Abstract
Spring 2003, Vol. 46, No. 1, Pages 21–39
Posted online on December 3, 2003.
(doi:10.1525/sop.2003.46.1.21)
Continuity and Change in Howard S. Becker's Work: An Interview with Howard
S. Becker
Ken Plummer
Howard S. Becker is one of the foremost sociologists of the second half of
the twentieth century. Although he is perhaps best known for research on
deviance and his book Outsiders, this constitutes only a very small
fraction of his earliest work. This interview looks at some of the continuities
and cores of his work over fifty years. Becker highlights how his work
maintains the same core concerns, although new interests have been added over
time. At the core is a concern with "work" and "doing things
together." Becker provides many concrete stories from the past and also
raises issues about the nature of doing theory and research, how he writes and
produces his studies, and the problems attached to the professionalization of
sociology. His writing on art and culture can be seen as assuming a major
position in his later work, but he does not identify with either postmodernism
or cultural studies.
Howard S. Becker did his
undergraduate and graduate work at the
He is the author of Outsiders,
Art Worlds, Writing for Social Scientists, and Tricks of the
Trade. He now lives and works in
This interview took place in
I’d like to ask you where you
see sociology has come to, and what its pitfalls
are now. Is there any thing
that has held you together in your sociological life
for the past .fty years?
Actually I think there is a very strong underlying
continuity to all your work,
but you may not see that. It’s those sorts of
things that I’d like to get
into.
Howar d
continuous.
KP: It’s all from one cloth.
HB: Oh yes, absolutely. I mean
I don’t think I’ve changed the way I do things
very much. You know, I’ve
added things, quite a lot of things, cause I’m kind
of a magpie—you know, I just
pick up new things, but they always get incorporated
into the way I do stuff.
KP: So lots of different areas
you’ve looked at?
HB: Yes.
KP: But always the same
approach basically?
HB: Yes.
KP: Because a lot of people
still think of you as a deviancy specialist.
HB: Yes. A lot of people think
of my earlier work as mainly about deviance, but
it’s not.
KP: It’s a very limited period
of your work, isn’t it?
HB: Well, I don’t know if I
had periods, I never really did work on deviance as
such. What happened was I did
my master’s thesis on musicians. After I got
out of school, I did the
marijuana study, which I wanted to do because I read
Alfred Lindesmith’s book on
opium addiction and thought, This is really
terri.c and I could do the
same thing with marijuana. It’ll be interesting
because it’s not addictive.
It’ll be kind of an interesting comparison. And at
that same time, when I was
writing the marijuana stuff up, I sat down and
wrote ninety pages about
deviance. This is in 1953 or 1954, and I wrote
ninety pages, too long for an
article, not long enough for a book. My friend
Erving Goffman would have
.gured out a way to make a book out of it right
away, which I didn’t. Maybe
ten years later I found this draft in a .le and
said, “Hey, this isn’t bad,”
and I sent it to Irwin Deutcher, who I knew from
book out of this, this is
pretty interesting.” And then I got the idea of sandwiching
the marijuana stuff and the
musician stuff in between parts of the
essay on deviance. One of the
reviewers, I think it was Kai Erickson, pointed
out that there was a certain
lack of coherence in this volume, which was
absolutely right. But that was
my involvement with deviance.
KP: Well, and a few little
bits. There’s the book The Other Side?
HB: True. I was editing the
journal Social Problems and the year after Outsiders I
collected some papers from the
journal for that book. Then I wrote another
chapter for the British
Sociological Association conference, in 1974, which
became the tenth chapter of
the book as it is now. And I wrote a few pieces
later on about drugs, when LSD
happened, because I thought I knew something
that would be interesting.
KP: “The Culture of
Civility”—about
HB: Yeah, right, I wrote that
piece with Horowitz.
KP: But if you can go right
back—I don’t know what was your .rst article, but
the piano jazz band stuff, I
think that was one of your earlier pieces?
Continuity and Change in Howard
S. Becker’s Work 23
HB: That was my .rst article.
KP: In a sense you can see
straightway a continuity with the more recent Art
Worlds in that they both deal with cultural creative worlds.
HB: Yes, the continuity is
probably Hughesian.
were the same, whatever he
called them. One class would be called “Race
and Ethnic Contacts,” another
would be “Institutions,” and the other one he
taught a lot was “The
Sociology of occupations and professions.” They were
all the same class, and
usually dealt with whatever he was reading that week.
KP: And they all said what?
HB: He started one of these
classes I took by saying, “Everything that happens in
society is somebody’s work,”
So you could always study what’s going on
someplace by looking at it as
somebody’s work. That’s probably the most
basic thing about everything I
do .
KP: Interesting you see it
that way . . .
HB: Let’s say you want to
study the phenomenon of death. Robert Haberstein
wrote his dissertation on
funeral directors. So, when I thought about deviance,
it’s quite obvious that this
is somebody’s work.
KP: You couldn’t say that all
social life is work?
HB: Sure you can. There’s a
challenge!
KP: Well, it’s a metaphor
which you can push and you can say having sex is
work, but it’s not so obvious
as, say, many of the areas that you’ve looked at.
HB: Not every person involved
in any of these activities is working. The dead
person is not working, but
work is being done about this. It’s somebody’s
work. So sex is obviously a
lot of people’s work. It’s pornographers’ work,
it’s policemen’s work, it’s
doctors’ work. It’s therapists’ work.
KP: But not all of it. There
are bits, which touch each other.
HB: No, not all of anything is
work, but it’s an approach to any area of activity.
KP: That does make sense as an
organizing metaphor for all your work. And of
course one of your edited
collections, Sociological Work, actually puts it in the
title. But there’s a sense in
which you are also a symbolic interactionist, yet I
never see you use the term.
HB: No. I don’t know what it
means. I mean it’s like all those “school” titles, you
know, labels—they’re
appropriated by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons.
So when I look at the journal Symbolic
Interaction, I don’t recognise
what’s in there as being
remotely connected to anything I’m interested in.
KP: But I mean you are .rmly
located in symbolic interactionism by other people
whether you like it or not.
HB: I can’t help what other
people think.
KP: Goffman’s treated the
same. But he denounced symbolic interactionism as
far as I can see. . .
HB: Erving’s lineage is quite
different from mine.
