THE POTENTIAL IMPACT OF B. F. SKINNER UPON AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY.

It has been argued elsewhere that the 1950's witnessed proximate consensus within American sociology over the orthodoxy of a systemic image of the nature of the subject matter and that this in turn was supported by a self-image in which the sociologist identified himself with the value-free stance he associated with the natural scientist. B.F. Skinner's life-long marriage to an austerely natural scientific epistemology is as self-evident as his fathering of an operant behaviorism that focuses immediately upon the change that can be brought about through positive reward. The very anomaly that was the fatal flaw of the "system" presumption - change - becomes operant conditioning's fundamental aim. Skinner's foremost advocate within sociology is, of course, George Homans, strategically placed as he has been of late as chairman of Harvard's Department of Sociology. No one can claim a more "systemic" methodology than the founding chairman of a graduate program specializing in the elicitation of models of complex and ongoing social interaction from sociology's beast of burden, the digital computer.