Howard S. Becker
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- For other people named Howard Becker, see Howard Becker.
Howard Saul Becker (born April 18, 1928, Chicago) is an American sociologist.
[edit] Biography
Howard Becker was born in 1928 in Chicago. As an undergraduate and later a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he worked as a professional jazz pianist. His professor, Everett C. Hughes, whose primary interest was the sociology of work and professions, was an important influence on Becker. It was Hughes, Becker reports, who first encouraged him to undertake the study of jazz musicians as a professional group. This research led Becker to write extensively about drug use, and he put off publishing it for over a decade until 1963, when the political climate in the United States had improved. The resulting book, "Outsiders" was a critical work in the sociology of deviance and laid the foundation of labeling theory.
For his doctoral dissertation, Becker studied Chicago schoolteachers. Generally speaking, his work reflects the prevailing thematic and theoretical preoccupations of Chicago sociology at that time, with its attention to symbolic interactions involving race, status, and power in the urban meltingpot. Erving Goffman was a contemporary of Becker's at Chicago, and their research interests and writing styles both reflect a similar formative milieu.
Becker received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1951, and went on to teach in Sociology Departments at Northwestern University, the University of Washington, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. However, the majority of his research, writing and teaching was in other fields of sociology, including but not limited to the sociology of art, qualitative method, visual sociology and the practice of research and writing (composition theory) in social sciences.
He is known for the clarity of his prose, and is a staunch advocate of what has been termed the "Plain style" of writing (see, for example, The Elements of Style). His stylistic predilections betray his academic pedigree: at the time he was a student, sociologists at the University of Chicago embraced European positivism and Midwestern pragmatism. They sought to communicate their ideas with scientific precision, on the one hand, while making them accessible to politicians and planners, on the other. Becker's book Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article is considered to be one of the best books advising all academics how to write, and reflects the conviction that clear prose and clear thinking are inseparable. He served on the advisory board for the 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.
Becker is notable for coing the phrase "hierarchy of credibility (in ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, Social Problems, 1967.)" The Hierarchy of credibility is a concept according purportedly objective judjements of fact and evidence are necessarily tilted in favor of those at the top of a society because they will have had more resources to produce seemingly objective evidence that tends to favor the privileges they enjoy. Becker argues that it is the scholar's responsibility to create evidence that supports the claims of society's least privileged.
Becker regularly sojourns in France in the company of Alain Pessin, a sociologist at the University of Grenoble who has written a book on Becker titled Un sociologue en liberté. Lecture de Howard S. Becker (A sociologist in liberty; a reading of Howard S. Becker).
