Some Memories of Harrison White in the Late 1960s at Harvard

Before coming to Harvard in 1966 and meeting Harrison, I had completed my BA and MA at the University of British Columbia (UBC). At that time, I was unconsciously looking for network analysis, but no one at UBC was into that. For example, I did my master’s thesis on the links between voluntary associations in the Vancouver Chinese community, based on interviews with association leaders, but I did not know how to analyze the network data effectively.

When I got to Harvard, I had no idea who or what Harrison was but found he had been assigned as my supervisor. Was this just great good luck? Did it have something to do with my math background? No idea! But it was indeed good fortune.

We, Harrison’s students, learned from him both as TAs in undergraduate courses and as students in his graduate course. One of the undergraduate courses was a sort of introductory course. “Sort of” because it was not really introductory at all. When I arrived in 1966, we were not in a standard sociology department but in the Department of Social Relations, a combination of sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and clinical psychology. Rumor had it that this odd combination resulted from a coalition of people in those four areas who were unhappy with the orientation of their original departments, an interesting example of the power of negative ties in social life. Instead of trying to “introduce” such a mixed collection, Social Relations had several faculties from each area introduce their own core areas of research. We TAs called this remarkable course “the parade of stars.” One of the stars was Harrison. He really tried to explain social structure to his students using lectures and notes. Just a few years ago, both Barry Wellman and I still had our typed (on a typewriter!) copies of Harrison’s Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure.

But the most intriguing and mystifying of his courses was the graduate course. This was an “R” course, meaning students could take it repeatedly, as many times as desired. Most of us took it every year for two reasons. One, we never fully figured out what he was going on about and hoped it would get clearer with repetition. Two, there was no repetition; the classes were different every time. That was because Harrison was fully immersed in his own current work. He would be in his office deep in thought about the current project (vacancy chains, when I first met him), and when it was time for class, he jumped up, dashed to the classroom, and kept right on thinking about the current project out loud. We could tell that something terrific was happening, but the something was usually just out of reach. Trying to figure it out was rather fun, like a particularly fiendish cryptic crossword puzzle when no one has told you what cryptic crossword puzzle clues are like and how to solve them.

It was exciting to be right there when a genius worked out profound insights with us and then to later see the published results, as in my hearing about vacancy chains and then reading the book (White, 1970) (with its typically Harrisonian mix of brilliant and baffling writing). It was also exciting to see some of my fellow students pick up core ideas and run with them, for example, taking the analysis of vacancy chains in the Protestant Episcopal Church to new areas, such as vacancies in rental housing units or hermit crab shells (see examples in Chase, 1991).

Harrison thought very deep, complex thoughts about social structure. He was always looking for fuel for ideas, reading widely across areas, and disciplines. Some of the things he introduced were and are enduring classics, such as Nadel’s Theory of Social Structure (Nadel, 1957) and Elizabeth Bott’s Family and Social Networks (Bott, 1957). Some were promising starting points but not complex enough for social structural analysis, such as Ford and Fulkerson (1962) on the flow of water in systems of pipes. We still work on flows in networks but now know that relational pipes have variable features that allow the flows of some kinds of culture, block others, and modify much of what does flow. Consider work on networks as the pipes and prisms of the market (Podolny, 2001), or my own recent chapter on how the flow of culture varies with the kind of culture, the kind of social relationship, and the impact of inequality between Weberian ethno-racial status groups (Erickson, 2021). My 2021 piece is a kind of supercharged version of my most cited paper (Erickson, 1996), in which I showed that people with occupationally diverse networks learn a lot about different topics (books, popular sports, and so on), a form of capital conversion in which social capital produces cultural capital. The 1996 paper only used non-controversial bits of information, and the 2021 paper shows that the connections between networks and culture vary greatly when we examine different kinds of culture and the impact of inequality between Weberian ethno-racial status groups. Most of the work I have done centers on the connections between networks and culture, which was also a fascination for Harrison.

Harrison got us all permanently excited about network analysis. We learned that networks are fundamental to every kind of sociological problem, that they are intricate, complex, and fascinating to study, and that a network analyst never runs out of new problems and new ideas. No one has more fun than we do, in large part thanks to Harrison.