TELLING ABOUT SOCIETY*

[This paper first appeared in a book that is now out of print: Howard S. Becker, Doing Things Together (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1986), pp. 121-135.]

I have lived, off and on, for many years in San Francisco, on the lower slope of Russian Hill or the upper reaches of North Beach; how I describe it depends on who I am trying to impress. I live near Fisherman's Wharf, on the route many people take from that tourist attraction to their motels downtown or on Lombard Street's motel row. Looking out my front window, I often see small groups of tourists standing, alternately looking at their maps and at the large hills that stand between them and where they want to be. It's clear what has happened. The map's straight line looked like a nice walk through a residential neighborhood, one that might show them how the natives live. Now, in the words of one young Briton I offered to help, "I've got to get to my motel and I am not climbing that bloody hill."

Why don't the maps those people consult tell them there are hills there? Cartographers know how to indicate hills, if that is required, so it is not a restriction of the medium that inconveniences walkers. I suppose, without knowing for sure, that the maps are made for motorists, financed by gasoline companies and automobile associations, and distributed through service stations--and drivers worry less about hills than pedestrians.

Those maps, and the networks of people and organizations who make and use them, exemplify the problem this paper deals with. An ordinary street map of San Francisco is a conventionalized representation of that urban society: a visual description of its streets and landmarks, and of their arrangement in space. Social scientists and ordinary citizens routinely use not only maps but a great variety of other representations of social reality~a few random examples are documentary films, statistical tables, or the stories people tell one another to explain who they are and what they are doing. All of them, like the maps, give a partial picture, which is nevertheless adequate for some purpose. All of them arise in organizational settings, which constrain what can be done and define the purposes the work will have to satisfy. This view suggests several interesting problems: How do the needs and practices of organizations shape our descriptions and analyses (call them representations) of social reality? How do the people who use those representations come to define them as adequate? Such questions have a bearing on traditional questions about knowing and telling in science, but go beyond them, as we will see, to include problems more traditionally associated with the arts and with the analysis of everyday life.

This paper reports on some explorations several colleagues and I have made of these problems.

Representations of Society as Social Facts

People in a variety of scholarly disciplines and artistic fields think they know something about society worth telling to others, and they use a variety of forms, media, and means to communicate their ideas and findings. Comparative study of these ways of representing knowledge about society shows the common problems all such representations involve and the different solutions people develop in different situations.

We have tried to be inclusive in our comparison, including (at least in principle) every medium and genre people use or have ever used. Although that is not possible, we have tried to avoid the most obvious conventional biases, and included not only reputable scientific formats and those invented and used by professionals but also those used by artists and lay people as well. A list will suggest the range of things we looked at: from the social sciences, such modes of representation as mathematical models, statistical tables and graphs, maps, ethnographic prose, and historical narrative; from the arts, novels, films, still photographs, and drama; from the large shadowy area in between, life histories and other biographical and autobiographical materials, reportage (including the mixed genres of docudrama, documentary film, and fictionalized fact), and the storytelling, mapmaking, and other representational activities of lay people (or people acting in a lay capacity, as even professionals do most of the time).

Modes of representation make most sense seen in organizational context, as ways some people tell what they think they know to other people who want to know it, as organized activities shaped by the joint efforts of everyone involved. We realized early that it was a confusing error to focus on objects, as though the subjects of our investigation were tables or charts or ethnographies or movies. It makes more sense to see these artifacts as the frozen remains of collective action, brought to life whenever someone uses them, as people making and reading charts or prose, making and seeing films. To speak of a film is shorthand for "making a film or seeing a film."

That's a distinction with a difference. Concentrating on the object misdirects attention to what a medium is formally and technically capable of: how many bits of information a television monitor with a particular degree of resolution can convey, or whether a purely visual medium can convey such logical notions as causality. Concentrating on organized activity, on the other hand, shows that what a medium can do is always a function of the way organizational constraints affect its use. What photographs can convey is in part shaped by the budget, which says how many photographs can be used and how they can be displayed, how much will be spent making them (how much film and photographers' time will be paid for), and by the amount and kind of attention viewers will put into interpreting them.

Seeing representations of knowledge about society organizationally really means incorporating all aspects of the organizations they are made in into the analysis: bureaucratic structures, budgets, professional codes, and audience characteristics and abilities all impinge on telling about society. Workers decide how to go about making representations by seeing what is possible, logical, feasible, and desirable, given the conditions under which they are making them and the people they are making them for.

It makes sense to speak, in rough analogy to the idea of an art world (Becker 1982), of worlds of makers and users of representations: the worlds of documentary film or statistical graphics, of mathematical modeling or anthropological monographs. These worlds differ in the relative knowledge and power of makers and users. In highly professionalized worlds, professionals mostly make artifacts for use by other professionals: scientific researchers make their reports and inscriptions (see Latour and Woolgar 1979, and Latour 1983, 1986, and 1988) for colleagues who know as much (or almost as much) about the work as they do. In the extreme case, makers and users are the same people, a situation almost realized in such esoteric worlds as mathematical modeling.

Members of more differentiated worlds share some basic knowledge, despite the differences in their actual work. That's why sociology students who will never do statistical work learn the latest versions of multivariate analysis. Other professionals do their work for lay people: cartographers make maps for motorists who know just enough about cartography to get to the next town, and filmmakers make movies for people who never heard of a jump cut. (Of course, these professionals usually worry about what their professional peers will think of their work as well.) Lay people, of course, tell stories, make maps, and write down figures for each other. What gets made, communicated, and understood varies among these typical settings.

This makes it useless to talk of media or forms in the abstract, although I have already done that and will continue to in this paper. Abstract terms like "film" or "statistical table" are only shorthand for such specifics as "tables-made-for-the-Census" or "big-budget-Hollywood-feature-films." The organizational constraints of the Census and Hollywood are best thought of as part of the artifact made in those places. So our focus differs from the conventional one, which treats the artifact as the main thing and the activities through which it is produced and consumed as secondary.

The form and content of representations vary because social organization shapes not only what is made, but also what people want the representation to do, what job they think they need done (like finding their way or knowing what the latest findings in their field are), and what standards they will use to judge it. Because the jobs users call on representations to do depend so heavily on organizational definitions, we have not been concerned with what many people think a (indeed the) major methodological problem: given a particular representational job to be done, what is the best way to do it? If that were the question, one would set up a task--to communicate an array of numbers, for example--and then see which way of organizing a table would communicate that information most honestly, adequately, and efficiently (as people compare computers by seeing how fast they can find prime numbers). We have deliberately avoided judgments about the adequacy of any mode of representation, not taking any of them as the yardstick against which all other methods should be judged. Nor have we adopted the slightly more relativistic position that while the jobs to be done may differ, there is a best way of doing each of them. That isn't relativistic asceticism on our part either. It seems more useful, more likely to lead to new understanding, to think of every way of representing social reality as perfect- -for something. The question is what it is good for. The answer to that is organizational.

Despite the superficial differences between genres and media, the same fundamental problems occur in every medium. The influence of budgets, the role of professionalization, what knowledge audiences must have for a representation to be effective, what is ethically permissible in making a representation--all these are common to every form of representation making. How they are solved and dealt with varies depending on organizational resources and purposes.

Such problems are debated in every field in which representations are made. Novelists worry about the same ethical dilemmas sociologists and anthropologists do, and filmmakers share our concern about budgets. The literature of those debates, and informal observations and interviews in those fields, have given us most of our data. We have also found the relatively recent literature concerned with problems of representation and rhetoric in the sociology of science very helpful (see, for instance, Gusfield 1981, especially pp. 83-108; Latour and Bastide 1986; Bazerman 1988; Clifford 1988; and Geertz 1983).

Making Representations

Any representation of social reality--a documentary film, a demographic study, a realistic novel--is necessarily partial, less than what one would experience and have available for interpretation in the actual setting. That is why people make representations: to report only what you need in order to do whatever you want to do. An efficient representation tells you everything you need to know for your purposes, without wasting your time with what you don't need. Makers and users of representations, then, must perform several operations on reality to get from it to the final understanding of social reality they want to communicate. Social organization affects the making and use of representations by affecting how makers go through these operations.

Selection.. Every medium, in any of its conventional uses, leaves out much, in fact most, of reality. Even media that seem more comprehensive than the obviously abstract words and numbers social scientists usually use leave practically everything out: film (still or moving) and video leave out the third dimension, smells, etc. Written representations usually leave out all visual elements. Every medium leaves out whatever happens after we stop our representational activities. Some breeds of sociologists like to point out that numerical representations leave out the human element, or emotions, or symbolically negotiated meaning--they use the criterion of completeness to criticize work they don't like. But no one, neither users nor makers, in fact ever regards incompleteness in itself as a crime. Instead, they recognize it as the way one does that sort of thing. Road maps, tremendously abstract and incomplete renderings of the reality they represent, are perfectly adequate for even the sternest critic of incomplete representations. They contain just what drivers need to get from one place to another (even when they mislead pedestrians).

Since any representation always and necessarily leaves out elements of reality, the interesting and researchable questions are these: Which of the possible elements are included? Who finds that selection reasonable and acceptable? Who complains about it? What criteria do people apply in making those judgments? Some criteria, to suggest the possibilities, are genre-related ("if it doesn't include this [or does include that] it isn't really a novel [or photograph or ethnography or table or . .] any more") or professional ("that's how real statisticians [or filmmakers or historians or . . .] always do it").

Translation. We can think of translation, in a loose analogy, as a function which maps one set of elements (the parts of reality makers want to represent) on to another set of elements (the conventional elements available in the medium as it is currently used). Anthropologists turn their field notes into standardized ethnographic descriptions; survey researchers create tables and charts from field interviews; historians combine their index cards into narratives, character sketches, and analyses; filmmakers edit and splice raw footage into shots, scenes, and movies. Users of representations never deal with reality itself, but rather with reality translated into the materials and conventional language of a particular craft.

Standard ways of making representations give makers a standard set of elements to use in constructing their artifacts, including materials and their capabilities, such as film with a particular light sensitivity, so many grains of light sensitive material and thus a particular degree of resolution making possible the representation of elements of a certain size but not smaller; conceptual elements, like the idea of plot or character in fiction; and conventional units of meaning, like scenes or the wipes, fades, and other devices for indicating the passage of time in a movie.

Makers expect standard elements to have standard effects, so that consumers of representations made with them will respond in standard ways. We might define representations made when that condition obtains as "perfect." Since the condition never obtains completely, the more interesting situation is when it is met sufficiently that most people (and especially those whose opinion counts, because they are powerful and important) respond near enough to what makers intended that the result is "acceptable" to everyone involved. The criteria defining acceptability vary considerably. Take the issue of the "transparency" of the prose, tables, and pictures people use to report scientific results. Both the makers and users of scientific representations would like the verbal, numerical, and visual languages they use in their articles and reports to be neutral standard elements, which add nothing to what is being reported. Like a clear glass window, results could just be seen through them without being affected by being seen through anything. Thomas Kuhn (1970) has provided a reasoned argument that no such "transparent" descriptive scientific language is possible, that all descriptions are "theory-laden." More to the point, it is clear that even the width of bars in a bar chart and the size and style of type in a table, let alone the adjectives in an ethnography or historical narrative, affect our interpretation of what is reported. Nevertheless, all these methods of portraying social reality have been acceptable to scientific audiences, who taught themselves to overlook or discount for those effects of the communicative elements they had accepted as standard.

