My first exposure to Harrison White was during his keynote address at the ASA meetings in Boston in 1979, a week before I started the graduate school at Harvard. I was transferring from 2 years of prior graduate studies at the UW in Seattle, sitting next to UW professor Michael Hechter. The talk was lucid, and it was about the phenomenological aspects of his then new interest in markets. At the end of Harrison’s talk, Michael nudged me and whispered, “That’s your man.”
On the second day of graduate studies, Harrison walked into my tiny windowless cubicle and asked if I wanted to be on his payroll. I said, “Sure,” and he walked out. A few weeks went by. I got my first paycheck and started wondering what I would be supposed to do. I got up the courage to go to his two-room corner office suite laid a floor below and asked. He answered, “If you have to ask what to do, I don’t want you working for me.” I said, “OK” and walked out, having gotten my first HCW lesson.
A month or so passed. I commented on his working papers and learned a programming language (APL) to facilitate calculations for necessary tables. Harrison asked me to housesit for 4 days with his 16 year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and her girlfriend. He disparaged the girlfriend in multiple ways and times as his departure approached. I moved in with the pair fully on guard. By the fourth day, I realized that he was completely wrong about the girlfriend—she was smart, responsible, and very attractive. When Harrison returned, I felt the need to correct him by telling him what it took me 4 days to notice. He responded, “You see, I was right.” Elizabeth called me the responsible graduate student (RGS) ever after, but I must give Harrison some credit for the title.
So I learned to make myself useful and assumed that Harrison was always right by figuring out a way to make it seem so. I developed a talent for explaining Harrison to others, even when I was not sure myself. Others seemed eager to assume I was right. Soon I had two offices, both with windows and views of Boston. One was next to Harrison’s, where I worked related to Harrison’s market model. I had a key to his office, where I browsed the working papers he received and marked up from across the field and world. The other office was one floor up, where I (covertly) worked that initially annoyed Harrison.
I had come to Harvard with two intellectual commitments. One was to pursue the ideal of science (beauty and simplicity) exhibited in Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The other was the voluntarism of Parsons, who sought (in his 1937 opus) to put the “natural and social sciences on the same footing.” I arrived at Harvard with a data set gathered from chess tournaments consisting of complete games and decision times (in seconds) for every move, intending to test Parsons’ “grand” theory. End-state pursuit should be reflected in the decision being concentrated (using the Gini index) at the beginning of organized sequences, and this should be clear for the most skilled.
Parsons had died 2 months before I arrived at Harvard. Harrison’s hair, I only gradually realized, had turned white/gray during his then recent stint as chairman of the sociology department, dealing with the likes of Parsons. The mention of Parsons’ name, as well as the word “decision” was enough to provoke an “ugh” from Harrison. So I kept the chess project largely secret, except for an innocent question occasionally, like, “Why isn’t there a recognition (in sociology) of skill in social action?” This seemed to interest Harrison.
Nobody, including myself, knew which office would produce a dissertation until 3 months before it was finished. My cousin in Chicago, a marketing consultant, had smuggled some disaggregated data on the canned chili market from the business world that would provide an empirical test of the market model. On a floor up, I doggedly pursued the chess project. Then 1 day, while waiting for a national chess master to finish coding “organized sequences,” I was looking at the primary data brought from Seattle and noticed a strange phenomenon. The highest rated players sometimes exhibited large amounts of decision time across consecutive moves, while the lowest rated players followed large decision times by small ones. The master’s coding enshrined this observation as a result: It was the least skilled players who were most likely to engage in Parsonian means-end pursuits (i.e., planning and implementation). Only when the game balance broke down did this result reverse itself. Coupled with a second result—the most skilled (among themselves) were most likely to sustain balance—the strange behavior and interdependency between skill and balance seemed worthy of a dissertation. When I showed these results to Harrison, his encouragement and support were evidence of his absolute intellectual integrity.
Harrison prophesized I would encounter difficulties in the field, and he was, of course, right. My dissertation in 1983, entitled “Robust Action,” passed through five journals, each requesting a revision, before yielding a published article in ASR. In the last resubmission, with virtually no revisions, a second reading led one reviewer to chastise me for not trumpeting the article’s importance! Harrison continued to provide professional opportunities throughout this period—including conference talks and three joint publications—and (with Ron Burt) rescued my career by bringing me to Columbia University in 1989. I suspect he was also behind an invitation to publish the dissertation as a book in a series of “Outstanding Harvard dissertations of the last 50 years.” With more revisions, the dissertation morphed into my book Actors as Observers in 1991. But I had enough by 1994 and left the field to marry and start a family on a homestead in the Hudson Valley.
