Harrison Colyar White (March 21, 1930 – May 18, 2024) was an American sociologist who was the Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.

White played an influential role in the “Harvard Revolution” in social networks[1] and the New York School of relational sociology.

He has been a leader of a revolution in sociology that is still in process, using models of social structure that are based on patterns of relations instead of the attributes and attitudes of individuals.

[4] Social network researcher Emmanuel Lazega refers to him as both “Copernicus and Galileo” because he invented both the vision and the tools.

[8] While at MIT he also took a course with the political scientist Karl Deutsch, who White credits with encouraging him to move toward the social sciences.

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.

[13] 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.

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.

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,[15] earning a PhD in sociology from Princeton University.

At that time, highly influential sociologists, such as Peter Blau, Mayer Zald, Elihu Katz, Everett Hughes, Erving Goffman were there.

"[17] 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.

The book received significant attention from many mathematical sociologists of the time, and contributed greatly to establish White as a model builder.

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."

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 shaping of networks, institutions, and agency are also readily apparent in Careers and Creativity: Social Forces in the Arts (1993), written for a less-specialized audience.

White avoids giving attributes to things that emerge from patterns of relationships, something that goes against our natural instincts and requires some thought to process.

His approach is related to economic concepts such as uncertainty (as defined by Frank Knight), monopolistic competition (Edward Chamberlin), or signalling (Spence).

In addition to his own publications, White is widely credited with training many influential generations of network analysts in sociology.

As popular social science blog Orgtheory.net explains, "in contemporary American sociology, there are no set of student-taken notes that have had as much underground influence as those from Harrison White’s introductory Soc Rel 10 seminar at Harvard.

"[27] The first generation of Harvard graduate students that trained with White during the 1960s went on to be a formidable cohort of network analytically inclined sociologists.

This line of research is still actively being pursued by Duncan Watts, Albert-László Barabási, Mark Newman, Jon Kleinberg and others.

White's research on “vacancy chains” was assisted by a number of graduate students, including Michael Schwartz and Ivan Chase.

This provided a quantitative analysis of social roles, allowing scientists new ways to measure society that were not based on statistical aggregates.

During the 1970s, White work with his student's Scott Boorman, Ronald Breiger, and François Lorrain on a series of articles that introduce a procedure called "blockmodeling" and the concept of "structural equivalence."

At Columbia, White trained a new cohort of researchers who pushed network analysis beyond methodological rigor to theoretical extension and the incorporation of previously neglected concepts, namely, culture and language.