Howard S. Becker Book order

"For more than 30 years, Writing for Social Scientists has offered readers a powerful reassurance: academic writing is difficult, and even accomplished scholars like Howard S. Becker struggle with it. Becker, the consummate sociologist, both analyzes how the professional context of academia contributes to writing problems and offers concrete advice, based on his own experiences and those of his students and colleagues, for overcoming them and gaining confidence as a writer. While the underlying challenges have remained the same over the years, the context in which academic writers work has changed dramatically, thanks to technology and new institutional pressures. This new edition has been updated throughout to reflect these changes, offering a new generation of scholars and students encouragement to write about society or any other scholarly topic clearly and persuasively"--

Howard S. Becker is a master of his discipline. His reputation as a teacher, as well as a sociologist, is supported by his best-selling quartet of sociological guidebooks: Writing for Social Scientists, Tricks of the Trade, Telling About Society, and What About Mozart? What About Murder? It turns out that the master sociologist has yet one more trick up his sleeve—a fifth guidebook, Evidence. Becker has for seventy years been mulling over the problem of evidence. He argues that social scientists don’t take questions about the usefulness of their data as evidence for their ideas seriously enough. For example, researchers have long used the occupation of a person’s father as evidence of the family’s social class, but studies have shown this to be a flawed measure—for one thing, a lot of people answer that question too vaguely to make the reasoning plausible. The book is filled with examples like this, and Becker uses them to expose a series of errors, suggesting ways to avoid them, or even to turn them into research topics in their own right. He argues strongly that because no data-gathering method produces totally reliable information, a big part of the research job consists of getting rid of error. Readers will find Becker’s newest guidebook a valuable tool, useful for social scientists of every variety.

"Founded in October 2013, Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, will open in 2017 in the Marais district of Paris. A multidisciplinary centre dedicated to production, transmission, active sharing, and exhibitions, it will first and foremost be a place of experimentation and fundamental research, offering artists, designers, fashion designers, and performers conditions and tools for developing prototypes and implementing projects. Significantly, Lafayette Anticipations has asked Rem Koolhaas/OMA to renovate a former 19th-century building and to conceive a new kind of artistic venue and curatorial tool dedicated to its core mission: production. Stemming from the pre-opening program begun in October 2013 and concluded in October 2016 with the collective exhibition Joining Forces With the Unknown, this publication brings together never-published before visual material dedicated to a large number of events organized and/or hosted by Lafayette Anticipations, as well as newly commissioned texts and conversations by highly recognized international art professionals and thinkers. It provides the opportunity to revisit the moments leading up to the opening of this institution-as-laboratory, but also to discuss and anticipate the stakes of artistic production and social and cultural change in the 21st century."--publisher website

Draws on a lifetime of sociological research and wisdom to show, in helpful detail, how to use a variety of kinds of cases to build sociological knowledge. The author provides a guide that researchers can use to produce general sociological knowledge through case studies.

"In 1963, Howard S. Becker gave a lecture about deviance, challenging the then-conventional definition that deviance was inherently criminal and abnormal and arguing that instead, deviance was better understood as a function of labeling. At the end of his lecture, a distinguished colleague standing at the back of the room, puffing a cigar, looked at Becker quizzically and asked, "What about murder? Isn't that really deviant?" It sounded like Becker had been backed into a corner. Becker, however, wasn't defeated! Reasonable people, he countered, differ over whether certain killings are murder or justified homicide, and these differences vary depending on what kinds of people did the killing. In What About Mozart? What About Murder?, Becker uses this example, along with many others, to demonstrate the different ways to study society, one that uses carefully investigated, specific cases and another that relies on speculation and on what he calls "killer questions," aimed at taking down an opponent by citing invented cases. Becker draws on a lifetime of sociological research and wisdom to show, in helpful detail, how to use a variety of kinds of cases to build sociological knowledge. With his trademark conversational flair and informal, personal perspective Becker provides a guide that researchers can use to produce general sociological knowledge through case studies. He champions research that has enough data to go beyond guesswork and urges researchers to avoid what he calls "skeleton cases," which use fictional stories that pose as scientific evidence. Using his long career as a backdrop, Becker delivers a winning book that will surely change the way scholars in many fields approach their research."--Publisher's website

Topics covered:The geography of YorkshireThe anatomy of flowersOver 400 species describedFlowering times and distribution

Students and researchers write under pressure, and those pressures - the desire to impress your audience rather than to communicate with them - often lead to pretentious prose, academic posturing, and writer's block. This title takes account of changes in computer tools and also analyses how academic institutions create problems for writers.

This classic sociological examination of art as collective action explores the cooperative network of suppliers, performers, dealers, critics, and consumers who—along with the artist—"produce" a work of art. Howard S. Becker looks at the conventions essential to this operation and, prospectively, at the extent to which art is shaped by this collective activity. The book is thoroughly illustrated and updated with a new dialogue between Becker and eminent French sociologist Alain Pessin about the extended social system in which art is created, and with a new preface in which the author talks about his own process in creating this influential work.

Explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. This book explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling such as fiction, films, photographs, maps, mathematical models - many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science.

This guide to research methods covers four areas of social science: the creation of imagery to guide research; methods of sampling to generate maximum variety in the data; the development of concepts to organize findings; and logical methods of exploring the implications of the findings.