William Foote Whyte: Quotes about studying

William Foote Whyte was American sociologist. Explore interesting quotes on study.
William Foote Whyte: 34   quotes 0   likes

“In addition to interviewing and participating, we spent a good deal of time in observing the interaction of the various people who make up the restaurant organization. For example, we observed waitresses getting their food from service-pantry girls and picking up drinks from bartenders, and we stood with the checker while she checked the waiters’ orders as they left one kitchen we were studying.”

William Foote Whyte

Source: Human relations in the restaurant industry. 1948, p. 361

People , Food , Girl , Drink

“[The Hawthorne studies was] perhaps the first major social science experiment… and we feel that continued efforts in this direction will yield rich returns in the development of the social sciences.”

William Foote Whyte

William Foote Whyte (1946), Industry and Society, New York. p. v-vi; Cited in: Richard Gillespie (1993), Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments. p. 255

Feeling , Effort , Study , Science

“Full-time participant observation over an extended period of time tends to be an age-graded phenomenon. Such studies are most likely to be done by young people, in our student years. When we are established professionals, with teaching or other professional responsibilities, we are unlikely to have the time and the motivation to make such a full commitment.”

William Foote Whyte

Source: Learning from the Field, 1984, p. 63

People , Age , Motivation , Study

“Without this combination of research methods, it is hard to imagine how this theoretical advance could have been achieved. If I had only relied on the anthropological studies, I would not have believed a student's report when professional anthropologists provided conflicting interpretations of the same community. Relying on the survey data alone, it would not have occurred to me to check the correlations between perceptions of conflict and perceptions of cooperation. If I had found a zero correlation, I could not have known how to interpret it.”

William Foote Whyte

Source: Participant observer, 1994, p. 242; As cited in: Ickis (2014)

Imagination , Communication , Study