Standard elements have the features already found in investigations of art worlds. They make efficient communication of ideas and facts possible by creating a shorthand known to everyone who needs the material. But they simultaneously constrain what a maker can do, because every set of translations makes saying some things easier but saying other things more difficult. To take a contemporary example, social scientists conventionally represent race and gender discrimination in job promotions in a multiple-regression equation, a widely used standard statistical element which tells what proportion of the variance in promotions is due to the independent effects of such separate variables as race, gender; education, and seniority. But, as Charles Ragin and his collaborators (Ragin, Meyer and Drass 1984) have shown, that way of representing discrimination does not answer the questions either sociologists or courts ask. It does not tell you, and cannot, how the chances for promotion of a young white male differ from those of an older black female; it can only tell you the weight of a variable like age or gender in an equation, not the same thing at all. They advocate making another statistical element standard: the Boolean algorithm (details can be found in the article just cited) which represents discrimination as the differences in chances of promotion for a person with a particular combination of those attributes as compared to mean rates for a whole population. This is what social scientists and courts want to know. (Related and complementary arguments are made in Lieberson 1985.)

Some constraints on what a representation can tell us arise from the way representational activity is organized. Organizationally constrained budgets--time and attention as well as money--limit the potential of media and formats. Books and movies are as long as people can afford to make them and as other people will pay attention to. If makers had more money and people would sit still for it, every ethnography might contain every field note and every step in the analytic process (which Clyde Kluckhohn [Kluckhohn 1945] thought the only proper way to publish life history materials).

Arrangement. The elements of the situation a representation describes, having been chosen and translated, must be arranged in some order so that users can take them in. The order given to elements is both arbitrary --you can always see how it might have been done another way--and determined by standard ways of doing things, just as the elements are. Arrangement makes narratives out of random elements. It communicates such notions as causality, so that viewers see the order of photographs on a gallery wall or in a book as meaningiul, see earlier pictures as the "conditions" which produced the "consequences" depicted in the later ones. When I tell a story (personal, historical, or sociological), the earlier elements "explain" those that come later; a character's actions in one episode become evidence for a personality which reveals itself fully in later ones (see McCall 1985: 176-79). Students of statistical tables and graphics are particularly sensitive to the effects of arrangement on interpretations (Tufte 1983, 1990).

No maker of representations of society can avoid this issue since, as many studies have shown, users of representations see order and logic even in random arrangements of elements. People find logic in the arrangement of photographs whether the photographer intended it or not, and respond to typefaces as "frivolous," "serious," or "scientific," independent of the text's content. Social scientists and methodologists have yet to treat this as a serious problem; what to do about it is one of the things that gets passed on as professional lore.

Interpretation. Representations exist fully only when someone is using them, reading or viewing or listening and thus completing the communication by interpreting the results and constructing for themselves the reality the maker intended to show them. The road map exists when I use it to get to the next town, Dickens's novels when I read them and imagine Victorian England, a statistical table when I inspect it and evaluate the propositions it suggests.

What users know how to do interpretively thus becomes a major constraint on what a representation can accomplish. Users must know and be capable of using the conventional elements and formats of the medium and genre. That knowledge and ability can never be taken for granted. Historical studies (e.g., Cohen 1982) have shown that it was not until well into the nineteenth century that most Americans were "numerate," capable of understanding and using standard arithmetic operations. Anthropological studies show that what such literary critics as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag insist is the universal appeal to our sense of reality embodied in still photographs and film is no such thing. More professionalized fields expect users to become knowledgeable consumers of representations through training in graduate or professional school, although what is expected to be known varies from time to time. We expect sociologists to acquire a certain amount of statistical sophistication (for which read, in part, "ability to read formulae and tables"), but few departments expect their students to know much about mathematical models.

