George C. Homans

George C. Homans was an American sociologist regarded as the founder of behavioral sociology and a principal architect of social exchange theory. In Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961) he applied principles drawn from behaviorist psychology and elementary economics to argue that everyday social interaction can be understood as an exchange of activity, approval, and other rewards and costs between individuals. His insistence on grounding sociological explanation in the observable behavior of individuals, rather than in free-standing social structures, made him an influential and controversial figure who pushed the discipline toward a more explicitly individualist, psychologically grounded theory of social behavior.