Herbert J. Gans

Who is Herbert J. Gans?

Herbert J. Gans is a German-born American sociologist who has taught at Columbia University between 1971 and 2007.

One of the most prolific and influential sociologists of his generation, Gans came to America in 1940 as a refugee from Nazism and has sometimes described his scholarly work as an immigrant's attempt to understand America. He trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with David Riesman and Everett Hughes, among others, and in social planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied primarily with Martin Meyerson.

Although Gans views his career as spanning six fields of research, he initially made his reputation as a critic of urban renewal in the early 1960s. His first book, The Urban Villagers, described Boston's diverse West End neighborhood, where he mainly studied its Italian-American working class community. The book is also well known for its critical analysis of the area's clearance as an alleged "slum" and the West Enders' displacement from their neighborhood.

One of the hallmarks of Gans's work is his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. His 1967 book The Levittowners was based on several years of participant-observation in New Jersey's Levitt-built suburb in Willingboro, observing how a set of new homeowners came together to establish the community's formal and informal organizations. Demonstrating the inaccuracy of the popular depiction of the post-war suburbs as homogeneous, conformist and anomic, Gans showed that Levittown was in many ways a typical lower middle class suburb, the residents' class and other differences structuring the social and political life of the community.