KP: But you were in the same
class together
HB: Oh yes, we were quite
close. We used to walk our babies together down
Fifty-third Street, they’re
the same age. But you know, my lineage is Simmel,
Robert Park, Everett Hughes. I
think that Erving’s lineage was Durkheim,
Radcliffe Brown, Lloyd Warner.
24 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Volume 46, Number 1, 2003
KP: That’s interesting. I
would also see Simmel as being inŹuential on
Goffman
too. I mean, you both have
this kind of preoccupation with what is called
mini concepts and little
phrases that sensitize you to how the world works.
You both do that.
HB: It’s not that having his
lineage he never heard of Simmel. Of course not. But
that’s not his lineage. He is
not a descendant of Robert Park.
KP: Right. That’s interesting.
HB: We both worked very
closely with Lloyd Warner who these days never gets
the attention he deserves. He
was quite inŹuential for a lot of people.
KP: And you both have in
common the essay mode of writing, the Simmelian
mode. Perhaps with the
exception of Art Worlds, you tend to write in fragments—
you write in little pieces
rather than big pieces.
HB: Oh no. Art Worlds is
the stitching together of a lot of shorter pieces. Back in
1970, I had a year off, I was
. . . most of the work I’d been doing till then was
in the sociology of education.
We had this grant to study a medical school,
then we studied an undergraduate
college, then we studied people who were
of college age who didn’t go
to college.
KP: This is Boys in White and
Making the Grade and those books.
HB: Right, and the third one
was actually Learning the Ropes edited by Blanche
Geer.
KP: Ah, that’s much less
known.
HB: Much less known. Graduate
students did these studies and wrote them up.
They were studies of places
like a barber college, a beauty college, apprenticeship
in the meat cutting trade,
things like that. So that sort of educational
study was what I’d been doing
for ten or twelve years, including my dissertation
on schoolteachers. I got to a
place where it was boring. Because I knew I
could go to study another
educational institution and—it’s not that I knew
how to penetrate its secrets
immediately, but I knew how to study it as the
kind of thing I knew how to
study, if you see what I mean. And three days
after I got there, I knew what
the book would look like three years from that.
So it was boring and I didn’t
want to do it anymore, and I was teaching at
Northwestern by then. Until
then, I had subsisted on grants, research that was
funded by raising money
somewhere, and now I didn’t have to do that anymore.
So I was quite free to do any
damn thing I wanted to instead of looking
for a topic where we could .nd
some money.
I thought at the time that the
sociology of art was a really underdeveloped
area, because it was mostly in
the hands of people who were pretty much aestheticians.
You know, like Adorno, Lukacs,
and Lucien Goldmann, whose
work was a thinly disguised
way of making and justifying judgments of value
in various arts. And I thought
that this was not really all that could be done. I
spent the year reading very
widely: books by .lm editors, books about Florentine
art, books about Victorian
novelists, and I came away with a lot of raw
material. I wrote a piece
called “Art as Collective Action,” which appeared in
the ASR, I think it was
1974. That became the .rst chapter of the book.
But about that time an odd
thing happened. I was out in
got a call from the head of my
department, Bob Winch, who said, “Look,
Continuity and Change in
Howard S. Becker’s Work 25
something’s come up. There’s a
new professor of ethnomusicology here, a
man named Klaus Wachsman, and
he’s quite surprised that we don’t have
a class in the sociology of
art —he says he needs it for his Ph.D. students.” It
was kind of a joke, because
nobody had a course in the sociology of art then.
“Would you be interested in
teaching it?” So I said, “Well, that’s a message
from someplace. OK.” And I
taught that class and I think the .rst or second
year I taught it, I recorded
the lectures and got them transcribed, and they
became the basis of the
chapters of the book. Then I’d write a piece, somebody
would ask me to do something
for a conference and I’d write a piece
about something, and that
became part of a chapter or whatever, and I just
wrote a lot of pieces and
eventually I had eight or ten of them and laid them
all out on the ground and
said, “OK, what’s missing?”
KP: Well, that’s the same as Outsiders
then in a way, isn’t it?
HB: Even more so. Every book
I’ve written is like that.
KP: So it’s little bits that
emerge. It’s like a kind of collage which eventually takes
on some coherence.
HB: All in the service of a
controlling idea, which of course changes from time to
time. But the idea of art as
something that a lot of people do together, and
that it is a matter of
convention which one gets to be called the artist, that
was right there pretty much
from the beginning.
KP: So we’ve got the notion of
work. You keep saying collective action and you
keep saying, here in the case
of Art Worlds, a lot of people doing things together.
So that’s another kind of
major preoccupation—doing things together. That’s
how deviance works too. Doing
things together. Are there any other kind of
mini ideas—mini concepts that
are really organizing frames for everything
you do? I mean, these are the
ones you’ve written about. I can hear them all
the time. Are there other ones
you think are around?
HB: Well, the other one that
is really connected to that is the idea of process. If
you explore this notion fully,
which for a long time I didn’t, not really, not in
some abstract sense, it starts
to put pay to the idea of cause and establishing
causal relationships. I mean
all kinds of work does that, treats things as—
here are the causes and there
are the results. How you get from one to the
other is not explored, it’s
just, the causes cause the effect.
KP: So it’s “how” questions. I
mean that to me is very Blumerian.
HB: It’s extremely Blumerian.
Because the key criticism Blumer made of everything,
of every theory that proposed
to explain human conduct, was that
they act as though there’s
some automatic connection between stimulus and
action, between instinct and
action, between culture and action. Like, “Why
did you do that?” “Well, it’s
my culture.” People do that, whatever it is you
want to explain, because it’s
in their culture. He said, “No, bullshit. The way
it works is there are all
kinds of things in the environment, people are active
not passive, they’re not
sitting there waiting to be stimulated to do something,
or being forced to do
something, being coerced by their instincts or
their culture. They’re busy
doing things and they’re actively searching the
environment. They are not
responding to stimuli, they’re creating stimuli,
looking in the environment for
what they can use,” It’s very Deweyish.
26 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Volume 46, Number 1, 2003
Blumer always insisted that
there is always this step between what’s in the
environment and the behavior
that comes out, which is the stage of reŹection.
