Hidden Meanings: Cultural Content and Context in Harrison White's Structural Sociology

Abstract

This paper is about structural sociology as practiced by one of the more important sociologists and social thinkers of our day-Harrison White, lately of Columbia University. I have chosen this topic because thinking is an important, perhaps the most important, feature of contemporary social thought; because Professor White's approach to the study of social structure is particularly influential; and because, frankly, I have misgivings about certain features of the program. It seems to me, in general, a good principle that critical questions ought to be raised about views that are on the verge of becoming accepted orthodoxy. In this paper I intend mainly to probe a line of thinking to see what sorts of dubious notions might actually be involved, but I will also suggest a few alternatives and improvements as I go along. There can be little doubt that the analysis of social structures as networks of relations among persons and positions is of decisive importance in contemporary sociology, and that Professor White plays an important role in current thinking about these matters. In the index of Collins's (1988) Theoretical Sociology-perhaps the best guide to the current state of scientifically oriented thinking in sociological theory-the word structure and words related to it take up an entire column, whereas words such as culture, social control, stratification, institutions, and social change take up half as many lines or fewer. White's name occupies 10 lines in the index. Of living sociologists, he is mentioned less often than Peter Blau (another structuralist), Jonathan Turner, and Harold Garfinkel, but he is cited more often than Robert K. Merton, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas, Arthur Stinchcombe, or Immanuel Wallerstein, among others. Apart from an uncharacteristic book (written with Cynthia White) on institutional and stylistic change in the French art world (White and White 1965), White has attempted for the last 30 years to work in a rigorously structuralist frame, which is to say that he has focused on the form of fundamental patterns of interaction that link individuals and larger social units to one another or provide the essential, underlying channels within which behavior occurs (Mullins 1973, pp. 256-57). In this sense, White has been unusually faithful to perhaps the single most distinguishing project of our discipline since the classical period: the effort to demonstrate how social structure constrains and in some instances even determines human behavior. This emphasis on underlying structures is evident in White's early mathematical studies of kinship organization (White 1963) and in his mature conceptualizations of vacancy chains as the channels of social mobility in organizations (White 1970), of blocks as positions in social networks (Boorman and White 1976; White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976), and of