William Lloyd Warner (b. October 26 October 26 is the 299th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 66 days remaining until the end of the year, 1898 1898 was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Thursday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar), Redlands, California Redlands is a city in San Bernardino County, California, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 63,591. The city is located 10 miles (16 km) east of downtown San Bernardino; d. May 23 May 23 is the 143rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 222 days remaining until the end of the year, 1970 1970 was a common year that started on a Thursday (link shows full calendar), in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. It was also the first year of the 1970s, Chicago, Illinois Chicago ( /ʃɨˈkɑːɡoʊ/ or /ʃɨˈkɔːɡoʊ/) is the largest city in both Illinois and the Midwest, and the third most populous city in the United States, with over 2.8 million people living within the city limits. Its metropolitan area, commonly named "Chicagoland", is the 26th most populous in the world, home to an estimated 9.7) was a pioneering anthropologist noted for applying the techniques of his discipline to contemporary American culture.

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Career at Harvard

Warner received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley , is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. The university occupies 6,651 acres (2,692 ha) in 1925. After serving as a researcher for the Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr. ("Junior"), and Senior's principal and the Australian National Research Council (1926-1929), Warner enrolled at Harvard Harvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the Ivy League. Established in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the first corporation chartered in the United States and oldest institution of higher learning in the United States (1929-1935) as a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology and the Graduate School of Business School Administration. His first book, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (1937), followed the conventional anthropological path of studying a primitive people.

During his years at Harvard, he became a member of a group of social scientists, led by Australian social psychologist Elton Mayo George Elton Mayo was an Australian psychologist, sociologist and organization theorist, who were exploring the social and psychological dimensions of industrial settings. Mayo, the father of the Human Relations Movement Human Relations Movement refers to those researchers of organizational development who study the behavior of people in groups, in particular workplace groups. It originated in the 1930s' Hawthorne studies, which examined the effects of social relations, motivation and employee satisfaction on factory productivity. The movement viewed workers in, is best known for his discovery of the Hawthorne Effect The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation in the course of his motivational research at the Western Electric Company. (On Warner's association with Mayo, see [1]).

Career in Chicago

In 1935, he was appointed professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago The University of Chicago is a private, coeducational research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890; William Rainey Harper became its first president in 1891 and the first classes were held in 1892, where he remained until 1959, when he was appointed professor of social research at Michigan State University Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act. Its alumni include at least six winners of the Pulitzer Prize. MSU’s record of Rhodes Scholars. During his Chicago years, Warner's research included important studies of black communities in Chicago and the rural South, of a New England community ("Yankee City"/Newburyport, MA), and a Midwestern community ("Jonesville"). In addition to these community studies, Warner researched business leaders and government administrators, as well as producing important books on race, religion, and American society.

Warner's Yankee City study was undoubtedly the most ambitious and sustained examination of an American community ever undertaken. Warner and his team of researchers occupied Newburyport for nearly a decade, conducting exhaustive interviews and surveys. Ultimately, the study produced 5 volumes: The Social Life of a Modern Community (1941), The Status System of a Modern Community (1942), The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (1945), The Social System of a Modern Factory (1947), and The Living and the Dead: A Study in the Symbolic Life of Americans (1959).

Criticisms

One of the most scathing critiques of Warner's methods came not from a fellow social scientist, but from popular novelist John Phillips Marquand. A Newburyport native with deep roots in the town, Marquand was annoyed by Warner's efforts to quantify and generalize people and experiences whose particularity served as the basis for several of his novels. In Point of No Return (1947), Marquand mercilessly lampooned Warner (the character Malcolm Bryant) and his work.

Marquand was generally scornful of academics, for instance his cruel portrayal of literature scholar Alan Southby in Wickford Point (1939), but his animus for Warner was personal. In Warner's deterministic vision of American culture, a small town boy like the Point of No Return protagonist Charles Gray would have had little hope of breaking free of the bonds of his provincial lower-upper-class status. That Marquand himself, like Charles Gray, was able to do so seemed a clear refutation of Bryant/Warner's fatalistic theorizing and facile status taxonomies.

Despite his impressive productivity and wide range of interests, Warner's work has long been out of fashion. An empiricist in an era when the social disciplines were increasingly theoretical, fascinated with economic and social inequality in a time when Americans were eager to deny its significance, and implicitly skeptical of the possibilities of legislating social change at a time when many social scientists were eager to be policymakers, Warner's focus on uncomfortable subjects made his work unfashionable. Warner's interest in communities — when the social science mainstream was stressing the importance of urbanization — and religion — when the fields' leaders were aggressively secularist — also helped to marginalize him. Recent work finds cause to celebrate Warner's work and his career. (See McCracken, Grant. 1988. Ever dearer in our thoughts: patina and the representation of status before and after the 18th century. Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 41-42.)

Relevance to Modern Anthropology

Events of the past decade have given Warner's work new relevance. His community studies offer invaluable evidence for scholars investigating social capital, civic engagement, civil society, and the role of religion in public life (Verba, Brady & Schlozman 1995; Putnam 1999; Theda Skocpol Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist at Harvard University. She served from 2005 to 2007 as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Influential in sociology as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, and in political science for her "state autonomy theory", Skocpol has 1999). His studies of class, race, and inequality grow more timely as the deep inequities of American society grow more evident.

Sources

Categories: 1898 births | 1970 deaths | American anthropologists Categories: Anthropologists | Anthropologists by nationality | American scientists | American social scientists | American people by occupation | Social psychologists

 

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