Howard S. Becker

Sociology and Music in the Chicago School

Jean Peneff, Robert Dingwall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781629583150
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429885570
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Who is Howard S. Becker? This book traces his career, examining his work and contributions to the field of sociology. Themes covered include Becker's theoretical conceptualizations, approaches, teaching style, and positioning in the intellectual milieu. Translated from French by sociologist Robert Dingwall, the English edition benefits from an editorial introduction and additional referencing, as well as a new foreword by Becker himself.

1

Why Should We Read Howard Becker?

When we read original and innovative writers, we open ourselves to the creation of new forms of sociological discourse. This is not a paradox. Such authors invite us to develop our own scholarship as their work takes us beyond our discipline’s conventional thinking. The pool of ideas about the social world is inexhaustible. Sociology cannot possibly claim that it has a monopoly: we have always been enriched by our borrowings from geography, history, political economy, arts and letters, and anthropology. Thanks to this openness, we can contrast our characteristic approaches with theirs, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of our own practices and working methods. Such comparisons are a sign of our own health and vigor. Consequently, it seems important to investigate how authors in the social sciences generate new ideas.

What is a new idea in the social sciences? A successful idea seems obvious once someone has formulated and disseminated it. Such novelties are not common in the social sciences. Routine thinking, the intervention of editors, and the inertia of today’s aging readership put brakes on change. Paradigm shifts are slowed. These factors all weigh in the direction of conformism and come with a cost: repetitive work, desperate attempts to copy “successful” models, fear of innovation. Through working with Becker, I have come to a better understanding of how deference and docility are embedded within the structures of contemporary sociology. Sociological apprenticeships generally promote this model. The slow pace of professional turnover and renewal locks us into the orthodoxies of the previous century, strangling us with a set of rules that were relevant in a distant past. The burdens of tradition lead sociologists to publish anodyne reports or trivial statements because they are afraid to be adventurous or to take risks. This is why we must read, re-read and study Becker as a case in the terms he himself proposes in his own work: What is a case? (Ragin and Becker 1992). What indeed? It is true that everyone can make their own preferred selection from Becker’s output. Within this diversity, however, there is an indisputable unity of thought which I shall set out through these pages. Whatever else it may achieve, I hope that this text will serve those with a general interest in sociology by revealing some little-known aspects of the ways in which sociologists create concepts and provide a context for understanding the conditions under which new explanations may appear. It is the lack of such conditions that is causing so many problems at a time when there is an urgent need to join in the analysis of the society that is emerging around us.

Finally, any summary of Becker’s work must also take account of some particular characteristics. The author being studied is still very active and internationally recognized. Although these are academic criteria, he is, in many countries, the contemporary sociologist who is most widely published, cited, and translated, on a par with Erving Goffman, while the impact of Robert Merton and Pierre Bourdieu has declined since their deaths, and that of Anthony Giddens since his retirement. Anyone writing about a living author is taking a risk because their body of work has not yet come to an end. Becker’s continuing publications confirm this – four books since 2006.¹ The balance sheet is not yet closed. Nevertheless, we can at least introduce and describe his thinking as it is today, throwing light on a diffuse and widely dispersed set of publications.

My interpretation of Becker’s thinking is not an authorized or officially sanctioned version. It does not defend a “true” Becker against supposedly false readings. There are as many readings as readers, at least if one applies his own approach, in Telling about Society (Becker 2007a), to the reception of a work. None of these readers is wrong. Moreover, like any commentator, I will display my own personal, and independently formed, preferences. This is inevitable. Nevertheless, I have had lengthy discussions with Becker about my own reactions to his work, and the ways in which I have used it.

I will also refer in passing to what Becker has brought to our scholarly generation, and what we have selected from this, made use of, added to, and embedded into our thinking. Every era reads an author through the lenses and questions of its own immediate concerns. We must, then, take account of the need to explain this context to current students, who may not fully understand where Becker has come from, and where he is taking them. They may well ask “Who is this Becker? We often hear him talked about but we do not really study him in our classes, with the possible exception of Outsiders” (Becker 2008). Even this book is more cited in student essays than used by active researchers. These are reasonable questions for beginners, who are taught sociology through the accumulation of “epistemologies” or the piling up of themes and schools. In selecting certain aspects of Becker’s work, I have tried to focus on useful questions, particularly at a time when we are concerned about the future of the social sciences. Our disciplines are searching for a new direction in the face of public crises – in the recruitment of students and in the confidence of our readers.

If I am not introducing the “authentic” Becker here, this does not really matter. I am describing “our Becker” – a great investigator over sixty years of fieldwork, who has practiced according to his own methods and techniques, with little regard for other people’s standards or conventions. It is a position that should engage those younger readers whose competence has yet to be certified. In following Becker, they can avoid over-complicating their investigations, subjecting themselves to the pain, which he rarely takes seriously, of searching for an original topic. His model is one of cultivating a permanent curiosity about everyday life, realized through observation.

