Behavioral Theory in Sociology

Essays in Honour of George C.Homans

Robert L. Hamblin, Robert L. Hamblin, John H. Kunkel, Robert L. Hamblin, John H. Kunkel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138507555
• eBook ISBN: 9781351319188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is designed to honor George Caspar Homans for his many and varied contributions to the development of modern sociology. The chapters have been written by sociologists and psychologists who value his work sufficiently to have made his basic approach their own. These original essays are intended to elucidate, assess, and give a progress report on the theoretical tradition Homans founded and to which he has given such significant impetus.

I

Metatheory

1

Homans and the Methodology of Theory Construction

Jack P. Gibbs

This token of respect is unusual in the history of scholarly testimonials. I have never worked in the Homans tradition and cannot claim to be one of his students, but the disassociation only reflects my substantive sociological interests, which have been largely macroscopic. Despite those interests, I argue that Homans has created the most distinctive theoretical perspective in contemporary sociology.

A Brand of Sociology

Homans does not reinforce fence-straddling in the social sciences. His brand of sociology is abrasively distinctive, and that is one reason why its impact could alter the field. The impact will transcend Homans’s unrivaled ability to convince colleagues that reductionism is not a four-letter word. To convert a putative vice into a virtue, he offers a theory about elementary social behavior (1961, 1974) rather than a philosophical justification of reductionism. The theory stems from a unique synthesis of various key notions in experimental psychology, economics, and sociology; and hence Homans’s most conspicuous contribution is the enrichment of substantive theory. However, this assessment focuses on one of his less recognized contributions, to the methodology of theory construction. Homans does not bill himself as a methodologist (a testimonial to his good sense), and sociologists are not likely to so identify him. Yet, contemplate Homan’s emphasis on explicit propositions as components of a theory and his preoccupation with the logical form explanation. Those interests are not among the stigma of renowned sociological theorists; compared to Talcott Parsons, Homans’s concern with explicit propositions and the logic of explanation amounts to an obsession.

The claim is not that Homans employs a truly systematic mode of theory construction. The discursive mode is nothing more than the conventions of some natural language (for example, English), and advocates of the alternative—formal theory construction—argue that those conventions are inadequate for stating a scientific theory. The contrast between the two modes is a matter of degree, meaning that a mode of theory construction is formal to the extent it transcends the conventions of a natural language; but that recognition does not contradict previous characterizations of Homans’s work. His concern with explicit propositions alone stamps him as far more predisposed to formal theory construction than any other renowned theorist in sociology.

Particular Substantive Issue

Sociologists who see a special wisdom in classical sociology may question Homans’s style of theory construction, arguing that it is indicative of theoretical interests that are narrow and lacking “significance” (the touchstone word in certain circles). The question of the scope and significance of Homans’s theory is not directly relevant for present purposes, but a few observations are justified if only to reject the argument that Homans’s style of theory construction merely reflects his focus on elementary forms of social behavior.

The focus of Homans’s theory indicates that he has avoided the curse of sociological theorists—the urge to theorize not only about human nature and human society but also to throw light on major historical events. Sociologists who venerate Marx or Freud will be unimpressed by Homans’s propositions about dyadic interaction, and they will be promptly joined by those who see the French Revolution or Plato as a turning point in human history. Such disdain reflects a studied indifference to four considerations. First, until sociologists commence theorizing about limited ranges of phenomena, the field will remain a warehouse of untestable, hoary theories. Second, even grand theories exclude a vast range of social phenomena, especially what is identified loosely as the sociology of “everyday life.” Third, when it comes to the sociology of everyday life, Homans’s perspective is a distinct alternative to symbolic interactionism and ethnometh-odology. And fourth, Homans’s theory of elementary social behavior should not be confused with his much more inclusive theoretical perspective.