My last encounter with Harrison was in 2002. He was traveling through the Hudson Valley with Lynn and was a half-hour away. My cousin in Chicago, with his wife and two daughters, was expected to arrive any minute on the return of their annual trip to NYC. I invited Harrison to join us for a porch lunch. It was a bit awkward. Lynn wore sunglasses and talked a little. The two plus sized girls barely touched the homegrown meal. Nobody mentioned canned chili. Upon leaving, my cousin pulled a small paper bag from his SUV and asked if I would throw it away. As he pulled away, I turned to Harrison and predicted there was an oversized NYC blueberry muffin inside the bag, minus one nibble. Harrison confirmed my prediction and was looking amazed. Some people think you cannot predict human behavior. Others require meanings to explain behavior. But it is the meaningless behavior that is most predictable. Harrison smiled at the thought, and departed soon after.
Two years ago, after two decades of homesteading—life without revisions—I reread Parsons’ Structure of Social Action. Finally, Harrison’s “ugh” became clear. There is no “other” in the book, and hence no social action past the title. The “actor” is trapped within a “subjective”—an “actor’s point of view”—pursuing ends (“empirical” or “ideal”) based on “scientific knowledge” or meanings. But theory is scientific knowledge, and is here being delegated to the actor, in the form of a point of view. Ugh. Where does this leave the social scientist? Weber had recognized that the centrality of subjective meanings allowed for only “fragmentary and hypothetical” results but thought there was no alternative. Yet, Parsons promised a “grand” theory on the same footing as natural science. Something was wrong with his Weberian treatment of the subjective.
So it was back to revision—the “voluntaristic theory of action” (VTA) into a theory of social action (VTSA)—rendering my 2-year intellectual commitments of voluntarism and science compatible. Two symmetry constraints were invoked: Actor symmetry gives the actor and others the same status within the VTSA, as voluntaristic actors; Information symmetry requires the information basis for action must be shared. Game theory satisfies both actor and information symmetry, but only by assuming transparent subjectives. Subjectives are private, however, and any revelation must itself be viewed as a social action. The only option is to shift the actor’s temporal orientation from ex ante to ex post. Actors become observers, using actions to get observations (directed actions). The temporal shift distinguishes skill from rationality and is the rationale behind robust action. A duality principle, where the meaning an action comes to assume rests on the reaction of others, lends a strategic volatility to social action. Restraint of the self (i.e., the subjective), or self-restraint, is essential in maintaining control over the self that will only be realized through interaction.
These ideas were written up as a thought experiment in a working paper entitled “Structure of Social Action Revisited: Pursuing the Complicity of Other.” The complicity of other is a fundamental uncertainty in the pursuit of standing, through roles. Roles come in complementary pairs, so acquiring a role requires the complicity of other. A wide range of cases is used to illustrate and support the claim of general theory, involving the author (and wife), Sigmund Freud (and Dora), a young Frederick the Great (and father/king), three Jews at a Catholic wedding, two women who call each other “husband,” and a hypothetical extension of Parsons’ potato boiling example (giving “ignorant and unscientific” wife a voice).
Perhaps, I now realize, Harrison and I were heading toward the same place from very different starting points. Harrison started from structure, I from the actor, yet both of these starting points are abstract constructs, generalities without actual referents. Sought were the possibilities from moments of coming together, where selves can be sorely challenged and structures turn gooey. Harrison’s “Identity and Control” was the synthesis of an entire career, and they drew upon a vast range of cases from different academic fields and historical periods. It came out in 1992, as I was leaving the field. On pages 82–84, Harrison coined the term “Leifer ties.” I have long since lost the ability to explain Harrison, and even here my attempts at explanation are feeble.
Harrison was a skilled social actor who could implement his theories in real time. Yet in his work, he never drew upon his own experiences. I have little skill, and it can take hours, days, and even decades to appreciate what has happened in a single moment. My understanding of Leifer ties could only come from my (working paper) theory. Only Harrison could give a personal account, and I would have loved to hear it.
Harrison passed away a few months before I could send him my working paper. I would have liked to show him the enormous influence he has had on my thinking, and acknowledge my unpaid debt to him. And, yes, I would have liked to receive a “wow”, for his sake and my own, for I hope neither of us was or is ever too old for that kind of excitement.