Barry Wellman (30 September 1942 – 9 July 2024) was an American-Canadian sociologist and was the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research were community sociology, the Internet, human–computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest was in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He wrote and co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as the S. D. Clark Professor.
Among the theories Wellman helped develop were: "network of networks" and "the network city" (both with Paul Craven), "the community question",Claude Fischer, "Inventing the Social Network," Boston Review, 19 December 2013 "computer networks as social networks",Barry Wellman, "Computer Networks as Social Networks." Science 293 (14 September 2001): 2031-34. "connected lives" andBarry Wellman and Bernie Hogan, with Kristen Berg, Jeffrey Boase, Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Rochelle Côté, Jennifer Kayahara, Tracy L.M. Kennedy and Phouc Tran. "Connected Lives: The Project" Pp. 157-211 in Networked Neighbourhoods: The Online Community in Context, edited by Patrick Purcell. Guildford, UK: Springer, 2006. the "immanent Internet" (both with Bernie Hogan),Barry Wellman and Bernie Hogan (2004). "The Immanent Internet." Pp. 54-80 in Netting Citizens: Exploring Citizenship in a Digital Age, edited by Johnston McKay. Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press. "media-multiplexity" (with Caroline Haythornthwaite),Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman, "Work, Friendship and Media Use for Information Exchange in a Networked Organization." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 49, 12 (Oct. 1998): 1101-1114 "networked individualism" and "networked society",Barry Wellman, "Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Networked Individualism." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25,2 (June 2001): 227-52 "personal community" and "personal network"Barry Wellman, "The Community Question: The Intimate Networks of East Yorkers." American Journal of Sociology 84 (March 1979): 1201-31. and three with Anabel Quan-Haase: "hyperconnectivity", "local virtuality" and "virtual locality".Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman, "Networks of Distance and Media: A Case Study of a High Tech Firm." Trust and Communities conference, Bielefeld, Germany, July 2003; Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman. 2004. "Local Virtuality in a High-Tech Networked Organization." Anaylse & Kritik 26 (special issue 1): 241-57 SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1; Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman, "How Computer-Mediated Hyperconnectivity and Local Virtuality Foster Social Networks of Information and Coordination in a Community of Practice." International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Redondo Beach, California, February 2005.; Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman. "Hyperconnected Net Work: Computer-Mediated Community in a High-Tech Organization." Pp. 281-333 in The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy, edited by Charles Heckscher and Paul Adler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006
Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman were co-authors of the 2012 prize-winning Networked: The New Social Operating System (MIT Press).; "2012 PROSE Awards Complete List of Winners," Association of American Publishers, February 2013 Wellman was also the editor of three books and more than 500 articles, often co-written with students.
Wellman received career achievement awards from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, the International Network for Social Network Analysis, the International Communication Association, the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence, and two sections of the American Sociological Association: Community and Urban Sociology; Communication and Information Technologies. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) in 2007. In 2012, Wellman was identified as having the highest h-index (of citations) of all Canadian sociologists.Toronto Globe and Mail, 27 March 2012, pp. B8-B9. He was a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013. Since July 2013, he co-directed the NetLab Network. Wellman was honoured with the Lim Chong Yah Visiting Professorship of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore in January–February 2015.
After a long illness, Wellman died at the age of 81 on 9 July 2024.
Early life Barry Wellman was born and raised in the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road area of the Bronx, New York City. He attended P.S. 33 and Creston J.H.S. 79, and was a teenage member of the Fordham Flames.Barry Wellman, "I was a teenage network analyst," Connections 17(2):28-45 He gained his high school degree from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959. He received his A.B. (Bachelor's) degree magna cum laude from Lafayette College in 1963, majoring in social history and winning prizes in both history and religious studies. At Lafayette, he was a member of the McKelvy Honors House and captained the undefeated 1962 College Bowl team, whose final victory was over Berkeley.Barry Wellman, "On from Lafayette"
His graduate work was at Harvard University, where he trained with Chad Gordon, Charles Tilly and Harrison White, and also studied with Roger Brown, Cora Du Bois, George Homans, Alex Inkeles, Florence Kluckhohn, Talcott Parsons and Phillip J. Stone. He received a M.A. in Social Relations in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1969. His focus was on community, computer applications, social networks and self-conception, and his dissertation showed that the social identities of African-American and White American Pittsburgh junior high school students were related to the extent of segregation of their schools.
