Throughout
a career spanning more than half a century, William Foote Whyte addressed questions
that lie at the heart of sociology—how individuals, groups, and
societies shape each other, how social processes operate at every scale
of human activity—and illuminated them with his participant
observation. His works are memorable, starting with the classic Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum,
1943 (which has been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, German,
Chinese, and Japanese), and including: Money and Motivation: An
Analysis of Incentives in Industry, 1977; Worker Participation and
Ownership: Cooperative Strategies for Strengthening Local Economies,
1983; Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker
Cooperative Complex (with K. Whyte), 1988. Whyte’s analyses on
these and other topics played an important part in subsequent scholarly
work, stimulating further research. And, perhaps more importantly, his
Street Corner Society introduced, since its publication almost sixty
years ago, innumerable students the world over to the power of
sociological analysis. The American Sociological Association is proud
to honor this creative and imaginative scholar. (ASA Past-President Whyte died this year.)