Thinking Complexity with Harrison White: Towards Social Emergence via Indexical Language

Harrison C. White, a founding giant of the relational turn in Sociology, has left us a monumental model of social emergence based on the interplay of three primitives (identity, control, switching) and two principles (self-similarity, dispersion) of social organization. In this essay honoring his extraordinary legacy, I reflect on the significance of White’s theoretical model for future thinking on complexity in the social sciences. After the relational and cultural turns, I propose that Sociology take a complexity turn, in light of recent developments across the sciences. In this respect, White’s model provides sharp insights consistent with complex systems ontologies far from equilibrium, exhibiting path dependence and nonlinear phase transitions. His model radically breaks with cybernetic or autopoietic systems models, and recognizes the ambiguity of network ties not as measurement error, but as integral to social systems. Moreover, White’s later turn to sociolinguistics to theorize context-making and meaning in networks is pathbreaking. His incorporation of linguistic indexicality and reflexive metapragmatics to explain shifting network configurations refines our understanding of complexity specific to human life, where systems boundaries are seldom physical but primarily semiotic. My goal is to stimulate complexity thinking in Sociology by foregrounding White’s innovative analytical tools, including polymer netdoms, scale-invariance and nonlinearities, phenomenologies of ties and stories, boundaries enabling multiple contingencies, resilient footings sustaining ambiguity, meaning and context-making via indexical switching, and speech registers indexing subsystems differentiation but also interpenetration, among others. I conclude by positioning White’s model in complexity debates on restricted versus general emergence, and claim his model contains a theory of general emergence based on irreducible path dependence and historical contingency.