George C. Homans - The Human Group

The Human Group

Homans was impressed by Henderson's notion of conceptual scheme. A conceptual scheme consists of a classification of variables (or concepts) that need to be taken into account when studying a set of phenomena. It also consists of a sketch of the given conditions within which the phenomena are to be analyzed. It also must contain a statement that the variables are related to one another—and following Pareto, that relationship is usually seen as one of mutual dependence. Homans was very interested in his conceptual scheme as a way of classifying phenomena and applied it to his own study of small groups. His teachings was included in Homans's work The Human Group (1950). This book's ultimate goal was to move from a study of the social system as it is exemplified in single groups toward a study of the system as it is exemplified in many groups, including groups changing in time. Homar said “If we wanted to establish the reality of a social system as a complex of mutually dependent elements, why not begin by studying a system small enough so that we could, so to speak, see all the way around it, small enough so that all the relevant observations could be made in detail and at first hand?” He fulfilled this study throughout his book The Human Group. This book allowed him to make certain generalizations, including the idea that the more frequently people interact with one another, when no one individually initiates interactions more than others, the greater is their liking for one another and their feeling of ease in one another's presence. Although this wasn't Homans's greatest piece of work, it allowed him to become more familiar with this type of methodology and led him towards explaining elementary social behavior.

He also proposes that social reality should be described at three levels: social events, customs, and analytical hypotheses that describe the processes by which customs arise and are maintained or changed. Hypotheses are formulated in terms of relationships among variables such as frequency of interaction, similarity of activities, intensity of sentiment, and conformity to norms. Using notable sociological and anthropological field studies as the grounding for such general ideas, the book makes a persuasive case for treating groups as social systems that can be analyzed in terms of a verbal analogue of the mathematical method of studying equilibrium and stability of systems. In his theoretical analyses of these groups, he begins to use ideas that later loomed large in his work, e.g., reinforcement and exchange. Along the way, he treats important general phenomena such as social control, authority, reciprocity, and ritual.