22 Facts About Harrison White

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

Harrison White 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.

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

Harrison White's dissertation was titled A quantum-mechanical calculation of inter-atomic force constants in copper.

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

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 at MIT.

Harrison 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.

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

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

Harrison White worked closely with small group researchers George C Homans and Robert F Bales, which was largely compatible with his prior work in organizational research and his efforts to formalize network analysis.

Overlapping Harrison White's early years, Charles Tilly, a graduate of the Harvard Department of Social Relations, was a visiting professor at Harvard and attended some of Harrison White's lectures - network thinking heavily influenced Tilly's work.

In 1988, White joined Columbia University as a professor of sociology and was the director of the Paul F Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences.

Harrison White stood at the heart of this, and his magnum opus Identity and Control was a testament to this new relational sociology.

In 1992, Harrison White received the named position of Giddings Professor of Sociology and was the chair of the department of sociology for various years until his retirement.

Harrison White argues that it is a default human heuristic to organize the world in terms of attributes, but that this can often be a mistake.

Harrison White avoids giving attributes to things that emerge from patterns of relationships, something that goes against our natural instincts and requires some thought to process.

Harrison White developed a perspective on market structure and competition in his 2002 book, Markets from Networks, based on the idea that markets are embedded in social networks.

Harrison White's approach is related to economic concepts such as uncertainty, monopolistic competition, or signalling.

Harrison White has a long-standing interest in organizations, and before he retired, he worked on how strategy fits into the overall models of social construction he has developed.

Harrison White found that women found doctors through links of friends and acquaintances and was four degrees separated from the doctor on average.

Harrison White trained later additions to the Toronto school, Harriet Friedmann and Bonnie Erickson.

At Columbia, Harrison White trained a new cohort of researchers who pushed network analysis beyond methodological rigor to theoretical extension and the incorporation of previously neglected concepts, namely, culture and language.