And he used to give us this
exercise which was really quite wonderful,
because he would rave on and
on about what was wrong with instinct theory
and what was wrong with
stimulus response theory, etc., and then ask us to
do this exercise: take any ten
minutes of your own behavior and explain
what went on in those ten
minutes using one of those theories. And you
know, really and truly, you
can’t do it. The theories aren’t up to it. Whereas
the whole notion of an
internal dialogue, you can observe that, you really can
observe it.
You’re talking all the time in
your head, you’re always thinking of things,
and you’re paying attention to
what the other one says. One of the implications
of that is that there’s no
telling where it’ll end up. You can’t make predictions.
I’ve been quoting David Mamet,
the American playwright who says
somewhere, but I can’t .nd it,
he says, “In every scene in a play all the people
who are in the scene are there
because they want something. If they didn’t
want something they wouldn’t
be there, so by de.nition if they’re there, they
want something. And the scene
develops by each of them pursuing what
they want in the light of what
other people are willing to do and what results
from everybody pursuing what
they want, and having to adjust to each
other, is something none of
them might have wanted and certainly that you
could never have guessed in
advance.” It results from their interactions.
KP: But that is the original
symbolic interactionist stance. It seems to me that a lot
of interactionists have moved
on into a lot of other things and have dropped
what is in fact the core of
it.
HB: That’s the only part worth
having. There’s that great paper of Blumer’s. He
said the same thing over and
over again, and the one paper where it is best
summarized is the piece called
“The Sociological Implications of the
Thought of George Herbert
Mead.”
KP: It breaks into .ve
different parts.
HB: Yes, and “Collective
Action” is one of them. That’s the part that seems to me
central, because if you have
that image of one person acting that way and
then all the people in the
scene acting together to produce whatever happens
in the scene, you just extend
that.
KP: Yes, but it isn’t just
true of people, it’s true of objects too. It reminds me of
that article where you talk
about overhead projectors in classrooms and you
take that as an object and
then you go to all the people involved in making it
work and making it happen. On
its own, the object is nothing, but it requires
that collective action round
it.
HB: Yes. I’ve found the way
Bruno Latour makes a great deal out of nonhuman
actions very useful. He speaks
of nonhuman actors, machines. Latour de.nes a
machine as when you get a
bunch of independent parts and tie them together
in such a way that they begin
to control each other’s behavior, like the governor
on an engine. That’s a
machine. Well, he says, “The people are tied into the
machine and the machine is
tied into what they’re doing and you can think of
that as a bigger machine.”
It’s another way of talking about the same thing.
Continuity and Change in Howard
S. Becker’s Work 27
It’s absolutely fascinating to
me that Latour who, I don’t think, probably to
this day, has read a word of
John Dewey, or George Herbert Mead, I can’t
imagine him reading that, but
it’s exactly a pragmatist position. It’s all sociology
of science and it’s
brilliantly original.
KP: I’m still trying to get at
key themes in your work. And one way in getting at
them is also to think about if
there have been any signi.cant shifts. We said
you’ve more or less been doing
the same thing for .fty years in different
areas of inquiry. From writing
to everything you think about that comes out
this way. So would you say
over half a century there has been anything that’s
kind of dramatically made you
go through some transformation in the way
you think about the world? Or
perhaps there really hasn’t been anything like
that? Given the fads and
foibles of sociology, with one trend after another,
you must have seen so many by
now. Has there been anything in any of that
that’s kind of hit you and
made you say, “Now look, I’ve got to rethink this.”
HB: I don’t think that I’ve
ever thought I had to rethink things. I’ve added all
kinds of stuff. And in the
course of adding, you know, you change the main
house when you put the
addition on. And there are lots of things like that.
When I began to read in art
history and literary theory and what not, when I
started doing Art Worlds,
I just picked up all kinds of ideas that were so useful
to me. To be sure I twisted
them so that they’d .t into what I was doing,
but they were new stuff.
KP: But that is something that
makes you a very different kind of sociologist. The
fact that as your work
progresses, you become more and more interested in
literature and drama and you
have more and more references to this. More
and more concerns about
writing, of being intelligible, of being literate,
which actually, for a large
number of sociologists doesn’t even come into the
game at all.
HB: Well, those were always
interests of mine. It was always just a question of
working them in. I tell this
story in my writing book. When Jim Carper and I
wrote this piece about
occupational identities and sent it to the AJS, Everett
Hughes, who was the editor, he
wrote this scathing letter. I got a letter back
from Helen Hughes, his wife,
who was the managing editor, saying, “Howie,
you know that
was just raving. “What
happened to you, you used to write decent English.
Good God, this sounds like it
was translated from German, word for word.”
KP: But it does seem to be a
credential these days to be a good sociologist. I’m not
talking Parsonian stuff. I’m
just suggesting that students are almost trained
to write incomprehensibly. And
it is a feature of your work all the way
through, that it’s always
intelligible and everybody says that about it.
HB: Sometimes critically.
KP: Yes, well of course the
trouble with it is, it makes it sound too obvious and
too simple because, you know,
you can understand what you’re saying.
HB: Yes, that’s what they say.
It is a fault. I remember when I read Leonard
Meyer’s book Emotion and
Meaning in Music. This book gives you kind of a
gestalt theory of how music
carries or creates emotional meaning, based on
the idea of tension and
release. But the key idea is that this is all convention28
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Volume 46, Number 1, 2003
alized because you have come
to expect that a dominant seventh chord will
be resolved into a tonic
chord, which is like a fundamental piece of Western
musical practice. Because
listeners have come to expect that, you can really
create an enormous tension by
not resolving the dominant seventh chord
that way.
You create tension by not
doing what people expect. It is connected to the
idea of inertia. And there’s
lots of stuff that people have learned to expect.
That this chord will lead to
that chord, for instance. I used to do this thing in
class, it was a lot of fun.
I’d put a musical staff on the board, write down middle
C. Then I’d say, “OK, this is
the .rst note of the melody,” and I’d sing it,
“mmmmm.” “O.K. what’s the
second note?” So they’d look at me like “What
are you talking about?” I’d
say, “Come on, what is the second note? You have
to guess.” So somebody would
.nally say E, you know, because everybody’s
learned that much music in
school. “So you mean C E,” I’d sing it, it’s a
major triad, right? Anybody
have a different idea? Somebody would say D.
C D, second note of the scale.
