Harrison White

White in Berlin (2005)

Harrison Colyar White (born March 21, 1930 in Washington, DC ) is an American sociologist. He is considered one of the founders and major representatives of network theory and the New Economic Sociology ( economic sociology ).

Career, research and teaching

As the son of a military doctor in the United States Navy , White moved several times at a young age and lived in various port cities. At the age of 15, he began studying theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Five years after graduating there, he graduated with a Ph.D.

Because of his knowledge of mathematics, the sociologists Herbert A. Simon and Harold Guetzkow brought White to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1957 to include him as a modeler in their work group. There he finally began studying sociology that he at Princeton University also as a Ph.D. completed. In 1959 he moved to the University of Chicago as an assistant professor , where he wrote the work An anatomy of kinship - mathematical models for structures of cumulated roles , published in 1963, which earned him a reputation as a recognized modeler.

In 1963, White followed a call to Harvard University , where he began his first professorship. There he developed the theory of vacancy chains , which he describes in particular in his book Chains of Opportunity - System Models of Mobility in Organizations , published in 1970 . A newly emerging void is used to examine how resources are distributed within a mobile society. This was u. a. empirically proven using the example of US college football in the post-war period. In many other publications he then dealt with mathematical modeling and reconstruction of social networks. He assumes that individual identities are only constituted by social structures or networks and that social structures form and control the environment for identity, its creation and development. Accordingly, he entitled his book, published in 1992, Identity and Control - How Social Formations Emerge. He had previously given up his professorship at Harvard University in 1988 and accepted an appointment from Columbia University as director of the Paul Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences . There he took over the Giddings Chair for Sociology in 1992 .

In 2005, a book was dedicated to White under the title General sociology of Harrison C. White - Chaos and order in networks . Also in 2005 he received the Niklas Luhmann visiting professorship in the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University . He has also received other awards, such as an honorary doctorate from the Université de Toulouse II – Le Mirail and the Career Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association . In 1975 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences .

literature

• Jens Beckert : Sociological network analysis . In: Current Theories of Sociology . Edited by Dirk Kaesler . Munich: CH Beck 2005, pp. 286-312. ISBN 3-406-52822-8

Web links

Commons : Harrison White  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Harrison White at Columbia University