Books by Howard S. Becker

Serves as a sociological examination of art which explores the cooperative network of suppliers, performers, dealers, critics, and consumers who - along with the artist - 'produce' a work of art. This book looks at the conventions essential to this operation and, prospectively, at the extent to which art is shaped by this collective activity.

Now regarded as a classic, Boys in White is of vital interest to medical educators and sociologists.By daily interviews and observations in classes, wards, laboratories, and operating theaters, the team of sociologists who carried out this firsthand research have not only captured the worries, cynicism, and basic idealism of medical students.

Howard S. Becker is a leading contemporary sociologist who interprets society as collective action and sociology, therefore, as the study of collective action. This volume explores the theory and methods necessary to study collective action and social interaction

Based on three years of detailed anthropological observation, this account of undergraduate culture portrays students' academic relations to faculty and administration as one of subjection

Based on three years of detailed anthropological observation, this account of undergraduate culture portrays students' academic relations to faculty and administration as one of subjection

Howard S. Becker is a leading contemporary sociologist who interprets society as collective action and sociology, therefore, as the study of collective action. This volume explores the theory and methods necessary to study collective action and social interaction

Among Howard Becker s favorite quotes is one he coined management is a one-word oxymoron and another uttered by Ambrose Bierce I think I think, therefore I think I am. His distrust of authority and convention is already apparent from the first, and his belief that things (or facts ) don t carry their meaning on their faces, but are relative to an observer and the observer s community, comes through in the second. His reputation as a maverick was firmly established more than 60 years ago when he published, in The American Journal of Sociology, Becoming a Marihuana User. He gets fan mail about this piece even now, six decades later (e.g., from a British manager of a criminal justice/drug rehab center, who insists that his volunteers and new employees read the article, even though a good few years have past and patterns of drug use have greatly changed, [but] this chapter like the vast majority of your work remains relevant and highly useful ). Smoking marijuana, still against the law in most places, is therefore deviant, and instead of asking why do they break universally accepted rules, for Becker marijuana is simply a substance whose use someone has outlawed. The question of how a choice is made to use it thus becomes a focus of study. And so, smoking marijuana is an experience one learns to enjoy: The taste for such experience is a socially acquired one, not different in kind from acquired tastes for oysters or dry martinis. The user acquires a stable set of categories for registering the drug s effects. Becker shows the steps by which the user acquires these categories from others in his marijuana-smoking world. Becker s new preface addresses the fact that marihuana over the past 60 years has become more accepted, thus more widely used, and that the cultivation of the plant has resulted in increased potency. Do people still have to learn how to get high? Yes, but there are some intricacies. And there are ironies; in some quarters, people think the 1953 article is the beginning point of the gradual revolution in acceptance of pot smoking (Becker knows better), and he wryly observes that people at first didn t know what to make of the article or of his conference presentations until, thanks to a police bust of several Northwestern students a decade or so later (where he was teaching), Becker all of a sudden became an expert. Nowadays, he is being celebrated as the Voice of Sociology, thanks to a wonderful write-up in The New Yorker magazine of his life as a jazz musician, scholar, and Chicagoan (at least for his first 50 years), and of his fame in French circles as the anti-Bourdieu and avatar of empiricism."

Draws on a lifetime of sociological research and wisdom to show, in helpful detail, how to use a variety of kinds of cases to build sociological knowledge. The author provides a guide that researchers can use to produce general sociological knowledge through case studies.

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 boundary between the social sciences and the humanities has begun to dissolve. This challenging volume explores that border area.

Explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. This book explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling such as fiction, films, photographs, maps, mathematical models - many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science.

This guide to research methods covers four areas of social science: the creation of "imagery" to guide research; methods of "sampling" to generate maximum variety in the data; the development of "concepts" to organize findings; and "logical" methods of exploring the implications of the findings.