“Well, what do you think? Which one is it?” So
then people would begin to
guess wildly. Finally I’d say, “OK, I can see you
can’t solve this with the
information I’ve given you. OK, the second note is E.
He was right, C E. What’s the
third note?” If I did it right the whole class
would sing “G.” Because it was
obvious. Why was it obvious? Because you’d
indicated that this was going
to be a major triad. If I’d said no, it was D—C,
D, E—everybody knew that that
was the next note. That was the fundamental
idea of Meyer’s book. It’s a
very powerful idea, and then I read a number
of other things about the idea
of convention, which he made such good use
of. It’s all through
discussions of art, literature, and everything else.
KP: It’s bound in narrative
structures and all conventions. It makes me ponder
where you stand on another
“ism,” which is postmodernism. This is supposed
to be a theory which breaks
down those conventions.
HB: I don’t know. I haven’t
read that much.
KP: I’ve never seen you
proclaim on it.
HB: No, no. I didn’t think
they were talking about anything I was interested in.
Coming back to conventions, I
soon saw that the idea of convention was the
same idea as the sociologist’s
idea of norms, shared understandings, any of
those words we habitually use.
If that’s true, then you can import all the
work people do on conventions in
all these various .elds and it’s sociology.
KP: You wouldn’t use words
like “institutions” for that, would you? It’s not part
of your language.
HB: No, but it was part of
Everett’s, Everett Hughes. He was a wonderful essayist.
But that idea was always kind
of vague to me.
interchangeably with
organization, I think. An institution was an organization
that lasted longer than some
other organizations. But he didn’t set great
store on distinctions like
that. So the idea of conventions was something that
had a big effect on me, but I
wouldn’t say it transformed my way of thinking.
It added to my repertoire.
Similarly, when I started
reading Latour’s work, I thought, this is a soul
buddy, you know, this guy is
simpatico. I met him in
Continuity and Change in
Howard S. Becker’s Work 29
and I read Laboratory Life and
then I read everything else Bruno had put out.
It was about the time I’d
started reading French, so I would read his books, in
French, painfully, but then
after a while I realized that everything he does
now is going to be translated,
so I stopped that because it takes me a lot
longer to read a French book.
But I read Les Microbes, which is the book that
came out in English as The
Pasteurisation of Society. Science in Action came out
in English originally. Bruno’s
work is very powerful, very original. So that’s
given me a lot.
When I worked with Charles
Ragin at Northwestern, Charles and I talked
together quite a bit. He’s
developed this method, what he called for a while
the Boolean method, now he
calls it qualitative comparative analysis, and
that’s had a big inŹuence on my thinking. It originally appeared in his book
called The Comparative
Method. Now he’s got a second book, which is really a
winner. It’s called Fuzzy
Set Social Science. It’s just terri.c. It’s something all
qualitative sociologists
should have under their belts. But they take one look
at it, and it looks like
formal logic, which it is, and “Oops—can’t deal with
that.”
KP: Right. I haven’t read it.
HB: Well, you should. You
really should. It’s so useful, as a way of thinking, you
can’t believe it.
KP: “Ways of thinking”? One of
the things that strike me about your work is that
by and large, you don’t talk
theory and you don’t talk method. I mean you
do talk a lot of theory and
you do talk a lot of method, but you don’t! Method
comes up all over the place,
how you do sociology, but you don’t write those
formal papers and handbooks on
interviewing, and all the rest of it. Tricks of
the Trade is the book, isn’t it? I mean, it’s called Tricks of the Trade, it’s
not
called A Primer of
Sociological Qualitative Methodology. And the same is true of
theory. You haven’t written
your theoretical magnum opus, because it drips
out from everything you
actually write about. Is there any reason why you
never felt the urge to develop
a formal theory?
HB: I may have felt the urge,
but it’s like Robert Hutchins, who was the president
of the
“Whenever I feel the urge to
exercise, I lie down till it goes away.”
KP: There could be a whole
Becker school. I mean, you actually train many graduate
students, etc., but there
isn’t really a Becker school of sociology.
HB: Praise the Lord!
KP: [laughing] Hope that comes
out.
HB: Donald Campbell the social
psychologist was another person who had quite
an inŹuence on me. When I went to Northwestern, there was an interdisciplinary
program in social psychology,
involving anthropology, sociology, and
psychology. And there was a
seminar, usually taught by someone from psychology
and someone from sociology.
The .rst year I was there, Raymond
Mack, who was the head of the
department and a truly brilliant administrator,
suggested that I teach the
seminar with Don, so, OK, I said yes.
He was an incredibly wonderful
person, unbelievably smart, with a very
sly sense of humor. He said to
me, with a straight face, “You know, I once
30 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Volume 46, Number 1, 2003
taught a class at the
did understand what he was
talking about, and I was so traumatized by
dealing with him, he was such
an impressive person physically.”
himself was about 6’4”, quite
impressive himself. So he said, “Why don’t we
have the seminar this year on
symbolic interaction?” Well, about halfway
through the term, I realized
that that meant I did all the work and that Don
sat around making smart
remarks. And the next year he had another idea
like that, but I said, “No,
this time you’re going to do the work.” But he was
really an interesting guy. He
had a big inŹuence on me too. What did you ask
me?
KP: It was about methods.
HB: I think the problem about
methods in social sciences, when you talk methods,
it’s as though you could
establish a method that would be independent
of the situation you used it
in. You know, like a questionnaire. There are principles
in questionnaire construction
and all that, and there’s a methodology
for dealing with that. But the
way that works is that you have to impose on
the world the structure that
the questionnaire requires. Latour has this wonderful
line where he says that
science is an absolutely fabulous way of doing
things. It works like a
railroad; it runs anywhere so long as tracks have been
laid for it. Science works
when you make the world into the kind of place
where that kind of science
will work. That’s the purpose of creating laboratories,
in his analysis: science
doesn’t really work in the world because there
are too many other things
going on that interfere with the thing you want to
make happen. In a laboratory,
you purify things,you keep the natural enemies
of what you are studying under
control. Then it works. Well, that’s the
case with a lot of social science
methods. It works as long as you change the
world into the kind of place
that method will work on.
KP: Well, this is Blumer’s
point too. Then you’ve amputated the world. It’s not
the world.
