• eBook ISBN: 9781135034931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Published in 1998, Sentiments and Activities is a valuable contribution to the field of Sociology and Social Policy.

1

Autobiographical Introduction

IN a volume of collected essays a reader will be looking for some unifying principle other than that they were all written by the same man—as if that were a unifying principle! He may know of volumes whose essays mark stages in a single line of investigation, pursued by the author year after year with cumulative success. At the least, he will expect some unity to be provided by the author’s official discipline. I am a sociologist, but the reader who has sense enough to scan the table of contents of this book and see what he is letting himself in for may well wonder whether even sociology provides the unity here. Should he know the field, he will, to be sure, find some essays that will strike him as legitimately sociological. Industrial sociology is a recognized department of the field, and so is the study of small groups, though it is a department sociology shares with psychology. But when he comes to a long paper on unilateral cross-cousin marriage, the “cross-cousin” will surely tell him that he has crossed the boundary into primitive kinship, which belongs to anthropology. And as for “The Frisians in East Anglia”—what business has a sociologist with English history?

I have indeed scattered my shots, and the best thing I can do by way of introduction to these essays is to take advantage of this very deficiency by explaining it. Few of us social scientists have tried to write our intellectual autobiographies and to tell as best we could why we got interested in the subjects we have worked on and what influences have played upon us as we worked. Without trying to analyze the deeper and less conscious influences, I shall explain the scattering of my subjects by giving, as well as I can at this late date, the more obvious reasons why I took them up and why I pursued them as I did. The reasons were seldom what the picture of an ideal scientist says they should have been. Often they were opportunistic, designed to advance a career rather than a discipline; often intensely personal rather than dictated by a reasoned appraisal of what was best worth doing in the field; and often matters of chance, in the sense that the choice could not easily have been predicted ahead of time. I should be more ashamed of myself if I thought that many others had let themselves be dominated by the mere flux of circumstance less often than I have.

Whatever my nonintellectual reasons for embarking on my various subjects, I found, once fairly embarked, that they were running into intellectual problems of wider scope than the subjects themselves. This collection includes most of the papers, other than reviews, that I have published during my professional life. Some of them are occasional pieces or the by-products of other work, and I shall explain at the beginning of each essay what the occasion for it was. The others are different. Although they certainly deal with their subjects, they should also be looked on as points where a dialogue that has been going on in my mind for a long time thrust itself for a moment above the surface of consciousness, a dialogue between the data of social science and certain kinds of general ideas. These ideas are the final justification of this collection, and the second purpose of this introduction is to explain what they are.

The trouble with sociology is not a dearth of information but a glut: every human being has more than he can handle. The problem is how to get hold of such a vast and slippery body of data. As Robert K. Merton once pointed out, the approaches are many, the arrivals few.¹ What is our subject finally about? Is it about men, or is it about societies? And how shall we go about organizing the subject? No one has any doubt what it ought to look like when organized: it ought to look like a theory. But what is a theory? And the way a theory looks when organized may be very different from the way that organization was brought about. What is the strategy of reaching a theory that will explain the facts? The general ideas that came into my dialogue had to do with these questions.

Becoming a Sociologist

My very entrance into sociology was a matter of chance; or rather, I got into sociology because I had nothing better to do. I graduated from Harvard College in June, 1932, having concentrated academically in English literature and nonacademically in writing verse. In line with my literary interests I had decided to make myself a newspaperman. I was quite wrong; literary ability is the last thing a newspaperman needs to get ahead. But I was saved from the consequences of deliberate decision. Although I had gotten myself a job beginning in the fall with William Allen White of the Emporia, Kansas, Gazette, the Depression was still getting worse, and when the time came for me to go to Emporia, White wired me that the circulation of the Gazette had gone down so much that he would have to withdraw his offer of a job. This made me, like so many others at the time, unemployed.

In that same fall of 1932, Lawrence Joseph Henderson, Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard, was offering a seminar on the Sociologie Générale of the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto;² the first such seminar given, I think, anywhere in the world and certainly the first in the United States. Henderson was by profession a physiologist, whose work on the chemical equilibrium of the blood was the foundation of later work on blood plasma. But Henderson was more than a physiologist. For years he had attended seminars in the Philosophy Department on problems connected especially with the philosophy of science, and he had given for years the first and only course at Harvard on the history of science. William Morton Wheeler, whose work on insect societies had led him to read all the sociology, human or animal, he could put his hands on, had suggested the Sociologie Générale to Henderson, and Henderson was at once taken with it. As a student of engineering, Pareto had written his thesis on the equilibrium of elastic solids, and Henderson thought the views expressed in the Sociologie on the nature of science were among the soundest he had ever encountered. There was an even better reason for his enthusiasm: with all its limitations the Sociologie is a great book.

Henderson used to say that some of the men he most disapproved of were among the most enthusiastic about his course on the history of science. Among those of whom he did not disapprove was the historian and essayist Bernard DeVoto, who had come back to Harvard as an instructor in English and who had renewed his friendship with Henderson. In my last three undergraduate years DeVoto was my tutor in my field of English literature, with whom I met once a week to discuss my reading. Henderson had urged the Sociologie on DeVoto, as he urged it on everyone; DeVoto in turn urged it on me, not because it was sociology but because it might clear a lot of nonsense from my mind. In my senior year I bought the book and read at least the first of the two big volumes in French.

I took to Pareto because he made clear to me what I was already prepared to believe. I do not know all the reasons why I was ready for him, but I can give one. Someone has said that much modern sociology is an effort to answer the arguments of the revolutionaries. As a Republican Bostonian who had not rejected his comparatively wealthy family, I felt during the thirties that I was under personal attack, above all from the Marxists. I was ready to believe Pareto because he provided me with a defense. His was an answer to Marx because an amplification of him. Marx had taught that the economic and political theories of the bourgeoisie—and I was clearly a bourgeois—were rationalizations of their interests. Pareto amplified Marx by showing that this was true of most theories of human behavior, Marx’ included. In the Sociologie and Les systèmes socialistes,³ Pareto was careful to point out that Marx was not mere rationalization, and that when he talked about class warfare he was talking about something real. But in showing that some of Marx, like the famous theory of surplus value, was certainly rationalization Pareto provided a kind of answer to him. At least the proletariat had no more intellectual justification in demanding my money or my life—and it looked as if they were demanding both, and my liberties to boot—than I had for defending myself. Emotional justification was something else again. As a beneficiary of inherited capital I was a good emotional target, and I was fond of quoting the lisping Bostonian who said: “Someday the pwoletariat is going to wise up and take away my pwopetty.” But it was some comfort to realize that the proletariat did not have reason as well as emotion on its side. If we could only meet as honest men—or honest rationalizers—we might divide up the take without fighting. It was the intellectual guff talked by the alleged leaders of the proletariat that put one’s back up and got in the way of a settlement. Whatever one did, one was not going to yield to men like that.

DeVoto did more than introduce me to Pareto: he introduced me to Henderson himself. And when, in the fall of 1932, Henderson was collecting recruits for his seminar on Pareto (he could not rely on volunteers, since he had a reputation for landing hard on men who disagreed with him) Henderson asked me to join. I knew something about Pareto, and I was known to be on the town. I had nothing better to do and accepted.

Henderson had recruited well. Besides DeVoto himself, Crane Brinton, and Joseph Schumpeter, among those who attended regularly was Charles P. Curtis, Jr., a lawyer and a Fellow of the Harvard corporation but also, which was unusual in either lawyers or Fellows, a man interested in any ideas that were going around the university. Curtis was a lifelong friend of my family’s, and whether for that reason or, what is more likely, because he knew I was employable, he suggested in the course of the seminar that he and I should write a book introducing Pareto’s sociology to the English-speaking public—it had then been translated only into French. I still had nothing better to do, and again I agreed. We wrote the book: An Introduction to Pareto.⁴ It came out the next year, and it is the best brief introduction to what Pareto actually said. Since Pareto’s book was about sociology, writing the Introduction made me a sociologist too, though his was the only sociology I had then read.

Circumstances then went to work to keep me a sociologist. Pareto was not the only enterprise Henderson had in hand. For several years he and Curtis, together with President Lowell of Harvard, Alfred North Whitehead, Professor of Philosophy, and John Livingston Lowes, Professor of English, had been holding informal discussions on graduate instruction in the arts and sciences. They were dissatisfied with the type of training that ended in the Ph.D. degree, believing that it gave the abler men too little freedom to pursue their own ideas wherever they might lead. The discussions finally resulted in a plan for a Society of Fellows.⁵ A number of graduate students were to be chosen every year as Junior Fellows, paid a small scholarship, and allowed to work on anything they were interested in. They were to be subject to no restrictions except that they might not be candidates for the Ph.D. and that they were to dine once a week with their elders, the Senior Fellows, who were to choose the candidates and administer the funds of the Society. Unable to get foundation support, President Lowell finally founded the Society with his own money—the last thing he did before retiring as President—and its first academic year of operation was 1933–34, that is, the year after Henderson had given his first seminar on Pareto. The original Senior Fellows were Henderson, chairman, Lowell, Curtis, Whitehead, and Lowes.

Someone—perhaps Curtis—had put me forward as a candidate for Junior Fellow in the first year of the Society. I had run as a poet and had rightly been rejected. But the second year, 1934–35, was another matter. By that time I had demonstrated my Paretan faith; I was Henderson’s man, and Henderson was chairman of the Society of Fellows. I had worked with, and become a great friend of, Curtis. As an undergraduate I had studied under both Whitehead and Lowes. If the Society was what I wanted, I was in with the right crowd. Moreover I was still unemployed, or at least unpaid, though I had not tried very hard to get employment. Accordingly, when Henderson suggested that I should run for the Society a second time, and this time as a sociologist, I again agreed at once. I had not been able to make anything of myself, but I had learned that, if I would only relax and say “Yes,” other people would make something of me. What they made me was a sociologist, and I am grateful. I was a Junior Fellow from 1934 to 1939, and, as I shall try to show, most of my ideas come, even if only by way of reaction, from men the Society put me in touch with.

Although in 1933–34 Pareto’s was the only sociology I knew, I was at least aware in a general way that the subject did not end with him; and so, to prepare for entering the Society, I asked Henderson, in effect: “Master, what shall I do to become a sociologist?” He knew no more about the matter than I did, and he certainly did not propose to ask any of the sociologists who were then at Harvard; but his answer was, as always, decided. Sociology must be a science. In the end, mathematics was the language of science. As a man who had done his undergraduate work in English literature, I was mathematically illiterate; I must learn the differential and integral calculus forthwith. German was still, for a scientist, the most important foreign language; I must also refurbish my German. Finally, I must learn historical method, for according to Henderson history was the only social science that had worked out a good method. Faithfully I did everything Henderson told me to do, with ambiguous results. The German at least allowed me to read Max Weber before he was translated. The calculus has enabled me to understand a great deal of classical physics and economics, though statistics, which Henderson did not suggest, would have served me better as a sociologist. As for historical method, I learned that there is no historical method other than the commonest of common sense, but in the course of learning that I got interested in history itself.

But Henderson was to do me a much more useful turn: he arranged for me to take a course of reading with Elton Mayo. Wallace Donham, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, had gotten Henderson and Mayo to the school to study the behavior of industrial workers. Henderson, who had finished his work on the blood, was to head the Fatigue Laboratory and study the physiology of work. Mayo was to study its psychology, and at the time when I first knew him, he had already been engaged for some years, with T. North Whitehead, son of the philosopher, and Fritz Roethlisberger, on the famous researches at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company.⁶ Henderson and Mayo occupied adjoining offices in Morgan Hall and, though very different in character, had come to like and admire one another. Above all it was the superb clinician that Henderson, a laboratory scientist but an M.D. by training, admired in Mayo.

