Harrison White, 1930 - 2024
Harrison Colyar White passed away on May 19th, 2024 at the age of 94 in Tucson, Arizona.
Harrison joined Columbia University in 1988 as a professor of sociology and the director of the Paul. F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences (now ISERP). He was named the Giddings Professor of Sociology in 1992, and served as the chair of the Department of Sociology for a number of years until his retirement.
Harrison played a key role in defining Columbia’s brand of sociology during his tenure at the university, but his impact on the discipline goes far beyond the confines of a particular time or place. He made contributions to a panoramic range of subfields and research areas, including kinship studies, social mobility, organization theory, artistic creativity & production, economic sociology, and studies of human language. Harrison was at the vanguard of the “Harvard Revolution” in social networks research while he was a professor in Cambridge. Equally groundbreaking and inscrutable, he defined a number of concepts and mathematical models of social structure that had a significant influence on the discipline, including structural equivalence, vacancy chains, and blockmodels. These concepts and models promoted an innovative understanding of social structure as patterns of relations rather than as attributes and attitudes of individuals. This relational view of the social world laid the foundation for what would become known as the “New York School” of relational sociology, encompassing the work of cultural sociologists and social networks researchers across Columbia, NYU, and The New School for Social Research.
As Kieran Healy noted in a blog post in 2008, perhaps the greatest testament to Harrison’s influence is the quality and quantity of research that his students and colleagues have produced. What was evident in 2008 is even more clear in 2024. An astonishing number of researchers in Harrison’s orbit were, would become, and/or remain, some of the most important figures in social science, let alone sociology.
A few of these students and colleagues have kindly shared their remembrances of Harrison. You can find their words below.
It is truly the end of an era. When I arrived at Harvard's Social Relations Department for graduate school, in 1965, Harrison was, at 35, the department's "young turk" and its breath of fresh air after the department's domination for almost twenty years by Talcott Parsons. Coming from the study of modern history, I knew vaguely that the connection between micro and macro levels was critical and also that the details of social relations and the structure of social organizations like the post office (as made so clear in the maps of Georges Lefebvre's brilliant "The Great Fear of 1789") mattered a lot. But I didn't know that there was a field called "social network analysis", which I quickly absorbed from Harrison. It may have been our hubris, but the group of graduate students that quickly coalesced around Harrison considered ourselves the vanguard of the department and perhaps the discipline, and we thought that we were way ahead of the sociological curve. As has been chronicled before, especially by Michael Schwartz, when Harrison undertook to teach Soc Rel 10 in the mid to late 60s -- the introduction to sociology for the somewhat bewildered freshmen -- graduate students flocked to his brilliant though highly idiosyncratic lectures. As one of the TAs, I absorbed so much, including the study by Rapoport and Horvath of an Ann Arbor junior high in which they noted in passing the "well-known fact" that you could reach more people through weaker ties than strong ones. Whether or not this was in fact well-known, it was clear that they had no idea what the general importance of this was, which set me on the road to making it clear. After a detour through the theme of "alienation" in urban settings -- resoundingly rejected in 1969 by ASR -- I focused more sharply on weak ties as a structural phenomenon, which hit the sociological audience at just the right moment finally in 1973.
I would add that not only was his work transformational, but he was himself a hugely charismatic figure, a pied piper of network analysis who led so many of us down that path. His charisma was felt mostly by graduate students. When he taught Soc Rel 10, he directed his lectures mostly to the blackboard, turning around occasionally to face the audience for emphasis. The freshmen were so confused that Michael Schwartz wrote his now-famous notes on every lecture, explaining what Harrison was talking about. If you don't have a copy of those notes, I can supply it. We grad students lapped it up, it was almost like a religious revival -- sociology transforming before our eyes. And all this from a man who was in person awkward, laconic and a little stiff. He was not hands on with us. He was my thesis adviser, and when I would finish a chapter I would say "Harrison, would you like to look at this", and he would say "Mark, I trust you". From anyone else that would be shirking. From him, it was just his honest evaluation that made me feel confident. He was one of a kind, and we all had huge affection for this awkward giant.
