Harrison White

Harrison Colyar White (born March 21, 1930) is the emeritus Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.

White played an influential role in the “Harvard Revolution” in social networks and the New York School of relational sociology.

He is credited with the development of a number of mathematical models of social structure including vacancy chains and blockmodels.

He has been a leader of a revolution in sociology that is still in process, using models of social structure that are based on patterns of relations instead of the attributes and attitudes of individuals.

Among social network researchers, White is widely respected.

White was born on March 21, 1930, in Washington, D.C. He had three siblings and his father was a doctor in the US Navy.

Although moving around to different Naval bases throughout his adolescence, he considered himself Southern, and Nashville, TN to be his home.

At the age of 15, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), receiving his undergraduate degree at 20 years of age; five years later, in 1955, he received a doctorate in theoretical physics, also from MIT with John C. Slater as his advisor.

At the same time, he took up a position as an operations analyst at the Operations Research Office, Johns Hopkins University from 1955 to 1956.

Upon meeting Simon through his mutual acquaintance with Guetzkow, White received an invitation to move from California to Pittsburgh to work as an assistant professor of Industrial Administration and Sociology at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie-Mellon University), where he stayed for a couple of years, between 1957 and 1959.

In an interview, he claimed to have fought with the dean, Leyland Bock, to have the word "sociology" included in his title.

It was also during his time at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study that White met his first wife, Cynthia A. Johnson, who was a graduate of Radcliffe College, where she had majored in art history.

His dissertation was titled A quantum-mechanical calculation of inter-atomic force constants in copper. This was published in the Physical Review as "Atomic Force Constants of Copper from Feynman's Theorem" (1958).

While at MIT he also took a course with the political scientist Karl Deutsch, who White credits with encouraging him to move toward the social sciences.

After receiving his PhD in theoretical physics, he received a Fellowship from the Ford Foundation to begin his second doctorate in sociology at Princeton University.

His dissertation advisor was Marion J. Levy.

White also worked with Wilbert Moore, Fred Stephan, and Frank W. Notestein while at Princeton.

His cohort was very small, with only four or five other graduate students including David Matza, and Stanley Udy.

During this period, he worked with Lee S. Christie on Queuing with Preemptive Priorities or with Breakdown, which was published in 1958.

Christie previously worked alongside mathematical psychologist R. Duncan Luce in the Small Group Laboratory at MIT while White was completing his first PhD in physics also at MIT.

While continuing his studies at Princeton, White also spent a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, California where he met Harold Guetzkow.

Guetzkow was a faculty member at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, known for his application of simulations to social behavior and long-time collaborator with many other pioneers in organization studies, including Herbert A. Simon, James March, and Richard Cyert.

In 1959 James Coleman left the University of Chicago to found a new department of social relations at Johns Hopkins University, this left a vacancy open for a mathematical sociologist like White.

He moved to Chicago to start working as an associate professor at the Department of Sociology.

At that time, highly influential sociologists, such as Peter Blau, Mayer Zald, Elihu Katz, Everett Hughes, Erving Goffman were there.

As Princeton only required one year in residence, and White took the opportunity to take positions at Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Carnegie while still working on his dissertation, it was at Chicago that White credits as being his "real socialization in a way, into sociology."

It was also during these years that White, still a graduate student in sociology, wrote and published his first social scientific work, "Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation" in Acta Sociologica in 1960, together with Vilhelm Aubert, a Norwegian sociologist.

This work was a phenomenological examination of sleep which attempted to "demonstrate that sleep was more than a straightforward biological activity... [but rather also] a social event"

For his dissertation, White carried out empirical research on a research and development department in a manufacturing firm, consisting of interviews and a 110-item questionnaire with managers.

He specifically used sociometric questions, which he used to model the "social structure" of relationships between various departments and teams in the organization.

In May 1960 he submitted as his doctoral dissertation, titled Research and Development as a Pattern in Industrial Management: A Case Study in Institutionalisation and Uncertainty, earning a PhD in sociology from Princeton University.

His first publication based on his dissertation was Management conflict and sociometric structure in the American Journal of Sociology.

The couple's joint work on the French Impressionists, Canvases and Careers (1965) and “Institutional Changes in the French Painting World” (1964), originally grew out of a seminar on art in 1957 at the Center for Advanced Study led by Robert Wilson.

White originally hoped to use sociometry to map the social structure of French art to predict shifts, but he had an epiphany that it was not social structure but institutional structure which explained the shift.

The most comprehensive documentation of his theories can be found in the book Identity and Control, first published in 1992.

For instance, at the 1997 International Network of Social Network Analysis conference, the organizer held a special “White Tie” event, dedicated to White.

Social network researcher Emmanuel Lazega refers to him as both “Copernicus and Galileo” because he invented both the vision and the tools.

A major rewrite of the book appeared in June 2008.

In 2011, White received the W.E.B. DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association, which honors "scholars who have shown outstanding commitment to the profession of sociology and whose cumulative work has contributed in important ways to the advancement of the discipline."

Before his retirement to live in Tucson, Arizona, White was interested in sociolinguistics and business strategy as well as sociology.