Harrison White changed my intellectual life during my Assistant Professor stint at Harvard—from the bounded rationality of Simon and March to the networks and history of Harrison White. Not through formal mentorship, but through co-teaching with him for 4 years a Harvard Sociology course entitled “Topics in Social Organization.” The title was intentionally vague to allow Harrison year-by-year flexibility to change course content at will (and at whim). This largely unstructured course experience produced not only me but Paul DiMaggio, Wendy Griswold, and Kathleen Carley at the same time as me, and Mark Granovetter and many other distinguished sociologists before and after me.
How did this alchemy work? For a newbie out of University of Michigan with no teaching experience whatsoever, Harrison’s offer to co-teach with him was both deeply an honor and deeply terrifying. I was desperate to know what in the world “Topics in Social Organization” meant. Upon arrival at Harvard, I kept knocking on his door to learn what I/we were supposed to teach. Can I see any syllabi from previous years? Harrison kept putting me off until the day before the course was to start. Then he finally told me the plan: “You bring the best ten books you have ever read, and I will do the same. That will be the course.”
I entered the classroom on the first day of class, having dutifully assembled at my side my small pile of books by Herbert Simon and/or Jim March. Harrison arrived theatrically late and scattered his 10 books down the seminar table. What were the “best ten books” he had ever read? Books like Taxation in Medieval England, Napolean’s Academy of Sciences, Saint Augustine and the Donatists, an anthropological ethnography of eating in a small town in India, and so forth. Turns out that not only were these not the 10 best books Harrison had ever read, he had never read any of them! These were books that Harrison wanted to read, not books that he had read. He wanted not to teach a subject, much less a dogma (even of networks), but to go on an adventure of learning. He explained that the goal of this course was not to teach a received theory, but to learn how to theorize. The less you knew about a topic the better from this pedagogical perspective. The goal was not truth but rather intellectual creativity, sharpened through debate.
The first reaction of the prospective students in this class was that half of them left. They couldn’t deal with this much chaos. But the ones who stayed were people like I listed above, who shaped the discipline of American sociology.
Harrison’s detailed teaching method was this: Once our 20 books were distributed across the 15 weeks of the semester (of course all of Harrison’s, five of mine), every student in the class, including us, was to write a short paper or memo that extracted an interesting question provoked by his/her reading and then propose an answer or explanation of the phenomenon so highlighted. We would all read each other’s memos ahead of time, and then Harrison the conductor would orchestrate a discussion among and debate (cross-critique) across the collected memos. There was no constraint of consistency across classes, so students were encouraged to “go with the flow” of the material in front of them, free inferentially to change their theoretical perspectives from week to week. Open exploration was the objective, not closed coherence.
Of course, the Harrison of formal network analysis and structural equivalence was not like this at all. That Harrison conveyed the impression that mathematical network analysis was intellectual work, whereas this Harrison was intellectual play. The first was better for answering questions; the second was better for generating questions. Science was a dialectic between them. I learned formal network analysis from Ron Breiger, a fellow Assistant Professor, and not from Harrison himself.
If there was a perspectival link between these two sides of Harrison, I would label it “the alter perspective.” That is, when trying to understand a social interaction or sets of social interactions, try not to see it from the ego perspective of each agent’s psychology, but rather from the alter perspective of observers and recipients of actions. Structural equivalence is a formalization of this, but even in these qualitative memos, Harrison would repeatedly ask, “what does the person or action look like in the eyes of observers?” and “how do those various alter perspectives concatenate?” My own Robust Action article was an attempt to put Harrison’s two sides together through both blockmodeling and historical interpretations of contemporaries.
In addition to the alter perspective, another Gestalt I learned from Harrison that has shaped my intellectual trajectory is multiple networks. Dealing with “raw” holistic histories or ethnographies pushes one to see how different layers of networks and institutions fit together and interpenetrate. Harrison was not one to think systematically about historical change, but I have come to believe that abrasion across Harrison’s multiple networks is the friction that induces innovations, which either tip or not into network reproductive feedback or autocatalysis.
Four years was not a huge amount of time to have spent together with Harrison. But it imprinted me for life. Both Identity and Control and The Emergence of Organizations and Markets emerged out of the “Topics in Social Organization” course that we co-taught. Had I stayed at Harvard, these probably would have been one co-authored book. In hindsight, however, it was better that we both went on to develop our own distinctive voices within a shared worldview. That realized trajectory, of course, is more consistent with the pedagogy of what Harrison was trying to teach in our course.