William Lloyd Warner

Background

William Lloyd Warner was born in Redlands, Calif. , the son of William Taylor Warner, a rancher, engineer, and owner of a gold mine, and Clara Belle Carter.

Education

After graduating from high school in San Bernardino, Calif. , he tried to write Tin Pan Alley jazz. During World War I, he served in the infantry and then attended the University of California at Berkeley. In 1925 he graduated with a B. A. in anthropology.

Career

Warner's teachers Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber, both of whom became his good friends, encouraged him to study native non-Western peoples. Bronislaw Malinowski, another anthropologist of the British functionalist school, lectured at Berkeley shortly before Warner entered the field, an event that strengthened Warner's developing interest in functionalism. Warner told his colleagues that one day he would apply similar methods to an analysis of modern industrial society. In 1926, Warner received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study the Murgnin aborigines of northeastern Arnhem Land, Australia. Warner's functionalist education was completed under Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who became his mentor in Australia. Radcliffe-Brown introduced Warner to the works of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, French sociologists who argued that social life and symbolism represented distinct "social, " not "psychological, " phenomena. Durkheim's scientific approach to measuring social behaviors also contributed to Warner's later work. Radcliffe-Brown helped Warner to obtain funds for two more years of research from the Australian National Research Council. In his study Warner incorporated the thenstandard anthropological research interest in technology with Radcliffe-Brown's stress on kinship and with the Durkheimian interest in symbolism as a metaphor for social structure. Warner's was one of the earliest efforts to understand the linkages between social-structural and cultural-symbolic phenomena. Throughout the rest of his career he further expanded his understanding of these relationships between the symbolic, structural, technological, economic, and ecological components of human social communities. His doctoral dissertation is the classic A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (1937). Warner never defended the dissertation, however. After returning from Australia in 1929, Warner became assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the School of Business at Harvard. Elton Mayo, a physiological psychologist, helped bring Warner to Harvard, where the two served on the Committee on Industrial Psychology. Warner's work, which moved him into the forefront of modern American anthropology, took two major but interrelated directions. One involved his affiliation with Mayo's studies of worker relationships, unrest, and fatigue at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant in Chicago. Warner employed anthropological methods to show that worker fatigue could be reduced by altering relationships in the workplace. The other resulted in the Yankee City studies, which remain the most comprehensive studies of an American community. The Yankee City studies began in 1930, and the fieldwork ended five years later. The research, also coordinated with Mayo, was conducted in Newburyport, Massachussets While Mayo's group had largely conducted biological and psychological research on industrial workers, Warner convincingly argued that an anthropological study of an industrial setting would add an important social dimension. People are products of their social environments, he believed. Behaviors learned within the home and community influence the interactions observed in the workplace. Yankee City was Warner's opportunity to apply the techniques of study used and refined with the Murgnin to a modern social setting and, more important, to help improve factory conditions. The Yankee City studies employed a work force of graduate students and collaborating professors. Reams of quantitative data from censuses, surveys, and various local documents were collected, along with detailed life histories. Special studies examined the factories, ethnic groups, and symbols. This comprehensive approach was based on Warner's evolving concept of community. Reflecting Radcliffe-Brown's structuralism, Durkheim's concepts of social interdependence, concepts of social self developed by Georg Simmel and George Meade, and Malinowski's emphasis upon social means of meeting biological demands, Warner conceptualized community as the ordered, social relationships and values shared by a human group and passed on from generation to generation. Individuals receive "identity" through participation in community processes -

the rituals, family life, and other aspects of daily living. Relationships noted in the factory, for example, were traced to community patterns in general, such as social mobility, class, and ideals. The Yankee City studies led to Warner's definitions of social class and status. Class refers to social levels within communities associated with particular attitudes and life-styles. Status represents the position a person occupies within a given social context, as defined by such culturally meaningful variables as occupation, age, kinship, power, and sex. The Yankee City studies were published in six volumes between 1941 and 1959. They have been criticized for being overly generalized, and some claim that Warner's concept of community is of little use when analyzing the dynamics of American and other industrial societies. C. Wright Mills described Warner's discussions of class and status as being confusing, ahistorical, unconcerned with power, and of little theoretical value. Solon T. Kimball argued in 1979 that Warner's concepts emphasize human relationships, not static entities like individuals or particular social groups, and, further, that Warner's community and status concepts are cross-cultural and dynamic and have been misunderstood by sociologists. Warner also initiated or oversaw a number of community studies patterned after Yankee City. The more famous of these include Arensberg and Kimball's study in Ireland, Burleigh and Mary Gardner and Allison Davis' studies of southern racial-caste relations, and Warner's studies of the Midwest. In 1935, Warner took a position as associate professor in sociology and anthropology at Chicago. There he became involved with the Committee on Human Development. He investigated social-class influences on educational achievement, presenting data particularly useful in explaining the generally lower academic scores of black children. He also made studies of agricultural policy and worked with the Federal Extension Service in incorporating social-science findings into their educational approaches. He conducted studies on Navaho personality and tribal patterns under John Collier in the mid-1940's. These activities reflect Warner's continuing concern that social science be used to combat social problems and inequities. In 1946, Warner and Gardner formed Social Research, Inc. , a consulting firm offering social-science analysis of managerial and human-relations problems in business. The techniques employed in the Hawthorne studies and Yankee City were refined through this organization. Warner combined this activity with a series of studies of the personality, behavior, and general character of bureaucratic workers and executives, interests that led him to focus on corporate society. Warner became professor of social research at Michigan State University in 1959, a position he held until his death. In 1961 he identified the components of what he called "the emergent American society. "

Achievements

• He is noted for applying the techniques of his discipline to contemporary American culture.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Family of God: A Symbolic Study of Christian Life in America (Yale paperbounds;Y45)

    (rare)

  • The Corporation in the Emergent American Society
  • The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (Yankee City Series)

Views

He believed that the corporation is the most integrative influence upon American society as a whole. In The American Federal Executive (1967), he compared the personality, mobility, attitudes, and behavior of corporate executives with American ideals, goals, and expectations; a second volume was never completed.

Personality

Warner always encouraged students to be innovative, but he worked closely with them. He was a lively teacher, filling blackboards with diagrams and exchanging ideas in the classroom on anything from his ongoing fieldwork to the theories of Marx, Malinowski, and others. His conceptualizations of the way cultural norms and worldview interact to influence technology, organization, and ecological relations influenced the theories of Leslie White and Julian Steward. His discussions of class, family, and community influenced Talcott Parsons, Gunnar Myrdal, Robert Havighurst, Conrad Arensberg, Solon Kimball, and countless others. It is fair to say that by the time of his death in Chicago, Warner had achieved his goal of bringing anthropology into the modern world and making it a meaningful mechanism for understanding and exploring human relationships and problems.

Connections

On January 10, 1932, Warner married Mildred Hall; they had three children.

Father:

William Taylor Warner

A rancher, engineer, and owner of a gold mine

Mother:

Clara Belle Carter

Spouse:

Mildred Hall