HB: Put another way, you can’t
talk about anything much, other than the world
you’ve created. Because it
doesn’t work outside that, because other things
are there. Thomas Kuhn makes
the same kind of point in a different way. His
way is really fun, because he
says the only way science can make any progress
is if everybody agrees to
collaborate on answering the same small set of
questions, using more or less
the same methods. Then they make enormous
progress. The only problem is
that this almost immediately generates anomalies,
this is the dynamics in his
theory of science, because to specialize like
this means that the scientists
leave practically everything out. The only way
to concentrate on something
that way is to leave out 99 percent of what’s
going on out there, leave it
out. Well, you can leave it out, but it’s there and it
will stick its head up.
KP: Doesn’t it slightly
depress you, looking back on .fty years’ worth of work,
with you taking your
particular stance, and not many other people working
like you. You have your
particular approach. I may be wrong, but in the main
most of the people are working
in the scienti.c cast that is going down a different
track.
Continuity and Change in
Howard S. Becker’s Work 31
HB: The same thing is true of
doing .eldwork. We are also creating a situation in
which we can do it. It’s not
exactly the real world. I mean, you study sex,
you’re not in bed with
everybody.
KP: No. [laughter]
HB: And there’s no way to do
that. So you’ve got to .nd some way to turn what
you want to .nd out
about into something you can .nd something out about.
KP: Would you say that one
track is more useful than the other track?
HB: The smart survey
researchers, which there are some—Lazersfeld was a very
smart researcher—work in a way
that takes account, more or less, of things
that need to be taken account
of. It can be done. It’s not the way I do it. It’s
not the only way to do it. I
don’t think the way I do it is the only way to do it.
I was brought up in a school,
my descent from Robert Park includes the idea
that there are a lot of different
ways to do this. They all contribute something.
To me, I never doubted for a
moment that with all the Źaws and all
the inaccuracies
and everything left out of a
census—it’s a lot better than nothing.
Am I interested in what
percentage of the American population is black?
Even though I know that the
question in the census is “Do you consider
yourself White, Black, Asian?”
I mean, what kind of a measure is that? Well,
not bad. Good enough for a lot
of purposes. With all the inaccuracies built
into it, it’s plenty good
enough for many, many purposes.
KP: Well, this is kind of good
news actually. Because I was getting an image that
you might have after half a
century of sociology been hand wringing about
the state of sociology. But
you don’t seem to be.
HB: I’ve been what?
KP: Hand wringing—in slight
despair about the contemporary state of sociology.
HB: I am. Despair is a
little hard. I’m not going to stay up nights worrying about
sociology. Organizationally,
science is also people doing stuff together and
the conventionalized ways we
have been doing it are very tied to universities,
and universities are in
terrible shape.
KP: Well, this is something
you were writing about in fact. I mean you have a little
piece in Doing Things
Together which is about university education, how sociology
departments are changing, and
this is actually obviously written in the
1970s or the early 1980s.
HB: I think it was published
in 1980.
KP: I mean that’s twenty-two
years ago and all those trends you talk about—
specialization, fragmentation,
etc.—they’ve all just gone on. And they’ve got
more and more extreme now.
HB: I like that piece very
much. I wrote it with Bill Rau. It’s really a demographic
analysis. It says, look, there
are ten or .fteen times as many sociologists
as there used to be. What’s
the consequence of that? The chief consequence,
I thought, and it turns out it
really is what happened, and our
friends at Sage Publications
are like a walking bulletin board of how it happened,
is that there are enough
people in every tiny subspeciality to support
a bunch of journals, to
support an organization, to elect a president, to
give a prize, and to have a
whole world so complete that they don’t need
anybody else. And I think
that’s bad for sociology, because it means that
32 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Volume 46, Number 1, 2003
the delinquency people don’t
talk to the sex people and none of them talk
to the art people.
KP: And in the same volume you
have something on graduate training which
also is a very dif.cult area
now. What constitutes any kind of basic training
in sociology when there are so
many specialties, even within methodology or
within theory.
HB: I have a really Deweyish
notion of education. I didn’t know I did, but it turns
out that’s what it is. I
essentially think you can’t teach anybody anything.
You can help them learn. If
they want to learn and are willing to put the time
in, you can help them teach
themselves things. My model of teaching is
much more like piano lessons,
language lessons, where you learn to do
something. Helping someone
learn how to do something. I don’t like to teach
a course which doesn’t help
someone learn to do something. I love teaching
.eldwork because, and this is
the Deweyish part of it, you get them started
and let them get into trouble.
Because learning is painful. People do not like
to learn new things. They like
to do things they know how to do, and the
only way you can get them to
try anything different is to put them in a position
where continuing to do what
they know how to do is even more painful
than learning. So the way I
teach .eldwork is, “Go out and start doing it!”
“Well, we don’t know what to
do.” “I don’t care. Start, go there, watch
people, talk to people, write
it all down, then come back.” They immediately
get themselves into what they
regard as terrible trouble. A nice example is
when they .nally get somebody
to agree to be interviewed and then they
realize they don’t know what
to ask them. They hadn’t got that far in their
thinking. And now they really
want to know. Now it’s not an academic exercise.
What is the right answer?
“Listen, I was sitting and this person was
waiting for me to interview
him and I didn’t know a damn thing.”
KP: If you adopt that model,
how would you get them to do theoretical work?
HB: You require them to make
up a theory about something.
KP: Right, so you’d show them
the overhead projector and you’d say develop the
theory of how that works . . .
HB: I think theory really
comes down to a series of activities you can do. Like the
trick I describe in Tricks
of the Trade as Bernie Beck’s trick. Bernie was just fabulous
with this. Students would
come, they’d found this in their .eldwork or
whatever and they wanted to
know how to generalize it. And their idea of
generalizing it would be to go
read Weber and .nd something that they
could tack this on to. They’d
say, “I’m using Weber.” It’s a hideous expression:
“I’m using Weber, I’m using
Durkheim.” And Bernie would say, “No,
that’s not how you generalize
your work.” Say you found out about something.
“OK, Becker, you studied
schools”—this is the example I have in the
book—“You studied
schoolteachers in
issues of race and class. Now
tell me what you found out. But you’re not
allowed to use the word
or school. Now tell me
what you’ve found out.” That’s a theoretical
exercise. My model is really
like learning to play the piano. When we play
the piano we play scales, we
learn to play chords: do this, do that. The doing
Continuity and Change in
Howard S. Becker’s Work 33
is the main thing.
