William Foote Whyte

William Foote Whyte was an American sociologist, born in 1914, best known for his ethnographic study Street Corner Society, published in 1943, for which he lived for four years as a participant observer in an Italian American neighborhood of Boston's North End while a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, documenting the social structure of a street-corner gang and its social world. The book became a foundational text in urban sociology and in the method of sustained participant observation itself. He later joined Cornell University in 1948, where he shifted his research toward industrial sociology and workers' cooperatives, studying labor relations and worker ownership models in Venezuela, Peru, Guatemala and Spain. He served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1981. He died in 2000.