The last consideration calls for elaboration. Compared to grand theories in sociology, Homans’s theory of elementary social behavior is narrow, but it would be a distortion to characterize his theoretical perspective as limited. Contemplate just a few of the central notions in that perspective: activities, cost, interaction, norm, profit, punishment, reward, and sentiment. What other theoretical perspective, including those of the masters, comprises a more impressive array of notions? Homans’s conceptual battery has been brought to bear only on elementary social behavior, but if one is prepared to dismiss the theory as narrow, then the same criticism applies even more to Durkheim’s analysis of suicide.

The effective limits of Homans’s theoretical perspective have yet to be determined; in particular, whether he and his followers can formulate fruitful theories about macroscopic phenomena (for example, division of labor, class conflict, urbanization) remains a crucial question. Steps in that direction have been undertaken (for instance, Kunkel 1970; Hamblin, Jacobsen, and Miller 1973), and at this point only a self-fulfilling prophecy would terminate that line of work.

Some sociologists are likely to harbor a reservation about Homans’s theoretical perspective—that it precludes an inclusive or general social theory. Such criticism reflects a “Newton-before-Ptolemy” sociology and hardly deserves a hearing; but insofar as it does, no one could improve on Homans’s response (1961, p. 13): “Men have always explained their behavior by pointing to what it gets them and what it costs them. That mine is an explanation of the same sort I claim as one of its positive advantages.” However, the statement itself suggests one possible limit of the perspective. It may be that theories within Homans’s perspective will not explain differential costs or the punishment-reward system at either the societal or individual level. Costs, rewards, and the range of alternative activities are taken as given (that is, left unexplained). Homans’s theory is explicitly based on that strategy (1961, p. 3), and it would be grotesque to demand theories that do not take any phenomena as given.

Sociologists are perennially uncomfortable with a theory unless they can link it to some school or philosophical tradition. A better way to insure that particular theories are rejected out of hand cannot be imagined; yet sociologists persist in it. They will have trouble with Homans’s theory, for it is not Marxist or Durkheimian, two of the more compelling labels in contemporary sociology. But it would be parochial to regard Homans’s perspective as alien to any tradition. It represents a rebirth of utilitarian sociology (though scarcely the Spencerian variety), and that characterization is not the kiss of death. Bentham is absent from the pantheon of sociology (now firmly occupied by Durkheim, Marx, Pareto, Simmel, and Weber), but the last page of the field’s intellectual history has not been written.

Structural Features of Homans’s Theory

Any theory is formulated in accordance with rules. Those rules are metatheoretical in that they can be used to state all manner of particular theories, and any set of such rules is a mode of theory construction. The rules of a formal mode of theory construction transcend the conventions of a natural language, and hence the structure of a formally stated theory is quite different from that of a discursive theory (one stated only in accordance with the conventions of a natural language). Whereas the components of a discursive theory are words, sentences, and paragraphs, with no explicit analytical distinctions, the components of a formally stated theory are so distinguished. To illustrate, there may be two major divisions of a formally stated theory, one designated as “analytical statements” and the other as “synthetic statements.” Within each division the statements are differentiated by explicit labels (for example, axiom, theorem, nominal definition, operational definition). A discursively stated theory has no such structure.

This assessment focuses on the structure of Homans’s theory of elementary social behavior, as that feature of the theory is far more distinctive than critics have recognized. No attempt is made to treat substantive issues, and space limitations alone preclude more than occasional suggestions as to a restatement of the theory. A formal restatement of the theory has been attempted by Maris (1970), and his effort has been rightly criticized at length (Gray 1971; Price 1971; Turner 1971). Some observations are made here as to why Maris’s reformulation failed, and they extend to suggestions as to what needs to be done before another attempt is launched. Subsequent attempts will focus on the revised edition of Social Behavior (1974), but this chapter is concerned with the first edition because it was the basis of Maris’s work and all critiques of Homans’s theory now in print.