— Mark Granovetter (Stanford University)
I have so many stories about Harrison that I’ve had trouble choosing.
One favorite is the first time I met him, which was at Cornell in 1997 and was totally out of the blue. He just showed up on campus, summoned me and my PhD advisor to the sociology department, proceeded to grill me about my dissertation research, and then promptly offered me a postdoc with him at Columbia. I don’t know where he got the funding from or how he made it work, but it turned out to be hugely important step for me as that’s how I met so many other future mentors and advocates (David Stark and Peter Bearman in particular), without whom I would never have been appointed faculty there a few years later.
Another happened during that post-doc, when he dragged me along with him to an invitation-only workshop at the Santa Fe Institute. The organizers were clearly *not* happy, but Harrison didn’t care and because he was Harrison they felt they couldn’t say anything. Anyway, just as with my postdoc, that meeting turned out to be pivotal for me, leading directly to really important future mentors and collaborators — and even to my next job (at SFI).
Yet another occurred when I was on the faculty at Columbia and had invited a distinguished colleague to speak at my research group meeting. I also invited Harrison because I thought he might find it interesting. He clearly did *not* find it interesting, but then took the extra and entirely unnecessary step of openly disparaging the speaker in front of my entire group. I was mortified, and insisted that he apologize in writing (which he did), but it was certainly memorable.
The through line for all these stories, and others I would tell if I had more time, is that I have never met anyone less interested in or impressed by traditions or status. With one exception, all he cared about was the ideas: if Harrison thought you had a good idea, he would treat you like you had won the Nobel prize even if you were “just” a grad student; and if he thought your idea was rubbish he would tell you exactly that even if you *had* won the Nobel prize. The one exception was that he also, in spite of his gruff and sometimes rude demeanor, really cared for his people.
Professionally, Harrison did more for me than any almost anyone, but mostly what I admire him for, and will remember him for, is that he cared about the right things and was willing to fight for them.
— Duncan Watts (University of Pennsylvania)
Memories of Harrison White and Me
Over my long career, Harrison White evolved from holy terror to mentor to colleague to beloved friend. Of course, he would claim that he didn’t change at all, just our relationship, but this is the way it seemed to me.
- Holy terror: Then Sociology Chair at Harvard, Harrison would stride into our seminar and scatter a pile of books across the table – one would be on Anglo Saxon law, another on the Indian caste system, a third on Dutch politics, and so on. He would demand that each stunned student grab a book and abstract some organizational principles from it. We struggled to rise to his expectation, only later catching on that the struggle was the point.
- Mentor: Continuing Harrison’s theme of offbeat sources, I decided to research how revivals of English Renaissance plays addressed social issues over four centuries. Naturally, Harrison was my dissertation adviser. At the end of my graduate career Harrison took me to the Harvard faculty club – all I remember is the lighting was dim and they had horse meat on the menu – along with an assistant professor I barely knew, John Padgett, and he ordered both of us to go to the University of Chicago. We did.
- Colleague: Over the next decades, as Harrison moved from Harvard to Arizona to Columbia, we would exchange professional gossip at meetings and, especially, at his summer home in rural Maine. John and I (had Harrison been a matchmaker? Seems unlikely, but that’s how it worked out) would go to his place to swim in Crystal Pond, eat with Cynthia and the boys (Elizabeth had already launched), and listen to local poet George Van der Vetter recite.
- Beloved friend: While the friendship dimension had developed in Maine, it deepened as Harrison moved into retirement in Arizona. Every year John and I would go to Tucson to see him, along with old Harvard-days friend Ron Breiger and linguistics professor Lin Waugh. We would always take him out to a Mexican restaurant for margueritas, which he loved. My last visit was exactly one week before he died. Although frail, his mind was a sharp as ever, and we once again traded sociology memories and gossip. He seemed especially tickled by a photo of my induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; always a mentor, he was pleased that another one of his many students had made good.