Becker’s Career

A Series of Simple Precepts

Becker is a pragmatic sociologist with practical goals. A diverse collection of books stands to his account. He has, we might say, led several “careers” – teacher, researcher, investigator, musician, photographer. What does it mean to say that he has “practical and useful goals”? If sociology does nothing to improve your understanding of your own immediate circumstances – to revise your understanding of everyday life and your passage through it – then it has served you poorly.

But Becker gives us other practical advice. For example: “Never commit yourself to a single profession, try several trades at the same time”; “Always write with care, with attention to style”; “Do not exaggerate small differences – do not write a polemic about a minor disagreement just to make a name for yourself”. You will encounter these precepts as you work through the following pages – and many other tips, if you read Becker himself. This is not just advice for those who want to get a degree: it is for those who want to practice sociology independently, to make sense of their everyday life, using the discipline as a way to understand the world around them. If you do not want to do that, whether as a student or as a reader, then Becker will be of no use to you.

Is it possible to find any unifying theme in the work of someone who has been an innovator in so many diverse settings? A body of work needs an audience, an organization to promote its diffusion. Innovations need organizations to welcome and disseminate them. Most fail and disappear. For Becker, the business of sociology resembles the music business, with a whole service industry producing manuals, dictionaries, summaries, and media commentaries:

Well, you have to be innovative in science, too. If I do the same study that you do and get the same result, no one is very interested. Everybody says it’s very good to replicate studies, but nobody believes it. Nobody wants to be the one who did the replication. You want them to say: “Müller found” not “Becker found and Müller also found”. So it’s more a question of what’s regarded as innovative. There are people who make changes and everybody says “Oh, you’re right”, not a problem, and then someone does something else that is a big problem for everybody. It happens in all kinds of communities, especially in the arts. The new book that Rob Faulkner and I just finished is about the jazz repertoire and innovations and what goes into the jazz repertoire and innovations may be very upsetting to a lot of people.² Even though, yes, of course, everybody wants to be individual and unique but not so unique.

(Müller, 2009)

Note that Becker does not attach much weight to the claims made by scientists. They become, instead, the topic of a serious analysis of the diversification and proliferation that is necessary to take the work forward. “Institutions,” he has said “are not everything: there are many professors of sociology who do not do sociology and many excellent sociologists who are not employed as professors.” His concept of career plays down the element of vocation and insists on the role of chance. As this implies, many career opportunities – some of them possibly “deviant” – offered themselves to him, as to any young person. The first advice that he gives to any beginner is to “stay independent and trust your own abilities. You have a vision, even a small one, of your corner of the world. Your own experience will open doors for you. Make use of it!” Of course there is a price to be paid for taking such liberties with the normal criteria of scholarship. Hard work and application are required to meet Becker’s standards and the benefit only becomes apparent after several years of practice.

These are the recommendations of an American scholar, brought up in a university system that was quite open and “democratic” in his youth, working in new fields of social science where entry and promotion had not yet become ossified. They are easier to realize in the United States, which has its own ways of valuing the work of sociologists. The twenty thousand sociologists in the United States are dispersed and independent: they are not regulated and controlled. Today, as we face a decline in funding and recruitment for our discipline, Becker appears as a distinctly contemporary author through his oblique perspective on the times we live in. His conception of our project is sobering. We must read his work as a response to debates about the rights and duties of sociologists in public activism, about the mission of our profession, and about the life of an educator.

Howard Becker’s Intellectual Journey

For the purposes of this account, we can divide Becker’s life and publications into three main phases:

(1) The years 1950–1970. This is the period of his major empirical works and the various articles collected in Sociological Work (Becker 1970). Initially, like other students, the young Becker established his financial independence. From the age of sixteen, he paid for his studies by working as a pianist in bars (seven hours a night, forty-five minutes on, fifteen minutes off). At the same time as he was embarking on the life of a musician, he enrolled in the sociology department of a great university, the University of Chicago, which was then acquiring the reputation that would mark its history as The Chicago School. ³

A precocious talent, Becker defended his PhD thesis at the age of twenty-three, while publishing several articles at the same time. In 1963, he produced his first book, Outsiders (Becker 2008), which has been translated into eight languages and become a global point of reference for sociologists. It must be said that he was completely in tune with the culture of that period. He anticipated the universal diffusion of jazz and the spread of counter-cultural movements. He began, like many others, as a researcher without a permanent position, surviving on temporary contracts. Universities had few tenure-track openings at that time and research was a way to keep his career alive while waiting for an opportunity. His postdoctoral employment proved to be a fertile period for research and rich in other experiences, such as editing journals or correcting articles for publication.

