Utilisatrice:Idéalités/Brouillon1

History

jaime pas les sections "histoire", les dates etc.

Jeunesse

Harrison White est né le 21 mars 1930 à Nashville, dans le sud des États-Unis, d'un père médecin, mais qui a eu du mal à pratiquer dû à des discrimination envers son origine sociale. Sa famille, constitutée d'une fratrie de sept, n'a pas d'origine aisée.  Il est entré à 15 ans au Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), ce qu'il a trouvé socialement difficile à vivre. Malgré son intérêt marqué pous son domaine d'origne, la physique fondamentale, sa jeunesse et ses désirs de jeune homme l'ont mené vers les facultés de sciences sociales où le ratio de femme inscrites est plus élevé. Sans avoir imaginer un jour faire de la sociologie, son parcours l'a mené à découvrir cette discipline pour laquelle il a ensuite consacré sa vie.

Il a ainsi obtenu en 1955 son doctorat en physique théorique du MIT, auprès de John C. Slater pour sa thèse intituléeA quantum-mechanical calculation of inter-atomic force constants in copper. This was published in the Physical Review as "Atomic Force Constants of Copper from Feynman's Theorem" (1958)..

Université de Princeton

Après l'obtention de son doctorat en physique théorique, White a reçu une bourse de la fondation Ford lui permettant d'entamer un second doctorat à l'Université de Princeton auprès de Marion J. Levy, où il faisait partis d'un très petite cohorte de quelques étudiants dont David Matza et Stanley Udy.

Pendant cette période, il a obtenu un poste en tant qu'analyste des opérations au Operations Research Office de l'Université Johns Hopkins de 1955 à 1956.

At the same time, he took up a position as an operations analyst at the During this period, he worked with Lee S. Christie on Queuing with Preemptive Priorities or with Breakdown, which was published in 1958. Christie previously worked alongside mathematical psychologist R. Duncan Luce in the Small Group Laboratory at MIT while White was completing his first PhD in physics also at MIT.

While continuing his studies at Princeton, White also spent a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, California where he met Harold Guetzkow. Guetzkow was a faculty member at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, known for his application of simulations to social behavior and long-time collaborator with many other pioneers in organization studies, including Herbert A. Simon, James March, and Richard Cyert. Upon meeting Simon through his mutual acquaintance with Guetzkow, White received an invitation to move from California to Pittsburgh to work as an assistant professor of Industrial Administration and Sociology at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie-Mellon University), where he stayed for a couple of years, between 1957 and 1959. In an interview, he claimed to have fought with the dean, Leyland Bock, to have the word "sociology" included in his title.

It was also during his time at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study that White met his first wife, Cynthia A. Johnson, who was a graduate of Radcliffe College, where she had majored in art history. The couple's joint work on the French Impressionists, Canvases and Careers (1965) and “Institutional Changes in the French Painting World” (1964), originally grew out of a seminar on art in 1957 at the Center for Advanced Study led by Robert Wilson. White originally hoped to use sociometry to map the social structure of French art to predict shifts, but he had an epiphany that it was not social structure but institutional structure which explained the shift.

It was also during these years that White, still a graduate student in sociology, wrote and published his first social scientific work, "Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation" in Acta Sociologica in 1960, together with Vilhelm Aubert, a Norwegian sociologist. This work was a phenomenological examination of sleep which attempted to "demonstrate that sleep was more than a straightforward biological activity... [but rather also] a social event"

For his dissertation, White carried out empirical research on a research and development department in a manufacturing firm, consisting of interviews and a 110-item questionnaire with managers. He specifically used sociometric questions, which he used to model the "social structure" of relationships between various departments and teams in the organization. In May 1960 he submitted as his doctoral dissertation, titled Research and Development as a Pattern in Industrial Management: A Case Study in Institutionalisation and Uncertainty, earning a PhD in sociology from Princeton University. His first publication based on his dissertation was ''Management conflict and sociometric structure'' in the American Journal of Sociology.

University of Chicago

In 1959 James Coleman left the University of Chicago to found a new department of social relations at Johns Hopkins University, this left a vacancy open for a mathematical sociologist like White. He moved to Chicago to start working as an associate professor at the Department of Sociology. At that time, highly influential sociologists, such as Peter Blau, Mayer Zald, Elihu Katz, Everett Hughes, Erving Goffman were there. As Princeton only required one year in residence, and White took the opportunity to take positions at Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Carnegie while still working on his dissertation, it was at Chicago that White credits as being his "real socialization in a way, into sociology." It was here that White advised his first two graduate students Joel H. Levine and Morris Friedell, both who went on to make contributions to social network analysis in sociology. While at the Center for Advanced Study, White began learning anthropology and became fascinated with kinship. During his stay at the University of Chicago White was able to finish An Anatomy of Kinship, published in 1963 within the Prentice-Hall series in Mathematical Analysis of Social Behavior, with James Coleman and James March as chief editors. The book received significant attention from many mathematical sociologists of the time, and contributed greatly to establish White as a model builder.

The Harvard Revolution

In 1963, White left Chicago to be an associate professor of sociology at the Harvard Department of Social Relations -- the same department founded by Talcott Parsons and still heavily influenced by the structural-functionalist paradigm of Parsons. As White previously only taught graduate courses at Carnegie and Chicago, his first undergraduate course was An Introduction to Social Relations (see Influence) at Harvard, which became infamous among network analysts. As he "thought existing textbooks were grotesquely unscientific," the syllabus of the class was noted for including few readings by sociologists, and comparatively more readings by anthropologists, social psychologists, and historians. White was also a vocal critique of what he called the "attributes and attitudes" approach of Parsonsian sociology, and came to be the leader of what has been variously known as the “Harvard Revolution," the "Harvard breakthrough," or the "Harvard renaissance" in social networks. He worked closely with small group researchers George C. Homans and Robert F. Bales, which was largely compatible with his prior work in organizational research and his efforts to formalize network analysis. Overlapping White's early years, Charles Tilly, a graduate of the Harvard Department of Social Relations, was a visiting professor at Harvard and attended some of White's lectures - network thinking heavily influenced Tilly's work.

White remained at Harvard until 1986. In addition to a divorce from his wife, Cynthia, (with whom he published several works) and wanting a change, the sociology department at the University of Arizona offer him the position as department chair. He remained at Arizona for two years.

Columbia University

In 1988, White joined Columbia University as a professor of sociology and was the director of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences. This was at the early stages of what is perhaps the second major revolution in network analysis, the so-called "New York School of relational sociology." This invisible college included Columbia as well as the New School for Social Research and New York University. While the Harvard Revolution involved substantial advances in methods for measuring and modeling social structure, the New York School involved the merging of cultural sociology with network-structural sociology, two traditions which had previously been antagonistic. White stood at the heart of this, and his magnum opus Identity and Control was a testament to this new relational sociology.

In 1992, White received the named position of Giddings Professor of Sociology and was the chair of the department of sociology for various years until his retirement. He nowModèle:When resides in Tucson, Arizona.