— Wendy Griswold (Northwestern University)
Harrison, true to his theory of action, knew how to develop his collaborators -- using an uncommon mix of positive pressure and compassion. He knew how to inspire and demand, but also when to encourage and support. Most of all, he graciously taught us better ways to think about the world.
— Matthew Bothner (European School of Management and Technology)
Harrison C. White, a founding giant of the relational turn in American sociology, has left us a monumental theoretical model that explains how social formations emerge. The model begins analytically with identities triggered by stochastic processes at any scale, from individuals to empires. Once decoupled from their environments, identities seek footings vis-à-vis other identities in control efforts to reduce uncertainty and self-organize in disciplined molecules that secure perduration. Signaling and comparability among identities are key. Specialization ensues. Increased complexity triggers further control efforts and so identities polymerize ever more intricate social networks and domains (netdoms) that merge in social ties delivering reflective stories and temporalities. Identities switch across these netdoms seeking further footing and changing contexts that spark new meanings. The entire process is scale-free and recursive.
In the 1990s Harrison White recognized the mounting limitations of formal network analysis in capturing identities’ phenomenological switches across complex netdoms and temporalities. So to further understand social emergence, he turned to the constitutive capacities of language, more specifically Peircean metapragmatics and linguistic indexicality, to theorize context-making and meaning production in social life. It was in the context of these intellectual frontiers that I had the honor and privilege to cross paths with Harrison as graduate student at Columbia University. We connected intellectually and after I graduated and became a sociology professor, collaborated on a series of important publications diving deeper into these analytical matters. To state that my sociological perspective was profoundly shaped by his vast knowledge is an understatement.
Moreover, beyond Harrison’s undisputed stature as a social scientist, I would like to share that he was also a remarkable teacher with impactful pedagogical moments. I will always remember that day in his graduate seminar on language. At some point, he intentionally “breached” us all by suddenly staying still, staring into space in silence for a few minutes. We, the seminar students, were caught by surprise and began experiencing anomie, at first nervously looking at each other, giggling, and increasingly losing footing of the situation. When the breakdown of the social order became unbearable, Harrison resumed interaction and explained that he had conducted the breaching experiment to show how social reality is fragile and actually an active co-construction that requires considerable phenomenological effort by all participating actors.
Harrison will be missed but his extraordinary intellectual legacy lives on through all of us, many generations of disciples. In my view, it is because of Harrison White’s genius and monumental ideas that we can still in the 21st century believe in the project of Sociology.
— Jorge Fontdevila (California State University, Fullerton)
At one point in Don Quixote, someone describes the knight as "mad in patches but full of lucid intervals." I first encountered Harrison in 1991 or 1992, when he'd just published Identity and Control. That was, I assume, the product of one long mad patch, and his students spent too much time trying to decipher it. My time with him was trying for us both, partly because of my difficulty in committing to a dissertation topic, the result of an aversion to specialization that Harrison couldn't do much to remedy given his own intellectual restlessness. I exasperated him at times. Once we took a road trip to Cornell, partly so that I could get some feedback on my dissertation research. As I was presenting some results, and receiving suggestions, Harrison became angry that I was not modifying my talk on the fly in light of those, and shouted at me: "David, you have a head of concrete!" He apparently felt bad about that, and the next morning sheepishly brought breakfast to my hotel room, I thought as a kind of apology. Our difficulties aside, what I learned from him is that the thorniest problems are the most interesting ones, and also to avoid easy answers. Harrison was no fan of well-tried methods (including his own, once they became widespread) and stock explanations, sending us--meaning the students who worked with him most closely--on an unrelenting quest for something innovative. I hope that's stuck with me.
— David Gibson (Notre Dame)
My first exposure to Harrison White was as an audience member to his keynote address at the 1979 ASA meeting in Boston, a week before starting graduate school at Harvard. I was sitting next to Michael Hechter, whom I knew from two years of prior graduate studies at UW in Seattle. At the end of Harrison’s talk, Michael nudged me and whispered, “That’s your man.”