From 1965 until his death, he was married to Beverly Wellman, a researcher in complementary and alternative medicine.Merrijoy Kelner and Beverly Wellman, eds., Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Challenge and Change. London: Harwood/Taylor and Francis, 2000;
Career Community sociology Until 1990, he focused on community sociology and social network analysis. During his first three years in Toronto, he also held a joint appointment with the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry where he working with D. B. Coates, M.D., co-directing the "Yorklea Study" in the Toronto borough of East York. This first East York study, with data collected in 1968, did a field study of a large population, linking interpersonal relations with psychiatric symptoms. This early study of "social support" documented the prevalence of non-local friendship and kinship ties, demonstrating that community is no longer confined to neighborhood and studying non-local communities as social networks. Wellman's "The Community Question" paper, reporting on this study, has been selected as one of the seven most important articles in English-Canadian sociology.Claude Fischer, To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1982. Robert J. Sampson, "Local Friendship Ties and Community Attachment in Mass Society: A Multilevel Systemic Model." American Sociological Review, 1988. Barrett A. Lee. RS Oropesa. Barbara J. Metch. Avery M. Guest. "Testing the Decline-of-Community Thesis: Neighborhood Organizations in Seattle, 1929 and 1979." American Journal of Sociology, 89, 5, 1161-1188. March 1984. Barry Wellman, "The Community Question: The Intimate Networks of East Yorkers." American Journal of Sociology 84 (March 1979): 1201-31.
A second East York study, conducted in 1978 and 1979 at the University of Toronto's Centre for Urban and Community Studies, used in-depth interviews with 33 East Yorkers (originally surveyed in the first study) to learn more information about their social networks. It provided evidence about which kinds of ties and networks supply which types of social support. It showed, for example, that sisters provide siblings with much emotional support, while parents provide financial aid.Nan Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Barry Wellman and Scot Wortley. "Different Strokes from Different Folks: Community Ties and Social Support." 1990. American Journal of Sociology 96, 3 (Nov.): 558-88. Barry Wellman and Scot Wortley, "Brothers' Keepers: Situating Kinship Relations in Broader Networks of Social Support." Sociological Perspectives 32, 3 (1989): 273-306. Barry Wellman, Peter Carrington and Alan Hall "Networks as Personal Communities." Pp. 130-84 in Social Structures: A Network Approach, edited by Barry Wellman and S.D. Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Vicky Cattell. (2001). "Poor people, poor places, and poor health: the mediating role of social networks and social capital." Social Science and Medicine, 52 (10): 1501-1516. The support comes more from the characteristics of the ties than from the networks in which they are embedded.Barry Wellman and Kenneth Frank. "Network Capital in a Multi-Level World: Getting Support in Personal Communities." Pp. 233-73 in Social Capital: Theory and Research, edited by Nan Lin, Karen Cook and Ronald Burt. Chicago: Aldine DeGruyter, 2001.Talja Blokland, Urban Bonds. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Linton Freeman, A History of Social Network Analysis. Vancouver: Empiric Press, 2004. This research also demonstrated that wives maintain social networks for their husbands as well as for themselves.Barry Wellman, "Men in Networks: Private Community, Domestic Friendships." Pp. 74-114 in Men's Friendships, edited by Peter Nardi. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. (1992). Barry Wellman, "Domestic Work, Paid Work and Net Work." Pp. 159-91 in Understanding Personal Relationships, edited by Steve Duck and Daniel Perlman. London: Sage, 1985.
Although Wellman's work has shifted primarily to studies of the Internet (see section below), he has continued collaborative analyses of the first and second East York studies, showing that reciprocity (like social support) is much more of a tie phenomenon than a social network phenomenonGabriele Plickert, Rochelle Côté and Barry Wellman. 2007. " It's Not Who You Know, It's How You Know Them: Who Exchanges What With Whom?" Social Networks 29, 3:405-29. and that the frequency and supportiveness of interpersonal contact before the Internet was non-linearly associated with residential (and workplace) distance.Diana Mok and Barry Wellman. 2007. "How Much Did Distance Matter Before the Internet?" Social Networks 29: in press.
Wellman has edited Networks in the Global Village (1999), a book of original articles about personal networks around the world. In 2007, he edited a special issue, "The Network is Personal" of the journal Social Networks (vol. 29, no. 3, July), containing analyses from Canada, France, Germany and Iran.
Social network theory Concomitant with his empirical work, Wellman contributed to the theory of social network analysis. The most comprehensive statement is in his introductory article to Social Structures, co-edited with the late S. D. Berkowitz. This work reviews the history of social network thought, and suggests a number of basic principles of social network analysis.Barry Wellman, "Structural Analysis: From Method and Metaphor to Theory and Substance." Pp. 19-61 in Social Structures: A Network Approach, edited by Barry Wellman and S.D. Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.