Howard S. Becker

Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 13th Feburary 2013. Laurie Taylor presents a special programme which pays tribute to the work and legacy of one of the most significant sociologists of our times, Stan Cohen. Cohen came up with the term 'moral panic' in his study Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), referring to the media and social reaction...

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When is an artistic work finished? When the copyeditor makes the final correction to a manuscript, when the composer writes the last note of a symphony, or when the painter puts the last brushstroke on the canvas? Perhaps it's even later, when someone reads the work, when an ensemble performs, or when the painting is hung on a gallery wall for view...

Every night, somewhere in the world, three or four musicians will climb on stage together. Whether the gig is at a jazz club, a bar, or a bar mitzvah, the performance never begins with a note, but with a question. The trumpet player might turn to the bassist and ask, “Do you know ‘Body and Soul’?”—and from there the subtle craft of playin...

Participating actively in an artistic world you want to study both helps and hinders your work. If you understand the people you want to study when they talk about their work, you already know what it might take an outsider months to learn. In our participant observation study of the world of jazz musicians, we discovered some common problematic si...

I Remember, one of French writer Georges Perec’s most famous pieces, consists of 480 numbered paragraphs—each just a few short lines recalling a memory from his childhood. The work has neither a beginning nor an end. Nor does it contain any analysis. But it nonetheless reveals profound truths about French society during the 1940s and 50s. Takin...

On the Concept of CommitmentThe term "commitment" is experiencing a growing success in sociological debates. In this article, the author examines the uses of the concept of commitment in order to understand the reasons for its growing popularity. He also points out the nature of one of the social mechanisms to which the term implicitly refers, and...

L’utilisation du concept d’engagement (commitment) est largement répandue, mais ce concept n’a que rarement fait l’objet d’une analyse formelle. Il contient une explication sous-jacente de l’un des mécanismes générateurs de comportements humains cohérents. On parle d’engagement lorsqu’un individu, en prenant un pari subsidiaire, associe à une ligne...

H.S. Becker and R.R. Faulkner, starting from their own experiment of musicians of jazz and their work of ground, study the processes of construction of the repertories of the jazz. They take the pieces, the musicians, the situations of play, the usual repertory, as as many units of analysis enabling them to make explicit the choices and the constra...

Sociologists typically have trouble writing. Experience in a seminar devoted to writing suggests that these troubles and the obscurity of much sociological prose arise from the social organization of colleges, graduate schools, and the discipline. The seminar experimented with ways of dealing with these problems.

Everyone knows that most of the things that happen to them happen “by accident,” and this is particularly true of the things that are most important to us, like our choice of a career or a mate. Yet social science theory looks for determinate causal relationships, which do not give an adequate account of this thing that “everyone knows.” If we take...

Studies of the impact of the media on people have not produced stable results, because they operate with an unrealistic view of audience members as an inert mass of passive "recipients" of what is aimed at them. Observation of television viewers in France, and the examples of amateur photography and pornography, show the importance of a more realis...

How do photographs provide evidence for social science arguments? Analysis of A Seventh Man , a book about migrant labor in Europe, by John Berger and Jean Mohr, suggests that they do this by providing specified generalizations, which state a general idea embodied in images of specific people, places, and events.

Drawing on more than four decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, Howard Becker now brings to students and researchers the many valuable techniques he has learned. Tricks of the Trade will help students learn how to think about research projects. Assisted by Becker's sage advice, students can make better sense of their research and simul...

The connected “package” of practices and relationships which make up an art world, such as the world of music making, creates a powerful inertia, since it is always easier to use the already present elements of the package. Innovation is possible and occurs whenever people are willing to go to the trouble of doing things the hard way.

Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism are social constructions whose meaning arises in the contexts, organizational and historical, of different worlds of photographic work. Rereading photographs made in one genre as though they had been made in another illustrates this contextuality of meaning.

Sociology in the 1990s is so hopelessly fragmented that it is increasingly difficult to detrme its subject matter and to find a common voice in the babel of competing theories and specialties. Not unrelated, it is also under attack by beleaguered administrators looking for vulnerable targets for budget cuts in this recessionary period. Contemporary...

Symbolic interactionism, resolutely empirical in practice, shares theoretical concerns with cultural studies and humanistic discourse. Recognizing that the humanities have engaged many of the important intellectual currents of the last twenty-five years in ways that sociology has not, the contributors to this volume fully acknowledge that the bound...

Performance science is a new way of presenting the results offieldwork research. The performance mode creates problems of syntax and interpretation, but has corresponding advantages, including narrativity and multivocality. We illustrate these problems and advantages with examples from our study of the social organization of professional theatre in...

Chicago, San Francisco, and Minneapolis/St. Paul are major regional centers of theatrical activity in the United States. Like other viable theatre communities, they contain the resources theatres need to produce plays, including community traditions and theatrical cultures, work opportunities, and theatre spaces. We have presented our analysis of t...

Incl. bibl., index.

Graduate training in sociology is an uneasy compromise between teaching new sociologists what would be good for them to know and doing what a graduate department’s various constituencies demand. Instead of worrying about teaching a core of materials, the graduate faculty instead should teach students what they know, and try to help students learn w...

Social scientists, whether earnest graduate students or tenured faculty members, clearly know the rules that govern good writing. But for some reason they choose to ignore those guidelines and churn out turgid, pompous, and obscure prose. Distinguished sociologist Howard S. Becker, true to his calling, looks for an explanation for this bizarre beha...

Computers, both large and small, can be of great assistance to a field worker. This assistance falls mainly in the area of relieving the field worker from tedious mechanical phases such as typing, sorting, and retrieving information. An examination of field work methods identifies issues and problems which must be addressed by any system for undert...

The following is a slightly revised version of an invited address presented at the “Ethnography in Education Research” Forum, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, March 1983. In the article, the author reflects on the reasons that ethnographic studies are, and probably will continue to be, suspect in the field of education. App...

El autor concibe a la desviación como una transacción que tiene lugar entre un grupo social y un individuo que es considerado por dicho grupo como un trasgresor a las reglas. Desde este enfoque, el autor estudia el fenómeno de la desviación a partir del análisis de dos grupos sociales: los fumadores de mariguana y los músicos que tocan en ambientes...

Students and researchers all write under pressure, and those pressures—most lamentably, the desire to impress your audience rather than to communicate with them—often lead to pretentious prose, academic posturing, and, not infrequently, writer’s block. Sociologist Howard S. Becker has written the classic book on how to conquer these pressures...

Incluye bibliografía

So-called "drug psychoses" can be interpreted as the anxiety reaction of a naive user occasioned by his fear that the temporary symptoms of drug use represent a permanent derangement of his mind. Participation in a drug-using subculture tends to minimize such occurrences, because other users present the person with alternative explanations of his e...

The concept of commitment is widely used but has received little formal analysis. It contains an implicit explanation of one mechanism producing consistent human behavior. Commitments come into being when a person, by making a side bet, links extraneous interests with a consistent line of activity. Side bets are often a consequence of the person's...