Users interpret representations by finding the answers to two kinds of questions in them (on understanding photographs as potential answers to questions, see Becker 1984). On the one hand, they want to know "the facts": what happened at the battle of Bull Run, where the slum communities of Los Angeles are located, what the median income of white-collar suburbs is, what the correlation is between race, income, and education in the United States in 1980, what it is "really like" to be an astronaut--questions, at every level of specificity, whose answers help people orient their actions. On the other hand, users want answers to moral questions: not just what the correlation is between race, education, and income, but also why the correlation is what it is, whose fault it is, and what ought to be done about it. They want to know whether the Civil War; and thus the battle of Bull Run, was "necessary" or could have been prevented; whether astronaut John Glenn is the kind of man who deserves to be President; and so on. On the most superficial inspection, almost any factual question about society displays a strong moral dimension, which accounts for the ferocious battles that so often occur over what seem to be minor matters of technical interpretation. Arthur Jensen's statistical mistakes upset people who are not statisticians.

Users and Makers

One important organizational dimension is the difference between makers and users of representations. We all play both parts frequently, telling stories and listening to them, making causal analyses and reading them. As with any other service relationship, the interests of the two sets of parties usually differ considerably, particularly when, as is so often true, the makers are professionals who make such representations full time for pay, and the users are amateurs who use such representations occasionally, in an habitual and uninspected way (see the classic analysis of routine and emergency in Hughes 1984: 316-25). A major difference between what we might call representational worlds is which set of interests dominate.

In worlds dominated by makers, representations take the form of an argument, a presentation of just that material which makes the points the maker wants to get across and no more (the current literature on the rhetoric of scientific writing referred to earlier makes this point). When making representations is professionalized, makers are likely to control the circumstances of their making, for all the reasons Everett Hughes pointed out: what is out of the ordinary for most people is what they do all day long. Even if others have substantial power; professionals know so much more about how to manipulate the process that they retain great control. Poweriul others who support representation making over a long term typically learn enough to overcome that disability, but casual users seldom do. So professionally made representations embody the choices and interests of makers, and indirectly of the people who can afford to hire them, and thus may well not show the hills a pedestrian would like to know about.

In user-dominated worlds, representations are used as files, archives to be ransacked for answers to whatever questions any competent user might have in mind. Think of the difference between the street map you buy at the store and the detailed, annotated map I draw to show you how to get to my house. Lay representations are typically more localized and more responsive to user wishes than those made by professionals. (Another example is the difference between amateur snapshots, which satisfy their makers' need for documents to show to a circle of intimates who know everyone in the pictures, and the photographs made by journalists, artists, and social scientists, oriented to the standards of professional communities, discussed in Bourdieu 1965.)

Some artifacts seem to be essentially files. A map, after all, seems to be a simple repository of geographic and other facts users can consult for their own purposes. In fact, maps can be made in a great variety of ways, none of them a simple translation of reality, which has allowed formerly voiceless peoples to claim that the maps that dominate world thinking are "Eurocentric," the technical choices they embody leading to results that arbitrarily make Europe and North America look like the center of the world. That is, those maps embody the argument that Europe and North America are "more important."

Conversely, scholars routinely ignore the arguments contained in the scholarly papers they cite, merely rifling the literature for results which can be put to their purposes. In short, they use the literature not as a body of arguments but as a file of results with which to answer questions the original authors never thought of.

So arguments and files are not kinds of documents, but kinds of uses, ways of doing something rather than objects or things.

Some Organizational Problems: Misrepresentation

Sociologists in my tradition habitually seek an understanding of social organization by looking for trouble, for situations in which people complain that things aren't happening the way they are supposed to. You find the rules and understandings governing social relations by hearing people complain when they are violated; every field of representational activity is marked by periodic violent, heavily moralistic debate over the way representations are made and used. The cries of "it's not fair" and "he cheated" would sound like the games of five-year-olds were the stakes not so much higher and the matters dealt with so much more serious. Analysis of the problem of misrepresentation illustrates the perspective on problems of method and technique this way of looking at things opens up.

