Telling About Society – By Howard S. Becker

Abstract

The British Journal of Sociology 2008 Volume 59 Issue 4 Book reviews Becker, Howard S. Telling About Society University of Chicago Press 2007 304 pp. $37.50 (hardback) $15.00 (paperback) Howard S. Becker’s prior two books in his current series, Writing for Social Scientists and Tricks of the Trade, are sociologically informed, practical aids to research and writing. Telling About Society, although presented by its publisher as a ‘Guide to Writing, Editing and Publishing’, is more like Becker’s earlier substantive work, where he undermines presump- tive authority and opens up a new line of social research by describing the process of producing social facts widely treated as compelling. Readers are likely to leave in search of a guide who could show them how to navigate in the brave new world of sociological work that Becker sees beyond conventional horizons. Becker incorporates experiences from decades of free-spirited investigation, analysing the social production of diverse ways of representing society, including photojournalism, socio- logical dramatization, maps as used in practical life and in social research texts, charts and tables as used in ethnographies like Davis’ Deep South, Goffman’s writing style, films, ‘legitimate’ theatre productions and ‘site-specific theatre’, reader-friendly fiction by Jane Austin and reader-challenging prose experiments by Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. He establishes that empirical claims about social life are essential to the logic of each genre, and then he usually asks the same questions. Through what series of social relations does the product evolve as it works toward an audience? At each stage of production, how is the product shaped by anticipations of how necessary actors, most especially audiences, will act at subsequent stages? Is there any reason that sociologists do not make use of these perfectly sensible ways of telling about society, other than because they are conventionally impracti- cal? These explorations raise powerful questions that Becker has always left unanswered, but that in his earlier substantive work on deviance and charisma (charisma in the form of revered art) were less problematic when left at rest. If deviance is not a quality of the person but a label conferred based on various social contingencies having nothing to do with the label’s target, then we need to study the organization of those contingencies, their histories and the culture that hides them from revelation, and we should be suspicious of what authorities do with the people they have defined as deviant. No matter that Becker would not show where, if anywhere, condemnation and punishment should be directed. There is plenty to do about the social construction of deviance as researchers and as political actors. Conversely, if art is not a self-manifesting sign of genius but the product of a multitude of frequently arbitrary social contingencies that distinguish ‘art’ from ‘craft’, and that get only © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.00220.x