I mean, it is doing something,
but it’s not doing what you need to do
to get your work done.
KP: It’s doing Weber work or
Marx work.
HB: Yeah, exactly.
HB: You see, what I think is
wrong these days, why despair, is that everything
has become so formulaic and so
ritualized. You only have to look at the journals.
You’re a journal editor and
you know that the papers you get are written
to a template. When I was
learning sociology, just after I got out of graduate
school, I spent a couple of
years among psychologists. The canonical
experimental psychology paper
is such a formula: theory, problem, subjects,
method, results, conclusion.
It was just like .lling out a form.
KP: Well, a lot of Ph.D.’s in
sociology are like that now. Even the Ph.D. student is
made to write these silly
“literature reviews.” And it’s called the literature
review. And there’s no
imagination.
HB: Harvey Molotch wrote a
wonderful paper called “Going Out.” He talks
about that, and he says, “They
talk about ‘the literature,’ or even worse now,
‘the literatures’ in the
plural.” I mean, what the hell is that? As though the
stuff comes in a little box.
Here’s the literature on the sociology of music, OK.
But you know, maybe that’s not
the relevant stuff to be reading for your
study, even though it involves
musicians.
KP: I have a colleague, Dennis
Marsden, who always says to students read it
after you’ve done the
research, don’t read it before, because it would kind of
cloud it. Then you do need to
know what other people have said about it. But
you don’t need to read it at
the beginning.
HB: But there is a weasel word
there, Ken, you need to know what other people
have said about it. Why?
KP: Well, whatever it is you
are studying.
HB: Well, what is it though?
Education is a wonderful example. One of Edgar
Friendenberg’s more snotty and
brilliant things was to write about schools as
though they were prisons. He
looked at a school and said this is a prison in
which wonderful young people
are imprisoned and prevented from being
the wonderful people they
might be. It’s the same thing Goffman is talking
about, total institutions. I
mean, there is a dimension of school life which is
exactly like prison life. It’s
not all of it, but it’s a very telling comparison. It’s
very interesting. And the
thing for sure that you can’t assume is that this particular
place is a school. What’s
going on here? Education. What else? It is a
school; I mean, that’s what
they do. Isn’t it? Well, they might, but it’s by no
means guaranteed. There are
plenty of “schools” in which no education,
under any construction of that
word, is gong on, and there are plenty of prisons,
conversely, in which a lot of
education is going on. The way most of our
research is done is we pick a
place—this is especially with .eld research, but
it doesn’t matter, it can be any
kind of research—you pick a place and you
say you’re going to study that
place, as though you know what they did
there. But what they do there
has to be a .nding, you can’t assume that you
know that. What they do there?
You’ll .nd out what they do there, that’s
34 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Volume 46, Number 1, 2003
what your research will tell
you. I remember reading in the New York Times
once years ago (which I don’t
ordinarily read because I don’t believe what I
read there) that they had
busted the warden of a prison somewhere in Soviet
railroad siding built and they
brought wool in there. He had found knitting
machines somewhere. The whole
damn prison, everybody there, was working
making sweaters, boxing them,
putting them in railroad cars, sending
them out, selling them. Well,
is that a prison or is it a sweater factory? If you
went to study it, what would
you be studying? Supposing you did this
study, should you be reading
the literature on prisons, or the literature on
factories, or what?
KP: This accounts for another
feature of your style, because you tend not to go
over the literature very much
of whatever it is you’re studying. You know,
you’re not a heavy footnote
person, are you?
HB: That’s another thing that
bugs me about contemporary sociology. Every article
you read has a list of
references from here to the corner, hundreds of references
for some article that doesn’t
need them. It’s ridiculous.
KP: It’s establishing your
credentials in part, isn’t it?
HB: Well, I don’t know what it
is—perhaps. I mean, what it’s not doing is any
useful thinking work. It’s not
being helpful about the problem that you
study, it just gets in the
way. It’s mostly totally irrelevant. It’s paying homage.
Art Stinchcomb wrote this
piece, “Should We Honor Our Sociological
Fathers and Mothers,” about
the practice of citation. He lists seven reasons
you might cite something,
almost none of them appropriate to serious intellectual
work. But the journals are so
heavily refereed now that this might be
necessary. The editor sends a
paper, it’s pretty standard, to three referees to
read. I don’t know, you’re an
editor, how many referees do you send a paper
to?
KP: Four.
HB: Four?!
KP: It’s because at least one
won’t bother.
HB: So you get at least three
readings, they’re surely not going to agree. They’re
bound to .nd things where they
give divergent advice, and the editor will
usually not adjudicate among
them. The editor sends back all this stuff and
says, “Deal with this.” And
then you get this kind of patchwork—OK, this
paragraph will answer that,
that one will answer this one. Pretty soon the
paper has no coherence, no
intellectual coherence at all. It’s just a patchwork—
that’s what it is.
KP: And the journals are full
of these sorts of articles.
HB: Journals are full of them
and especially as the market for sociology Ph.D.’s
has contracted, creating the
anxiety of young folks about, Am I going to get a
job? Which is quite realistic
and cannot be controlled in any reasonable way, and
this goes right back to
Malinowski: If you can’t do it in a reasonable way, you
do magic. So there’s an
enormous amount of magical thinking and practice.
“If I do it the right way
it’ll get published, so what do they [the editors and
referees] want?” Trying to
second guess the editors’ reviewers gets totally in
Continuity and Change in
Howard S. Becker’s Work 35
the way of any kind of
intellectual coherence. I mean, imagine Goffman trying
to answer to that kind of
stuff.
KP: It wouldn’t get published.
HB: He would never get
published. Goffman’s papers—it’s like the experiment of
Trollope that I mentioned in Art
Worlds, where he wrote a couple of stories
under another name and sent
them to the magazines that published his work
routinely. Not a chance. He
got letters like, If you keep at it, perhaps in .ve
years.
KP: So what you’re saying
about the fate of sociology is really the institutionalization
of it and the fragmentation of
it and its growth which actually was
inevitable?
HB: Its growth is largely a
function of its growth as a subject for undergraduates
to study because that’s what
makes the jobs for the teachers.