On the second day of graduate studies, Harrison walks into my windowless cubicle and asks if I want to be on his payroll. I say, ”Sure” and he walks out. A few weeks go by. I get my first paycheck, and start wondering what I am supposed to do. I get up the courage to go to his two room corner office suite a floor below and ask. He answers, “If you have to ask what to do, I don’t want you working for me.” I say, “OK” and walk out.
A month or so passes. Harrison asks me to housesit four days with his 16 year old daughter, Elizabeth, and her girl friend. He disparages the girl friend in multiple ways and times as his departure approaches. I move in with the pair fully on guard. But by the fourth day, I realize he is completely wrong about the girlfriend - she is smart and responsibel. When Harrison returned, I feel the need to correct him, telling him what took me four days to notice. He responds, “You see, I was right.” Elizabeth called me the RGS the responsible graduate student ever after, but I must give Harrison some credit for the title.
So I learned to make myself useful and assumed Harrison was always right, or figured out a way to make it seem so. I developed a talent for explaining Harrison to others even when I wasn’t sure about it myself, and the others seemed eager to assume I was right. Soon I had two offices, both with windows. One was next to Harrison where I did work related to the market model Harrison developed. The other was one floor up where I covertly did work that initially had annoyed Harrison.
I had come to Harvard enamored with both (Parsons) voluntarism and science. Nobody, including myself, knew which office would produce a dissertation until three months before it was finished. A Chicago cousin, a marketing consultant, had smuggled in some disaggregated data on the canned chili market from the business world that would provide an empirical test on the market model. A floor up I had data gathered in Seattle on the distribution of decision time on the means-ends pursuits in chess. When the latter produced a “result”, I went straight to Harrison. His encouragement and support was evidence of his absolute intellectual integrity.
Harrison prophesied that I would encounter difficulties in the field, and he was, of course, right. He continued to provide professional opportunities, and (with Ron Burt) rescued my career by bringing me to Columbia University in 1989. But I left the field in 1994 rendering my enormous debt to Harrison unpayable.
My last encounter with Harrison was in 2002. He was traveling through the Hudson Valley and was half an hour from our Homestead. My Chicago cousin, with wife and two daughters, were expected to arrive any minute on the return of their annual trip to New York City. I invited Harrison to join us for a porch lunch. It was a bit awkward. The two girls barely touched the homegrown meal. Nobody mentioned canned chili. Upon leaving, my cousin pulled a small paper bag from his SUV and asked if I would throw it away. As he pulled away I turned to Harrison and predicted there was an oversized NYC blueberry muffin in the bag minus a nibble. Harrison confirmed my prediction, looking amazed. “Some people think you cannot predict human behavior. Others require meanings to explain behavior. But it is the meaningless behavior that is most predictable.” Harrison smiled.
— Eric Leifer (The Homestead)
Some years ago, Paul DiMaggio invented the Theorodology Prize and Harrison was the first awardee. That was such a good idea. Methodology is the primitive set of tools we use to constrain ourselves in the creation of new objects. Without methodology it would be too easy to build new things. Theory is the art of learning how free oneself from the harassing presence of the real world that – like an insistent guest – keeps returning and threatens to never leave. Harrison demonstrated that simultaneously advancing and intwining both method and theory enables real discovery. Harrison discovered more things than anyone I know. A small list includes, short chains, vacancy chains, structural equivalence, production markets, image matrices, and so on using simple algebras, one-way mirrors, tricks from operations research, and simple sleight of hand.
For Harrison, doing sociology was a normative project. He wanted to identify the tangible sources of constraint so that we could embrace and experience real freedom. He believed that structures are out there waiting to be discovered and that it is our job to reveal them. I was lucky enough to be his student and found in this one simple idea enough to motivate a lifetime of work, a gift for which I am deeply grateful.
— Peter Bearman (Columbia University)
If you would like to contribute your own thoughts and memories about Harrison, please contact Ari Galper at [email protected].
Special thanks to Ron Breiger and Scott Boorman for their contributions to the brief overview of Harrison’s work that appears above.