(2) The books of the 1980s and 1990s combined his major project on art worlds with several works on the practice of sociology, where he urged colleagues to renounce their pompous academic mannerisms (e.g. Doing Things Together [Becker 1986]). This was the most traditional part of his career, as a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, where he worked for thirty-four years. He loved teaching. Like his colleagues, he would spend hours in his office at the disposal of his students, talking freely with them, as I observed on many occasions. As for administrative duties in this private university, he only accepted those that he considered to be legitimate: to be reliable in his courses, his examinations and his seminars (but, in a characteristically personal touch, although the courses were delivered, they did not necessarily take place in the advertised locations but in the basement among the maintenance crew!). He broke with the traditional organization of space in classes, where students traditionally face their teacher, symbolically signaling the intellectual hierarchy of the professor speaking from the pulpit or the podium of the lecture theatre. The work that he required from students left space for them to express their independence and avoided signs of authority by grading in broad categories. He resisted evaluations, judgments, and classifications as premature verdicts on young people in the process of learning. Harsh marking for students was inappropriate, particularly given the lack of consensus within sociology about its mission and standards.

(3) Becker’s third career is now in progress through his final position at Seattle and his current retirement. It has already yielded several original books, often with collective authorship. He has returned to his preferred style, turning his back on irrelevant “courtesy” references, a heavy load of footnotes (which he has never used) and a self-conscious display of erudition. He has innovated as much as in his youth, revisiting his established themes: the value of sociological studies of everyday life; the engagement with other forms of reporting on the social – by novelists, photographers, journalists, statisticians or artists. In this way, he directly attacks the fundamental problem of the nature of sociology. What kind of a discipline is it? Is it a science? If it is, then what kind of a science? If it is a way of describing society through the multiplication of subtle abstractions, is it any more than a branch of philosophy?

The identification of these three careers is important for French readers because the usual accounts of his work give an impoverished and limited version of Becker’s contribution. He has been presented successively as:

a A sociologist of deviance who anticipated the leisure activities of affluent, urban, middle-class young people, the service industries that have grown up around these, and the alternative ways of life that promised a better future (drugs, music, student cultures). This is the commonest summary of his work in the textbooks.

b A sociologist of the professions, and of art, whose works treated these sacred and prestigious institutions as if they were mere trades. This body of work takes a more classical form, although it introduces some novel features in its presentation, particularly in the use of photographs or images.

c Finally, in retirement, Becker is seen as a tester of ideas, a stylistic innovator, a sociologist freed from any institutional role that might oblige him to advise students about how to adapt their practices to the norms and traditions of the university. These late texts can be read as the fruits of years of serenity, written without aggression or the distracting critique of professional rivals. Nevertheless, the velvet language cloaks a steely mind.

Who, then, are we going to meet in the pages that follow? A pragmatic sociologist or a free-ranging scholar? Becker is, above all, a hard worker, focused on his thinking, preserving time for this by keeping his distance from the demands of marketing and self-promotion: “I am never going to be on the radio,” he says. “I never go on television. It is a waste of time.” His taste for liberty is deep-rooted. Remember that he was financially independent from the age of eighteen as a worker in the night-time economy. These experiences are not affectations but the basis of a great education in the school of life that led to a wide range of investigations and to his understanding of the ephemeral nature of public assessments of success or failure.

I didn’t have any trouble in graduate school because, I tell people, I never worried about school, because it was simply a pastime, it was a hobby. The serious business was playing the piano. So I didn’t choose sociology, I just kept doing it and then, one day, I had a Ph.D., not trying very hard, not because I am brilliant, but because all my colleagues were worrying and worrying just because they were very serious. If you don’t worry it’s not that difficult to go through graduate school successfully. And then I realized two things. One is the kind of music business I was in was probably not such a wonderful thing to do forever, because the people I worked for were small time criminals, you know, Mafiosi, and so on, and that probably wasn’t good, and the things that would be more successful weren’t really so interesting, like writing music for advertising, which I think I could have done very well. So I thought, well, maybe I should try sociology, which I did, and in the same way, you know, you don’t choose these things, you do something and that leads to something else…

(Müller, 2009)

Elsewhere, Becker has said:

I became a sociologist by chance, or better by accident…in general, I find it difficult to take on the role of an intellectual, of a great thinker, which people sometimes ascribe to me…music has influenced my sociology. Music helps to give me anthropological distance, the skeptical perspective on the organization and practices of a society that is essential for a sociologist. But I must make an importan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Howard S. Becker
• Introduction to the English Edition – Robert Dingwall
• Preface to the French Edition
• Introduction to the French Edition
• 1. Why Should We Read Howard Becker?
• 2. The Sociologist of Work
• 3. The Social Worlds of Organizations, Institutions and Professions
• 4. From Pragmatism to Interactionism
• 5. Professor Becker’s Approach to Teaching
• 6. Becker in France
• References
• Index