Harrison White - The Harvard Revolution

The Harvard Revolution

In 1963, White left Chicago to be an associate professor of sociology at the Harvard Department of Social Relations, where he became the leader of the “Harvard Revolution” in social networks. White’s research on “vacancy chains” was assisted by a number of graduate students, including Michael Schwartz and Ivan Chase.

The outcome of this was the book Chains of Opportunity. The book described a model of social mobility where the roles and the people that filled them were independent. The idea of a person being partially created by their position in patterns of relationships has become a recurring theme in his work. This provided a quantitative analysis of social roles, allowing scientists new ways to measure society that were not based on statistical aggregates.

Another of his graduate students, Mark Granovetter, studying how people got jobs, discovered they were more likely to get them through acquaintances than through friends. This, tied with earlier work by Stanley Milgram (who was also in the Harvard Department of Social Relations, though not one of White’s students), gave scientists a better sense of how the social world was organized: into dense groups with “weak ties” between them. This line of research is still actively being pursued by Jon Kleinberg, Duncan Watts and others.