For example, anthropology students at the University of Papua in New Guinea complained that Margaret Mead's Growing Up in New Guinea was unfair because it repeated the derogatory stories her informants had told about the students' ancestors, for whom they had a traditional contempt. The students did not complain that what Mead reported was untrue; they agreed that those people had said such things. Nor did they complain that Mead presented the stories as fact. Rather, they complained because their own ancestors, whom Mead had not studied, used to say equally terrible things about those other people, and Mead had not given them equal time.

These complaints exemplify the class of complaints which arise from self-interest: "You made me [or mine] look bad!" The first assistant physician of the mental hospital Erving Goffman studied complained wistfully (in the footnote Goffman donated to him) that for every "bad thing" Asylums noted he could have produced a balancing "good thing": for the victimizations of patients Goffman reported he would have told about the newly painted cafeteria (Goffman 1961). The citizens and politicians of Kansas City, Missouri, complained that the 1960 Census underreported the city's population by a few thousand, thus keeping it from sharing in the benefits state law gave to cities over half a million (a law designed to help St. Louis some years earlier). Almost everyone whose organization is filmed by Frederick Wiseman complains that they didn't realize they were going to end up looking like that.

The practice of more or less fictionalizing reportage, as practiced by Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe, among others, has provoked another kind of complaint. The distinguished journalist John Hersey (1980) pointed out that these writers not only made things up, but insisted on the right to make them up in the name of a higher truth. Hersey argues that that is all right in writing labeled as fiction, which carries on its license the legend "THIS WAS MADE UP!", but not in journalism. There:

the writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP The ethics of journalism, if we can allow such a boon, must be based on the simple truth that every journalist knows the difference between the distortion that comes from subtracting observed data and the distortion that comes from adding invented data.

Hersey adds, interestingly, that distortion by omission is acceptable, because:

the reader assumes the subtraction [of observed data] as a given of journalism and instinctively hunts for the bias; the moment the reader suspects additions, the earth begins to skid underfoot, for the idea that there is no way of knowing what is real and what is not real is terrifying. Even more terrifying is the notion that lies are truths.

But many critics of print and broadcast journalism (e.g., Molotch and Lester 1974; Tuchman 1978; Gitlin 1980) complain exactly that it leaves out what people need to be able to assess issues properly. And it's easy to imagine readers who would be as much at ease "instinctively hunting out" additions as Hersey is going after subtractions, as long as they knew that it needed to be done; in fact, I imagine that many of Wolfe's readers, as well as newspaper readers and television viewers, do just that.

Hersey, whether or not we accept his judgments, points to the sociological core of conflicts over representations of social reality. No report in any medium or genre, following no-matter-what strict rules--not even our own most up-to-the-minute state-of-the-art inventions--will solve all problems, answer all questions, or avoid all potential troubles. People who create reports of any kind come to agree as to what is good enough, what procedures need to be followed to achieve that good-enough condition, and that any report made by following those procedures is authoritative enough for ordinary purposes. That protects professional interests and lets the work and that of the people who use it proceed, guaranteeing the results as acceptable, believable, and capable of bearing the weight put on them by routine use for other people's purposes. These standards define what is expected, so that users can discount for the shortcomings of representations made according to them and, at least, know what they are dealing with. Hersey's analysis accepts this state of affairs as normal, standard, and proper. It is what I had in mind when I said earlier that every way of making a representation is "perfect": that it is good enough that people will accept it as the best they can get under the circumstances and learn how to work with its limitations. People claim that misrepresentation has occurred when the standard procedures have not been followed, so that users are misled by thinking a contract is in force which is actually not being honored.

People also claim misrepresentation when their interests are harmed because the routine use of acceptable standard procedures has left something out which, if it were included, would change the interpretations of fact, but more importantly the moral judgments, people make on the basis of the representation. This usually happens when some historical shift makes new voices audible. The people Mead studied did not read anthropological monographs and so could not criticize them, but their descendants can and do.

