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.
“The work of Harrison White has indisputably reoriented the field of sociology,” Ronald Breiger, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, said in an interview. “It is simply inconceivable to imagine American sociology over the past 50 years without accounting for the advances contributed by Harrison White.”
His early research was focused on vacancy chains, which begin with the movement of a single node — a job opening, the sale of a house, a professor’s obtaining tenure.
In a corporation, for example, a senior executive’s retirement leads to a middle manager’s promotion, which opens a spot for a lower-level employee to fill, which opens a lower-level position for someone else, from inside the company or outside, and so on.
“There’s a whole chain of events that controls the possibility of having something like social mobility,” said Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford University and one of Professor White’s former students. “Most people aren’t aware of what that chain looks like because it goes well beyond their own experience.”
Professor White could be prickly. He did not have a positive view of economics and once referred to economists as “speechwriters for sophisticated businessmen.”
In his book “Markets From Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production” (2002), he argued that prices weren’t determined, as economists have long maintained, by supply and demand. Instead, companies order supplies and set prices based on what their competitors are doing, he wrote.
“Market networks are akin to human acquaintance networks rather than the fully connected networks specified to obtain explicit mathematical solutions for abstract oscillators, as for orthodox economics,” he wrote, somewhat characteristically.
Harrison Colyar White was born on March 21, 1930, in Washington, D.C., and grew up, one of three siblings, in Philadelphia and San Diego. His father, Rear Adm. Joel White, was chief flight surgeon for the U.S. Navy from 1930 to 1944. His mother, Virginia (Armistead) White, was a pianist and poet.
Growing up, he was a voracious reader of science fiction. He graduated from high school when he was 16 and enrolled at M.I.T., where he studied physics. After graduating in 1950, he began work there on a doctorate in theoretical physics.
For fun, he took a night course in sociology that was taught by Karl Deutsch, an early innovator in applying quantitative methods to social-science research.
Professor White became consumed by the theoretical possibilities of applying physics to sociology. After finishing his doctorate, he began work on a Ph.D. in sociology at Princeton, graduating in 1960.
He taught sociology at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago before joining Harvard in 1963.
At Harvard, he was instrumental in founding the school’s sociology program and served as chair of the department. He was later the chair of Columbia’s department of sociology.
In each of his academic posts, Professor White championed a cross-disciplinary approach to challenge the historical dogmas of sociology.
“Decades before the word interdisciplinary had permeated university campuses and funding agencies alike, Harrison was the quintessential interdisciplinarian, a benign Trojan horse through which the ideas and techniques of contemporary physics could invade and reshape sociology,” Duncan J. Watts, a computational social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” (2003).
Professor White’s marriage to Cynthia Johnson in 1955 ended in divorce in 1986. They jointly wrote “Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World” (1965), a study of social networks in the art industry.
He married Lynn A. Cooper in 2010. She died in 2020.
In addition to his daughter, Ms. Nelson, Professor White is survived by two sons, Benjamin and John, and seven grandchildren. His brothers, Joel and Robert, and a sister, Virginia White Fitz, died earlier.
Professor White’s inscrutability wasn’t limited to his writing.
Ms. Nelson recalled an event honoring him 30 years ago.
“His graduate students were telling the most hilarious stories about him as a young teacher,” she said — especially about what it was like working as a teaching assistant for him.
“He would stand up at the front of the classroom and basically talk to the blackboard so that nobody could hear or understand what he was saying,” Ms. Nelson said.
The teaching assistants were supposed to explain in small discussion sessions what the lectures were about.
“But they didn’t know what he was talking about, either,” she said. “So they would have a meeting to come to an agreement about what it might be about.”
