Howard S. Becker is a sociologist and author who lives in San Francisco and (at times) Paris. He is the author of Art Worlds (1982) and Telling about Society (2007) and coauthor (with Robert R. Faulkner) of “Do You Know…?”: The Jazz Repertoire in Action (2009) and Thinking Together: An E-mail Exchange and All That Jazz (2013). His newest book is What About Mozart? What About Murder? (2014).
Howard S. Becker
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Writing on Public Books
The Book That Made Me: A Sociologist
A renowned American sociologist reflects on the book that persuaded him to abandon a career playing bar piano in Chicago …
Studying Up
In an often-quoted manifesto, Laura Nader urged fellow anthropologists (and, by extension, sociologists and other social scientists) to “study up,” do their research among the rich and powerful people directly responsible for the ills of society, rather than among the poor, who can’t as easily protect themselves from intrusive social scientists who want to pry […]
Ordinary Lives
“Nobody’s listening!” (“Le pays, en un mot, ne se sent pas représenté,” or literally, “The country, in a word, feels that it is not listened to.”) Pierre Rosanvallon, a professor of history at the Collège de France in Paris, makes that statement the cornerstone of an ambitious project (of which more shortly) to counter the […]
