White, Harrison

Harrison Colyar White (b. 1930), American sociologist, structuralist thinker, network phenomenologist, and mathematical modeler, contributes theory, models, and [Page 885]conceptualization that focus on concrete, interconnected sets of actors beyond the level of the individual person or group but below the level of total cultures or societies. Having earned doctorates in theoretical physics (at MIT) and in sociology (at Princeton), White addresses problems of social structure that cut across the range of the social sciences. Most notably, he has contributed (1) theories of role structures encompassing classificatory kinship systems of native Australian peoples and institutions of the contemporary West; (2) models based on equivalences of actors across networks of multiple types of social relation; (3) theorization of social mobility in systems of organizations; (4) a structural theory of social action that emphasizes control, agency, narrative, and identity; (5) a theory of artistic production; (6) a theory of economic production markets leading to the elaboration of a network ecology for market identities and new ways of accounting for profits, prices, and market shares; and (7) a theory of language use that emphasizes switching between social, cultural, and idiomatic domains within networks of discourse. His most explicit theoretical statement is Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action (1992), although several of the major components of his theory of the mutual shapingof networks, institutions, and agency are also readily apparent in Careers and Creativity: Social Forces in the Arts (1993), written for a less-specialized audience.

The relation of White's work to strands of classical European structuralism is evident in his first book, An Anatomy of Kinship (1963), which includes in an appendix a translation (by Cynthia A. White) of a portion of Chapter 14 of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949, English translation 1969). Like André Weil, a mathematician who endeavored to formalize a portion of Lévi-Strauss's kinship theory, White is interested in the algebraic modeling of social relations. In his 1963 book, however, White brought to bear several distinctive themes that he has been developing throughout his later work. One of these is based on the observation of a certain similarity between charts of kinship roles among native Australian peoples and tables of organization for modern businesses. The more general concern is what White termed “structures of cumulated roles.” In his first book, this preoccupation with roles led to the formulation of eight axioms relating clan structure to marriage rules for Australian societies (e.g., children whose fathers are in different clans must themselves be in different clans), derivations of ideal-type models of all possible societies that conformed to the axioms, and comparison of these models against extant anthropological accounts.

In subsequent work, White and collaborators loosened up the models (moving from algebraic group theory to the algebra of semigroups) so as to make them applicable to organizations and informal groups in a modern, Western context; now he defined role structures as positions of social actors across multiple networks of social relations (such as friendship, enmity, and the provision of help). In particular, in a seminal 1971 paper, White and François P. Lorrain defined “structural equivalence” with reference to sets of individuals who are placed similarly with respect to all other such sets, to the extent that relations and flows across multiple networks are captured by an aggregation of detailed relations. This equivalence concept allowed the representation of complex networks by reduced-form images that were obtained by aggregating equivalent actors. Further loosening of the underlying mathematics led White and collaborators to many analyses of social networks under the term blockmodeling (reviewed in White 1992).

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