William F. Whyte: Contributions to management

The name of William Foote Whyte is most frequently associated with Street Corner Society, the sociological study of life in Bostonʹs North End during the late 1930s, but his research spanned another sixty years in a range of settings on three continents. This article traces his achievements over the decades, as he developed and applied a participatory action research methodology in the kitchens of Chicago restaurants, the oilfields of Oklahoma and Venezuela, subsistence farms in Peru and Guatemala, and industrial cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. It describes how this methodology, grounded in case research, led to social change at the “Tremont Hotel” in a Midwestern city. It questions why his achievements have not received greater recognition among by academicians and practitioners, perhaps because his ideas and findings on social change produced discomfort among peers and the sponsors of his research.