Becker, Howard

An American sociologist who has pursued diverse interests over a long career, Howard S. Becker (b. 1928) is a prominent advocate of qualitative research methods in a discipline increasingly given to abstraction and quantification. Educated at the University of Chicago in the 1940s under Everett Hughes, Becker self-consciously inherits from the Chicago School a commitment to fine-grained field studies, and from symbolic interactionism an abiding concern with the intersubjective negotiation of meaning. In addition to definitive substantive contributions to the sociology of education, deviance, and art, Becker has been an [Page 43]innovative methodologist, explaining the varied virtues of qualitative inquiry, advocating photography as a legitimate and fruitful mode of social research, and encouraging sociologists to view their work as both science and craft.

Becker's early collaborative field studies of medical students and undergraduates at the University of Kansas (Becker et al. 1961, 1968) reveal how differently life in school appears to students and school authorities. While teachers typically see a straightforward relationship between educational goals and the curricular program, students often find that the curriculum inhibits their pursuit of real learning. Undergraduates strategize to make good grades, even when doing so means opting for rote memorization and fluffy course loads, because so many practical rewards are tied to grades, not to what students actually learn. Medical students find that passing their exams and pleasing their superiors are the crucial facts of life in medical school, and so they suspend their idealistic concerns with helping patients in the interest of passing tests and gaining approval. Becker's studies became classics in the study of education and the professions, and also crystallized analytic strategies that would inform his subsequent scholarship. He would continue to examine social phenomena from the standpoint of low-status or marginal groups and use their perspectives to refashion established social science wisdom.

This approach is most clear in Becker's studies of marijuana users and jazz musicians published in Outsiders (1963), in which he extended Everett Hughes's notion of career to novel theoretical ends. He argued that unconventional ways of life are the culmination of gradual behavioral trajectories in which people learn, in piecemeal fashion, both to appreciate the pleasures of deviant activity and to redefine conventional practices and values as errant. Becker significantly shifted the terms in which social scientists view deviance: Rather than pathology, deviant behavior is understood as the product of a generic learning process in which people gradually redefine their conceptions of the normal. But Becker went further, politicizing dominant conceptions of normality and deviance. What is deviant, Becker argued, is what powerful social groups call deviant; deviance does not inhere in behaviors themselves, but is the product of a labeling process in which some activities are called “inappropriate,” “sinful,” “unlawful,” or “sick.” This argument became the genesis for a rich research tradition under the banner of “labeling theory” (ironically, a term Becker himself claims never to have advocated) and also has been deployed and elaborated by scholars of social movements.

The career notion is otherwise extended in Art Worlds (1982), a benchmark sociology of artistic production, in which Becker demonstrated that a central task of becoming a professional artist is learning the conventions—the collective agreements about what counts as good work—that obtain within a particular genre. Artistic conventions are intersubjectively negotiated over time but at any given moment of experience have a strong normative character. Particular works are evaluated as “pedestrian” or “brilliant” in light of the conventions governing a particular artistic community. Art Worlds also demonstrated that while primary credit for an artistic production is often given to one person, the work of art is always a collective activity. It involves not only brilliant creators in their studios but also the people who manufacture paints and brushes and stretch canvases, the curators who fashion exhibitions, the dealers who assemble amenable audiences for particular artists, and the critics who are able to explain a particular artwork's virtues. Holding the entire artistic enterprise together are mutual necessity and generally agreed-upon ways of working. No one can keep an art world spinning on one's own, and cooperation requires some degree of common vision. As Becker himself made clear, these insights about the nature of creative production are as applicable to academic communities as they are to artistic ones. Indeed, they form the basis for Becker's general, and disarmingly simple, definition of culture: shared understandings.

...