Abstract

Social Relations 10 was much more than an "Introduction to Sociology" course; it was a forum in which Harrison White developed and codified a new sociological perspective. Before an audience of bewildered undergraduates and inspired graduate assistants, White presented, for the first time, the foundations of network analysis, replete with catnets, hubs and wheels, and the rest of his new conceptual vocabulary. In doing so, he challenged and rebutted the then dominant "attributes and attitudes perspective" most closely associated with Talcott Parsons, and presented in its place a fresh structural analysis, most closely associated in my mind with dialectical materialism.