Harrison White, Groundbreaking (and Inscrutable) Sociologist, Dies at 94
Harrison C. White, a theoretical physicist-turned-sociologist who upended the study of human relations and society by examining how social networks shape the unseen forces of everyday life, died on May 19 in Tucson, Ariz. He was 94.
His daughter, Elizabeth White Nelson, confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility.
For decades, Professor White was considered to be one of the foremost thinkers in sociology — a status he earned despite an elliptical writing style that brought to mind the difficulty of reading James Joyce. (“There is no tidy atom and no embracing world, only complex situations, long strings reptating as in a polymer goo, or in a mineral before it hardens,” he wrote in “Identity & Control,” his 1992 book laying out his grand theory of society.)
“Harrison White is like an IQ test for sociologists,” Randall Collins, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the foreword to “The General Sociology of Harrison C. White” (2005). “In this respect, he is like James Joyce was 50 years ago: all intellectuals read him whether or not they understand him.”
Lurking in his inscrutable writing was an entirely new paradigm in sociology. Before Professor White came along in the 1960s — he taught at Harvard, Columbia and the University of Arizona — sociology was dominated by thinkers with a top-down view of society that focused on aspects of culture, such as national character, and the individual attributes of people, such as their income, religion and geography.
With his background in physics, Professor White viewed humans as nodes within social networks. Those networks operated in complex ways that shaped economic mobility, financial markets, language and other social phenomena.