Mayo undertook to put a few of us through a course of reading in the authors he thought it most important for young social scientists to be familiar with. Although he was himself a psychologist and psychiatrist by training and practice, he started us off with social anthropology, specifically the new “functional” anthropologists, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Both of these men Mayo had met, either in London or in his native Australia. Radcliffe-Brown’s disciple, W. Lloyd Warner had come to Harvard, fresh from studying a tribe of Australian blackfellows; he had given Mayo some good advice on the later stages of the Western Electric research, and with Mayo’s encouragement he was trying to apply the ideas of functional anthropology to the study of a modern community, Newburyport, Massachusetts.⁷ One of his assistants in this work was Conrad Arensberg, who had become a Junior Fellow in the same year I did.

Mayo was never much interested in the details of behavior in the Andaman or Trobriand Islands for their own sake. What he wanted us to get from our reading in social anthropology was a picture of societies in which human collaboration was supported by established ritual. This ritual, Mayo felt, modern society had lost, to the impairment of the human capacity for collaboration, and with the consequences in individual neurosis and collective conflict that in the 1930’s he could see all around us. Some of his critics to the contrary, Mayo never argued that the modern world should try to return to the primitive type of society—what he called the established, society. His question was rather: How can the human capacity for collaboration be maintained in a society of a very different kind, one in process of continuous change? What are the conditions for an adaptive society?⁸ It was only as background for attempts to answer that question that Mayo felt his students should be familiar with traditional forms of human collaboration. His eyes were always on the modern world. But if the master proposes, the pupil disposes. You can start a student reading, but you cannot be sure he will get out of it what you want him to. For reasons I shall try to give later, I forgot about the modern world and got interested in the details of primitive behavior.

The second group of books we read with Mayo followed naturally from the first. They centered in Durkheim’s Suicide and lay in the field now called social pathology. Mayo was concerned to show how the breakdown of an established society—the condition Durkheim called anomie—led to disorders of individual behavior. But again, I did not get from Durkheim quite what, I think, Mayo wanted me to. It was not that I could not get interested in social pathology, but that I could get more interested in something else. In the course of an essentially literary education, I had absorbed one of the unstated assumptions of the Western intellectual tradition, the notion that the nature of individuals determined finally the nature of society. Reading Suicide led us to Durkheim’s other books, especially The Rules of Sociological Method and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Both the Suicide and the Rules implied that the unstated assumption should be turned around and—to put the matter as naively as I then saw it—that the nature of society might determine the nature of individuals. As for the Elementary Forms, which had been the inspiration of Radcliffe-Brown’s Andaman Islanders, it suggested, as the latter did, that the purpose or function of human institutions was not—to put the matter naively again—the satisfaction of human needs but the maintenance of society. Unlike Pareto, who made clear, however admirably, only what I was already prepared to believe, Durkheim upset me. His was a revelation, but a revelation I never was quite comfortable with. Though at the time I did not see what was wrong, he started an itch that took me further and further away from Mayo’s concern with social pathology.

Mayo finally turned to the disorders of individual behavior them selves, and led us through the main works of the psychiatrists he most admired: Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud; accompanying his discussion of the text with cases, light-heartedly described, from his own wide clinical experience. Later, he arranged that we should get clinical experience of our own. At the Boston Dispensary and the Boston City Hospital we interviewed patients who complained of physical ills certified by the physicians to have no p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Autobiographical Introduction
• 2 The Small Warship
• 3 Status among Clerical Workers
• 4 The Cash Posters
• 5 Status Congruence
• 6 The Sociologist’s Contribution to Management in the Future
• 7 Giving a Dog a Bad Name
• 8 Bureaucracy as Big Brother
• 9 Men and the Land in the Middle Ages
• 10 The Rural Sociology of Medieval England
• 11 The Frisians in East Anglia
• 12 The Puritans and the Clothing Industry in England
• 13 Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown
• 14 Marriage, Authority, and Final Causes: A Study of Unilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage
• 15 The Strategy of Industrial Sociology
• 16 The Strategy of Small-Group Research
• 17 Social Behavior as Exchange
• 18 Small Groups
• Notes
• Index