In either case, the problem of misrepresentation is a problem of social organization, of a bargain once good enough for everyone being redefined as inadequate. A large number of problems which crosscut genres and media can be similarly analyzed in organizational terms: the ethics of representation, the problem of the authority of a representation, or the influence of context on content.

Conclusion

This all implies a relativistic view of knowledge, at least to this degree: The same reality can be described in an enormous number of ways, since the descriptions can be answers to any of a multitude of questions. We can agree in principle that our procedures ought to let us get the same answer to the same question, but in fact we only ask the same question when the circumstances of social interaction and organization have produced consensus on that point. That happens when the conditions of people's lives lead them to see certain problems as common, as requiring certain kinds of representations of social reality on a routine basis, and thus lead to the development of professions and crafts that make those representations for use. As a result, some questions get asked and answered while others, every bit as good, interesting, worthwhile, and even scientifically important are ignored, at least until society changes enough that the people who need those answers come to command the resources that will let them get an answer. Until then, pedestrians are going to be surprised by San Francisco's hills.

*This paper reports on work done with the help of a grant from the System Development Foundation of Palo Alto, California.

The members of the research group at Northwestern University were Andrew Gordon, Bernard Beck, Robert K. LeBailly, Marjorie Devault, Samuel Gilmore, Lawrence McGill, Lori Morris, and Robin Leidner. A number of people at other institutions collaborated with us: the late James Bennett, Michal McCall, Rachel Volberg, Elihu Gerson, and Susan Leigh Star.

References

Bazerman, Charles. 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and the Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison: University of WIsconsin Press.

Becker, Howard S. 1974. "Photography and Sociology." Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1:3-26.

________. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clifford, James. 1988. "On Ethnographic Authority." Pp. 21-54 in The Predicament of Culture, edited by James Clifford. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cohen, Patricia Cline. 1982. A calculating people : the spread of numeracy in early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World Is Watching. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. Garden City: Doubleday.

Gusfield, Joseph. 1981. The Culture of Public Problems; rinking, Driving and the Symbolic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hersey, John. 1980. "The Legend on the License." Yale Review 70:1-25.

Hughes, Everett C. 1984. The Sociological Eye. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1945. "The Personal Document in Anthropology." in The Use of Personal Documents in History, Anthropology, and Sociology, edited by Louis Gottschalk, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Rpbert C. Angell. New York: Social Science Research Council.

Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1983. "Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World." in Science Observed, edited by Karen Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Latour, Bruno. 1986. "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands." Knowledge and Society 6:1-40.

________. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

________, and Françoise Bastide. 1986. "Writing Science--Fact and Fiction: The Analysis of the Process of Reality Construction Through the Application of Socio-Semiotic Methods to Scientific Texts." Pp. 51-66 in Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World, edited by Michel Callon, John Law, and Arie Rip. London: MacMillan.

________, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Fact. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Lieberson, Stanley. 1985. Making It Count. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McCall, Michal. 1985. "Life History and Social Change." Studies in Symbolic Interaction 6:169-82.

Molotch, Harvey, and Marilyn Lester. 1974. "News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals." American Journal of Sociology 39:101-12.

Ragin, Charles C., Susan Meyer, and Kriss Drass. 1984. "Assessing Discrimination: A Boolean Approach." American Sociological Review 49:221-234.

Tuchman, Gaye. 1978. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: Free Press.

Tufte, Edward R. 1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

________. 1990. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.
 



Página creada y actualizada por grupo "mmm".
     Para cualquier cambio, sugerencia,etc. contactar con: fores@uv.es
     © a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
      Universitat de València Press
Creada: 15/09/2000 Última Actualización: 15/06/2001

 

1 2 3456   

 

Back

 

 

©Copyright http://www.uv.es/~fores/programa/becker_society.html

 

Academic year 2008/2009

© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López

©Macarena García Mora
Universitat de València Press

garmoma2@alumni.uv.es
Página creada: 1/11/08