Types of Statements

Early in Social Behavior (1961, pp. 53-55, 75) Homans sets forth five main propositions, which stem from and abstractly express not only empirical uniformities described in Homans’s Human Group (1950) but also experimental findings on human or animal subjects by psychologists or sociologists.

I. If in the past the occurrence of a particular stimulus-situation has been the occasion on which a man’s activity has been rewarded, then the more similar the present stimulus-situation is to the past one, the more likely he is to emit the activity, or some similar activity, now.

II. The more often within a given period of time a man’s activity rewards the activity of another, the more often the other will emit the activity.

III. The more valuable to a man a unit of the activity another gives him, the more often he will emit activity rewarded by the activity of the other.

IV. The more often a man has in the recent past received a rewarding activity from another, the less valuable any further unit of that activity becomes to him.

V. The more to a man’s disadvantage the rule of distributive justice fails of realization, the more likely he is to display the emotional behavior we call anger.

The five statements presumably are premises in Homans’s theory, and they are clearly set apart from other statements. Accustomed as they are to discursive theories, many sociologists will not grasp the advantages of an explicit differentiation of premises. The only way to enlighten the skeptical is to pose a challenge: identify the premises in the theories of Durkheim, Marx, Pareto, Simmel, or Weber. It would be a horrendous chore, for the typical classical sociological theory is a verbal jungle, with a bewildering mixture of empirical generalizations, definitions, anecdotes, digressions, exhortations, and rhetoric. Even if one perseveres to the identification of premises (see, for example, Lopreato’s restatement [1973] of Pareto on the circulation of elites), it will be disputable in the best tradition of exegetical sociology. Yet the identification of premises is essential unless one assumes that tests of a theory require only operational definitions or indicators. No amount of operation-alization or “finding of indicators” will clarify the logical structure of a theory.

A theory is a set of logically interrelated statements. At least two of the statements are universal and synthetic, but only some of them may be testable in any direct sense. Unless the logical relations among the statements are clear, there is no way that tests can bear on the theory as a whole. But the prior consideration is identification of those statements that make up the theory. If a theory is set forth in a book that runs for hundreds of pages, it would be madness to consider all statements in the book as components of the theory, for it is inconceivable that one can demonstrate logical interrelations among all the statements. Yet that is the “form” of the typical renowned sociological theory. By contrast, Homans is an innovator, and his explicit identification of main propositions will save sociology thousands of person-hours and perhaps spare the field another tradition of exegetical debates. In setting forth his main propositions, Homans did more than make them explicit; he implicitly recognized that a theory comprises two sets of statements, synthetic and analytic.

The idea that scientific theories are testable and hence subject to falsification presumes that analytic/synthetic distinction. If anyone thinks the distinction obvious, they should contemplate a question: Assuming that the essential component statements of the theories of Durkheim, Marx, Pareto, Simmel, and Weber can be identified, which were intended as analytical and which as synthetic? Only in light of such questions can one appreciate the structure of Homans’s theory.

The analytic/synthetic distinction is fraught with problems (Quine 1960), and it is especially difficult to maintain in the case of sociological statements. Unless a sociological theorist differentiates two sets of statements (as divisions of the theory) and labels one as analytic and the other as synthetic, the distinction is blurred at the outset. In setting forth his main propositions, Homans comes close to such an explicit distinction.

The foregoing does not reduce to a claim that Homans’s theory is formally adequate. His departure from the discursive mode of theory construction is largely limited to explicit identification of main propositions, but the remainder of his statements are not all analytical (that is, restricted to definition of terms in the main propositions). In particular, Homans continually alludes to deductions from the main proposition, but he did not consistently use any one term to identify those derived statements, nor did he set them apart. It is very difficult to ascertain which of Homans’s statements are derived from the main propositions, and the formulation would have been more ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Bibliography of George C. Homans
• Part I Metatheory
• Part II Micro Sociology
• Part III From Micro to Macro Sociology
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Indexes