KP: Graduate schools have
grown enormously too.
HB: Well, there are Ph.D.
centers now.
KP: Ph.D.’s?
HB: Well, yeah, but the
Ph.D.’s are people who—they can’t all be teaching graduate
students, it’s like a pyramid
scheme.
KP: I wanted to raise another
theme that I see in your work. It’s really caught in
the title Outsiders,
because I think you’re a bit of an outsider—to put it
mildly. You started off as an
outsider, and now as I am talking to you, you’re
still an outsider. You’ve not
held, for example, any major posts—you’ve not
been president of the American
Sociological Association. You don’t go for
any of those big glories.
HB: Well, I think that, not
just sociologists, but also any respectable intellectual
can’t afford to sign on with
blind loyalty to any organization. It’s just giving
too much up, because you can’t
trust an organization. You particularly can’t
trust universities. I mean
universities are—I’ve always thought that Veblen
had his .nger on it in The
Higher Learning in
as he always was. He may have
been quite serious about it. He
described the tycoons of
erudition and the captains of industry who are
.nancing them. The tycoons of
erudition, college presidents and the like,
have to make universities the
kind of places that the captains of industry
want them to be. I mean, it
shouldn’t be a surprise to sociologists that universities
answer to very powerful people
and organizations. I don’t mean to say
that there’s this ruling
class, all of one mind, but the money’s got to come
from some place and . . .
KP: Well, it’s a slightly
different situation in the
not privately run
institutions.
HB: No, not when money’s
coming from the government [laughter].
KP: But in the
everything. I don’t know
whether it’s really taken on here to the same extent.
HB: Well, you know, this is
one thing Veblen said: The captains of industry are
used to cost accounting. They
want to see a quantitative measure of what
they’re getting for their
money. I know the
assessment. It’s completely
nuts. One thing that Anselm Strauss said to me
36 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Volume 46, Number 1, 2003
that stopped me cold was, he
said—Anselm was always looking for the key
phrase to de.ne someone’s
work—he said, “You’re easy,” he said, “It’s liberty,
freedom, that’s what you’re
interested in.” And the more I thought
about it, the more I think he
was right. That is a preoccupation. And the outsiderness
is that I’m very leery, very
wary of getting obligated to some institution.
A book that I found very
interesting and useful, I think about it a lot,
is Albert Hirshman’s Exit,
Voice and Loyalty. He’s an economist. What it’s
about is, you belong to an
organization. Your organization does something
you don’t approve of. What are
the possibilities? Exit, voice, and loyalty. Exit
you quit, voice is you .ght
within the institution, and loyalty is you shut up
and go along with it.
KP: So most of your life I
suspect, you’ve been that “Voice.”
HB: Well, I can say very often
“Exit.”
KP: Now, it’s “Exit.”
HB: No, I’m very often, you
know—places, things I do, like I mean like the ASA,
you know, God bless it, a . .
.
KP: A big jamboree.
HB: That’s what it is. It’s
not something you’d want to be president of. I mean,
seriously, you know, because I
saw friends of mine who were. The year Stan
Lieberson was president, he’s
an old buddy of mine, I was on the program
committee at Stan’s request
and, good God, I mean, once you’re involved in
the day-to-day running of
things, it goes on and on . . .
KP: If you’ve been “exiting,”
where does that leave your politics over the past
.fty years in relation to
sociology? I know you’ve written about radical matters
in politics; “hierarchies of
credibilities” and the “Gouldner” attack and
all that stuff. But have you
really been a quietist in the sense of really not
being a major activist for
large periods of time?
HB: I’ve never really been
politically very active. I suppose I’m a little pessimistic
about that. The issue for me
that is sort of like the canary in the coal mine;
you know, it’s the marijuana
issue. It’s not an important matter, really. It
doesn’t make any difference if
the government make laws against it or
doesn’t. In the larger scheme,
I mean it’s not . . .
KP: But it is a good case of
your concern with liberties, isn’t it?
HB: To me, it’s a good case.
Also of—what good is it to do scienti.c research on
these matters, because by now
there isn’t the slightest doubt from any point
of view, no reasonable
biologist or medical person is going to be willing to
get up in public and say this
is a dangerous drug. There just isn’t any evidence.
In this country, almost all
the chiefs of police of major cities have
signed on as against the
marijuana laws, quite a lot of inŹuential
people.
KP: It’s happening more and
more in the
HB: It’s happening all over
the place. But nothing changes, it’s been known by
physiologists and people who
do that kind of work that this is one of the
most benign drugs you could
possibly put in your body. It can hardly hurt
you. The only way they can
kill a laboratory animal with marijuana is to
inject so much of it into the
poor little rat that it .nally bursts its organs. It’s
just physical. It’ll put it to
sleep for a while. But it’s like a—I remember a
Continuity and Change in
Howard S. Becker’s Work 37
pharmachologist telling me,
“It’s astounding that a drug that has such obvious
psychological activity, has no
discernible similar physical activity.” It’s
pretty hard to .gure out how
it works. It’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t do
any harm. I mean, everybody
knows that. But you can’t get politicians to
change any of the laws
regulating it. So when it’s that clear cut and there’s
essentially hardly any big
money involved—so there’s not even that preventing
it—what chance is there for
activism about other issues where things
matter more to people with
more money, more inŹuence. And you know, I
watched my friends over the
years who were activists and I don’t see what
they’ve accomplished that adds
up to much. Too bad. The big changes in
society don’t come about that
way.
KP: I’m not sure I agree with
you completely. When I think of some, of the lesbian
and gay movements or the
women’s movement, they have brought
about quite a few changes.
HB: I would say that they rode
in on the back of a gigantic cultural drift that was
going in that direction. It’s
like they took credit for it. I mean that was going
to happen, bound to happen.
KP: Interesting.
HB: I can’t think that you
know, because it’s not like there’s a riot in a bar in New
KP: No, no, it’s not as simple
as that, but it kind of gave it the visibility that it
needed and it became a potent
symbol.
HB: It was like, you know—it
was a match. If there hadn’t been any undergrowth
in the forest, nothing would
have happened.
KP: Yes, yes. It didn’t come
out of the blue, because nothing comes out of the blue.
HB: I think these major
cultural changes come about over a much longer term.
