The General Sociology of Harrison C. White

The General Sociology of Harrison C. White The General Sociology of Harrison C. White Chaos and Order in Networks G. Reza Azarian © G. Reza Azarian 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-4434-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-52247-7 ISBN 978-0-230-59671-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230596719 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Azarian, G. Reza, 1960– The general sociology of Harrison C.White : chaos and order in networks / G. Reza Azarian. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-349-52247-7 1. Social networks. 2. Sociology. 3.White, Harrison C. I. Title. HM741.A93 2005 302.4—dc22 2005044354 10987654321 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 For Nadja Contents Foreword by Randall Collins ix Acknowledgments xvii 1 Introduction 1 2 Return to Empirical Social Reality 13 White as an empirical sociologist 13 Search for general social logics 20 Networks as analytical tool 25 White’s mobility studies 27 3 Ties and Networks 35 Social networks as theoretical paradigm 35 Social ties 37 Dynamics of ties 44 Story 51 A new image of contemporary social contexts 53 4 Control and Identity 59 Embedded in multiple networks 59 Control 64 Modes of control 69 Control and agency 76 Identity 79 5 Structures and Disciplines 83 Structural analysis 83 Structural equivalence 88 Comparability 97 Disciplines 100 vii viii Contents 6 A General Assessment 108 Quest for the real 110 Misleading ontological constructs 113 Real social forces 118 Some critical remarks 121 Appendix 135 Notes 151 References 153 Bibliography of Harrison C. White’s Work 160 Index 166 Foreword The publication of Reza Azarian’s treatise is a major event for the field of sociological theory. Harrison White is regarded by many as the greatest living sociologist. But he is notoriously difficult to understand, especially in his later and most important work. White has had a long series of important students, such as Paul DiMaggio, Mark Granovetter, and many others, who have established both sociology of networks and sociology of culture as prominent fields. Yet, none of White’s successful students claim to fully understand him. The lead- ing American sociologists, like Charles Tilly, Andrew Abbott, Arthur Stinchcombe, and others, all try their hand at interpreting him. Harrison White is like an IQ test for sociologists. In this respect, he is like James Joyce was 50 years ago: all intellectuals read him whether or not they understand him, and some made careers by expounding the secret meaning of Ulysses or by providing A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake. Reza Azarian is doing the field of sociology a great service in much the same way, by providing the first systematic, comprehensive explanation of Harrison White’s theory. It should be noted that Harrison White is not a bad writer in the conventional sense. He is not difficult in the way that Talcott Parsons or Pierre Bourdieu could be; he is not grammatically involuted or complicated, nor pretentious or rhetorical and defensive. White’s writings sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph are lucid and incisive, even full of bon mots. The trouble in understanding lies elsewhere. White is so deeply innovative that the rest of us have trouble seeing how he frames the world. In contrast, Bourdieu once you get through the verbiage is comparatively easy – a synthesis of Marxism with cultural sociology via a structuralist device of quasi- autonomous but mutually self-reproducing fields. White, however, wants to break entirely with the vision of society as stratification, and indeed as permanent structures of any kind. As Azarian points out, White wants a theory of pure process, sheer ongoing making, and unmaking of structural connections, a world in which there are no fixed identities, and no individual essences either on the level of personalities, groups, or organizations. His image for this world of ix x Foreword ephemeral mutually constituting temporary structures is the network. But it is a vision of networks which is so much more ambitious and profound than other network researchers that we have to recon- ceptualize most of that field too. In Azarian’s lucid account, the primary conceptual elements in White’s universe are not individuals (whether human selves or organizations); but neither are they holistic concepts such as culture or social structure. He offers instead networks, ties, and stories. All these terms have conventional referents; part of the difficulty in understanding White is that he gives them new and unconventional meanings. Networks are made out of ties; at the same time, ties constitute the units (or identities) which they connect. White empha- sizes that ties, at least in contemporary society, should not be regarded as permanent things, as if modelled on kinship structures in traditional tribes. Ties are emphemeral; they are made and unmade in an ongoing process of attempts at control. The argument can be made in regard to individual human selves; it works just as well on the level of business organizations. What we are emerges out of our ties; at the same time, we manipulate our ties in order to control them, and to escape from being controlled. What White calls story is the subjective phenomenology of ties; we tell stories about ourselves, in a plot peopled by others in our networks; in the process we confirm and reconstitute the networks. Another way to say this is that the networks that we see are merely a selection from all the myriad social encounters we have, with a few of these brought into focus as especially important and meaningful. Contrary to the purely formalist model of networks, the content of ties does matter; for it is what flows through the ties in the form of telling stories that enacts some ties as the genuinely consequential ones. One might also regard this as a structured flow of cultural capital, usually localized and particularistic, in contrast to the generalized cultural capital which Bourdieu sees as flowing predictably through a very large circuit of the total society. In White’s terms, stereotyped stories constitute the networks, by putting a frame around our own deal- ings with others, and crystalizing them in a short-hand form in which they can circulate still further in other people’s stories which make up our own reputations. This also applies to business firms; a key feature of their economic position is just these stories that they tell about each other as to their linkages, product qualities, and reputations. Foreword xi In a famous quotation, White says “there is no tidy atom and no embracing world, only complex situations, long strings reptating as in a polymer goo, or in a mineral before it hardens” (Identity and Control, 1992, p. 4 [quoted in Azarian p. 54]). As Azarian explains, plastics and other similar materials are glassy, hard and brittle at lower temperatures, but when heated soften and turn into a shapeless goo. White is being a bit of a post-modernist here; he asserts that whatever network models might have been useful for traditional societies (although our image of their static character may well be overstated), in our contemporary world there are no enduring structures, and no enduring identities. Yet there is a science of the “chemistry” of these emphemeral shapes and transformations; that is network theory á la Harrison White. Ties, moreover, are multiplex; there are different sorts of connections, even with the same individuals, and hence there are many different flows through each node, and many different demands on attention. Thus different kinds of ties compete with each other and drive each other out. The individual (person or organization) follows a strategy of control. White coins terms for three control strategies: “ambiguity” about relationships in order to preserve freedom of action; “ambage,” that is using partners to indirectly influence others; and “decoupling”, that is breaking ties or obligations. Identity arises from such efforts at control. The structures that arise from such strategies are kinds of networks, forming patterns of structurally equivalent actors. The most important kinds of structures, the major shapes on the social landscape are called “disciplines” by white, presumably because these are strong networks that impose discipline on their members. Here White indulges in his propensity for coining neologisms, and Azarian does a great service in spelling out what they mean.

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