Whyte, William Foote

For many students and scholars in North America, William Foote Whyte's work represented the first exposure to the idea that people learning and working together to improve things could succeed much more readily than individuals working in isolation. For many, too, who had missed the practical reform work of Paulo Freire in Brazil and Myles Horton in the southern USA, Whyte's writings introduced us to the potential in empowering problem holders to solve their own problems. The researcher in such a situation takes on the role of colearner rather than know-it-all expert. The researcher helps problem holders organize and find the resources to create positive social change but does not impose his or her ideas for change. Indeed, Whyte persisted until the end of his life in adding the word participatory to “action research’ to emphasize the significance of engaging those who might otherwise be seen as ‘subjects' in the research.

Whyte was born June 27, 1914, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He grew up in the Bronx, Caldwell, New Jersey, and in Bronxville, New York. He graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1936, having majored in economics. Following this, he went on to 4 years at Harvard University as a member of the Society of Fellows, followed by 3 years at the University of Chicago, where he received a Ph.D. in sociology with a minor in social anthropology. Whyte began his teaching career at the University of Oklahoma. In 1943, he contracted polio and spent a year at the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia, where he learned to walk with a cane. From that point on, Whyte conducted all of his fieldwork with the aid of crutches or a cane. From 1944 to 1948, he taught at the University of Chicago and then moved to Ithaca, New York, where he joined the faculty of the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. When he retired as an active faculty member, he co-founded Programs for Employment and Workplace Systems to promote the engagement of faculty in participatory action with union leaders and managers. He died in Ithaca on 16 July 2000.

In his autobiography, Participant Observer, Whyte recounts a lifetime of research projects that illustrate the role of the participatory action researcher. A clear example of why participation is critical can be seen in his 1950s work with poor farmers in Latin America, as part of a Cornell University rural development project. He went there to study the organizational and cultural issues in the introduction of new farming technology. It turned out that the local farmers' rational practice of growing corn with beans meant that growing a new, high-yielding variety of corn would not work. Local knowledge was needed for the successful introduction of technology. Inclusion of peasant farmers in the planning of agricultural improvement would lead to far better results.

In his earliest study, published in 1943 as Street Corner Society, Whyte's approach was unconventional because he engaged as a participant in the social world of the people he was studying. When Whyte reported to one of the Boston gang members he was studying that he ‘just want[ed] to understand these things as best I [he] can and write them up,’ he was challenged to believe that in writing about the conditions of poverty and lack of work the gang members experienced, he might be able to change things. He came to understand that he was working with the group of young men he was studying.

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