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Howard S. Becker

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Also known as Howard Saul Becker

American sociologist (1928–2023)

Person · Open Library

Born
18 Apr 1928
Died
16 Aug 2023
Works
74

Top works

  • 論文の技法
  • La confrérie fantastique
  • Outsiders; studies in the sociology of deviance
  • Spiritual Meaning of Scripture
  • Qu'est-Ce Qu'un Cas?

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Quotes

  • Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal.
  • Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem.
  • Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way
  • Even in the simplest societies, no two people learn quite the same cultural material; the chance encounters of daily life provide sufficient variation to ensure that. No set of cultural understandings, then, provides a perfectly applicable solution to any problem people have to solve in the course of their day, and they therefore must remake those solutions, adapt their understandings to the new situation in the light of what is different about it.
  • Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer's responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and respond to it
  • I … view deviance as the product of a transaction that takes place between some social group and one who is viewed by that group as a rule-breaker. I will be less concerned with the personal and social characteristics of deviants than with the process by which they come to be thought of as outsiders and their reactions to that judgment.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA