Choose one of Homans’s main concepts and explain why it sits where it sits within his basic theoretical orientation. Be sure to provide quotations from the text to support your explanation.
What will be an ideal response?
On the relationship between individual action and social structures, Homans summed up his position as follows: Once [social] structures have been created, they have further effects on the behavior of persons who take part in them or come into contact with them. But these further effects are explained by the same [psychological] propositions as those used to explain the creation and maintenance of the structure in the first place. The structures only provide new given conditions to which the propositions are to be applied. My sociology remains fundamentally individualistic and not collectivistic. (Quoted in Ritzer and Goodman 2004:403) For Homans, then, what accounts for the enduring patterns of behavior and social structures that make up society is basic behavioral psychology, “for structures do not act on individuals automatically. They do so because they establish some of the contingencies under which persons act: their stimuli, rewards and punishments . . .” (1984:342). Students should then situate one of Homans’s concepts (rewards/benefits, costs/punishments, distributive justice) within this theoretical context.
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