the failure of the network approach or how structuralism returned to where harrison white started

The publication of Harrison White’s notes in Sociologica is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in an academic journal! The notes themselves are fascinating, although if you’ve read some of Identity and Control and Markets from Networks they’re not entirely new. Perhaps more fascinating though are the commentary around the notes. Marco Santoro offers one of the most impressive and succinct summaries of the history of network analysis that I’ve seen (by focusing on White’s early contribution), and Michael Schwartz’s reflections on the class are really interesting.

What’s remarkable about White’s notes, in retrospect, is how complete his view of networks and categories were for their time. That’s not to say that White had it all figured out way back in the early 1960s, but all of the necessary parts were there. The “elementary types of social structure” – networks, categories/identities, frames – are all present in these notes. It’s also remarkable that it took so long for structural sociology to reincorporate all of these elements after a long period of networks-dominated structural theory.

Both from Santoro’s and Schwartz’s account we learn that the real motivator behind White’s Social Relations 10 class was the dominant Parsonian theory that focused so heavily on “attributes and attitudes.” I had no idea that White’s theorizing was such a strong reaction to Parsons’s structural-functionalism. I realized that Goffman and the symbolic interactionists were very critical of Parsons’s approach, but Schwartz makes it clear that White was equally resistant and even hostile (perhaps this is why I see complementarity between White’s theory and symbolic interactionism).

In those days, he was not even a little bit diplomatic about this disdain. I can remember (in a graduate course) him savaging Parsons while Chad Gordon (a Parsonsian and his co-teacher) squirmed around trying to figure out a defense. For us as graduate students, that disdain was the hookfor everything else. We could easily see the failures of the “attributes and attitudes” approach in the various texts we were reading (by ourselves or with his help), and this made us hungry for an alternate view that could better explain the evidence.

The rejection of Parsons united a group of grad students around White. In White’s “catnets” approach they saw a new kind of sociology emerging that could change the way sociologists think about individuals and their relation to society. The basic idea was that individuals could be understood as mutually embedded in personal relationships (i.e., networks or “nets”) and categorical domains (i.e, identities or “cats”). The mutual reinforcement of these two constraints created the basic framework that shaped sociability. White’s approach was revolutionary in the sense that it avoided functionalist theorizing while offering an alternative empirical methodology to attitudinal research.

Students of networks and culture will note that not all of White’s ideas were picked up by the cadre of grad students that came out of those “heady” times. Rather quickly the project quickly coalesced around the idea that structuralism should be the empirical analysis of networks. Santoro notes that many of his students became almost solely methodologically focused, developing the tools that would come to be the backbone of network analysis in the years to come. Even White became preoccupied block modeling for a time. The cultural component of White’s original “catnets” thesis was largely left behind (although see Breiger’s duality thesis as a nice step in that direction). In fact, one might say that the “catnets” idea wasn’t picked up again until the ecologists revamped some of his ideas with new terminology – see especially the work of Miller McPherson, whose “ecology of affiliation” approach was the beginning, I think, of an attempt to reinvigorate the “duality of networks and identities” idea.

Why did White’s grad students get so caught up in the relational component of catnets and lose the cultural component? Who knows really. One explanation is that the students wanted to get as far away from “attributes and attitudes” as they could and network materiality was a nice bunker in which to build reinforcement. Michael Schwartz’s experience illustrates:

Another of Harrison’s great innovations was “problem sets,” just like in Math courses. One problem set, I remember, led to a fine illustration of the hub structure of networks. The students were required to choose their two best friends and have those two choose their two best friends and etc., going out, I think, to six removes. Most of the networks folded back to the student tracing them, but one of my students’ had a network which consisted of something like 20 people stretched out with almost no reciprocal ties, and zero people choosing my student. I took one look at the network she had traced and felt a great sorrow come over me, as I realized that she was a very lonely, unloved person, without any real group of friends. And then I was won over to the fundamental theory of network analysis, that structure expresses and/or creates content.

For at least the next twenty years, the network folks would attempt to show how all kinds of “content” were endogenous to network structure. There is still a lot of that research still being done (especially in organizational studies), much of it very well-done and interesting. But while the network approach generated significant empirical insights, it never seemed to live up to its revolutionary potential. Recently, some have worried that the network approach was in the doldrums. One might speculate that network exhaustion creeped in because the entire project departed from its theoretical foundations too early. White’s original intent, I think, was to show that network structure and identities were mutually constitutive. You couldn’t understand how one evolved without the other. Nets without cats wasn’t a theory at all.

More recently the catnets concept has been rejuvenated, some of it by White’s own work in the books mentioned above. But others, like Paul DiMaggio, John Mohr, Ann Mische, have done their best to reunite culture and networks. A 2000 issue of Poetics pushed the idea even further, even publishing a paper by White on modeling discourse. Ron Breiger organized another special issue of Poetics in 2005 that focused more exclusively on “cats” – how classification affects markets. Thus, it appears that 40 years later, structural sociology is finally embracing the totality of catnet, which perhaps explains why it took so long for the original notes to be published.