Hard to see because you don’t
see it. All of a sudden, one day, it’s like somebody
says, “Hey, it’s bullshit,”
and everybody looks and says, “Oh yeah, I
guess that’s right.” But it’s
already happened.
KP: Interesting. That gives
your whole theory a kind of much broader sense of
cultural change.
HB: Blumer used to talk about
this, not very clearly, but he said “cultural drift.” A
good example of it is what you
see in Stanley Lieberson’s book about the .rst
names given to children. Where
over quite a long period these shifts occur,
but nobody is trying to
orchestrate it, nobody’s proselytizing on behalf of
biblical names, and somehow
over .fty years, they’ve become more important,
more common.
KP: But this is the background
to all your little human beings actively doing
things together in small situations,
which cumulatively drift into bigger
social change.
HB: Yes.
KP: One .nal thing I would
like to talk about— given the popularity of Cultural
Studies these days—is your
view of culture. I wondered also about how you
felt about the rise in
cultural studies because you’ve obviously been working
in the .eld of culture, you
actually have an area of cultural studies attached
to you in a way, but you’re
very different from all the cultural studies folk.
38 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Volume 46, Number 1, 2003
HB: Yeah. Cultural studies is
a phenomenon of academic politics, much more
than an intellectual movement.
I have a very simple view of culture. There’s
really two sources for me. One
is William Graham Sumner talking about
folkways and mores. When you
get a lot of people together and they all have
pretty much the same dif.culty
and they talk to each other, they’re very
likely to arrive at a solution
in common, and begin to treat that as the way we
do it. That’s culture. That’s
part of it. The other part is Red.eld’s de.nition,
which is one of the 153
de.nitions that Kroeber, Kluckohn, and Parsons
agreed on or whatever.
Red.eld’s is “shared understandings made manifest
in act and artifact,” I like
that. It’s an interesting remark and you don’t need
to add anything to it. Culture
to me is, hey, this is the way we do it and I
know it, I know that you know
it and I know that you know that I know it.
So I can act that way with
pretty good assurance that when I do, you’ll say
how right he’s doing X, that’s
the way we do it.
KP: And that’s missing from
another common de.nition, which I think is
“designs for living.” It
doesn’t have that notion of “sharedness” about it.
HB: Well, the “sharedness” is
what makes it work.
KP: It is crucial.
HB: “Sharedness” is what says
I can go ahead and act this way knowing that
everybody else is going to
fall in line. It’ll .t. We don’t have to sit down and
every day begin from the
beginning. What sounds shall we use today when
we talk? And what shall we
have them mean? I can speak to you as I am, and
feel more or less that you’ll
know what I’m talking about. More or less is the
quali.cation.
KP: Yes, but then you have
academic cultures, which do the same thing. So if you
say cultural studies, you can
only understand that if you’re a member of that
group, but that’s a
subculture.
HB: My real problem with
cultural studies is, and I haven’t really done a deep study
of this because I have lots to
do, is that it struck me as they’re not very empirical.
KP: Well they’re not. I think
you’re right. But they are empirical in the sense that
they take a .lm or they take
one cultural artifact and then they give it multiple
meanings.
HB: There’s a tremendous
amount that they assert that they don’t know to be true. If
I say to them I don’t believe
you, the answer to that is, well you should believe
because look, here is the
evidence. There isn’t any evidence; it’s just their interpretations.
You see, if you say here is
the .lm, it means this, the .rst question is,
to who does it mean that? And
does it mean really that to those people?
I just don’t take this stuff
too seriously because it’s mostly, you know, jerkoff
fantasies.
KP: Howard Becker. Thank you.
REFERENCES
Secondary Sources
Blumer, Herbert. 1969.
“Sociological Implications of G. H. B. Mead.” Pp. 61–77 in Symbolic
Interactionism: Perspective
and Method.
Continuity and Change in
Howard S. Becker’s Work 39
Hirshman, Albert. 1970. Exit,
Voice and Loyalty.
Latour, Bruno. 1992. Laboratory
Life.
———. 1993. The
Pasteurization of
Lieberson, Stanley.
Meyer, Leonard B. 1955. Emotion
and Meaning in Music.
Press.
Molotch, Harvey. 1994. “Going
Out.” Sociological Forum 9(2):22–39.
Ragin, Charles. 1985. The
Comparative Method.
———. 2000. Fuzzy Set Social
Science
Stichcombe, Art. 1982. “Should
Sociologists Forget Their Mothers and Fathers?” American
Sociologist 17:2–11.
Veblen, Thorsten. [1918] 1965.
The Higher Learning in
of Universities by Business
Men.
Howard S. Becker’s Work Cited
Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders:
Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.
———, ed. 1964. The Other
Side: Perspectives on Deviance.
———. 1971. Culture of
Civility: Culture and Civility in
———. 1977. Sociological
Work: Method and Substance.
Books.
———. 1982. Art Worlds.
———. 1986. Doing Things
Together.
———. 1988. Tricks of the
Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It. Chicago:
Becker, Howard S., Blanche
Geer, Irwin Deutscher, and Elizabeth Thompson. 1968. Learning
the Ropes: Among the People.
Becker, Howard S., Blanche
Geer, and
Side of College Life.
———. 1961. Boys in White: Student
Culture in
Press.
Interviews with Howard S.
Becker
Over the years, Howard Becker
has been interviewed a number of times. This is a listing of
his main interviews.
“Dialogue with Howard S.
Becker.” Issues in Criminology 5 (Summer 1970):159–79.
Reprinted in Howard S. Becker,
Doing Things Together, 25–46.
University Press, 1986.
“Uma Entrevista com Howard S.
Becker.” Estudos
Históricos 5(1990):114–36
(Rio de Janeiro).
“Entrevista com Howard
Becker.” Cięncia Hoje 12, no. 68(November 1990):54–61 (
Janeiro).
“Conversation with Howard
Becker.” Videotaped interview with Silvia Gherardi and
Gianpietro Gobo, available
from the
“La carričre
déviante du professeur Becker: De Al Jolson ŕ Georges Perec (en passant par
“Howard Becker en .lature.” Le
Monde, May 17, 2002, Livres, p. 5.
copyright © 2008 by the Regents of the
Technology Partner - Atypon Systems, In
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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
©Macarena García Mora
Universitat de Valčncia Press
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