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Tricks of the Trade Tricks of the Trade How to Think about Your Research While You're Doing It Howard S. Becker The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1998 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1998 Printed in the United States of America 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 2 3 4 5 ISBN: 0–226-04123–9 (cloth) ISBN: 0–226-04124–7 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Becker, Howard Saul, 1928– Tricks of the trade : how to think about your research while you're doing it / Howard S. Becker. p. cm.—(Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–226-04123–9 (alk. paper). ISBN 0–226-04124–7 (pbk.: alk. paper). 1. Social sciences—Authorship. 2. Sociology—Authorship. 3. Academic writing. I. Title. II. Series. H91.B38 1997 300’.72—dc21 97–19618 CIP The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. eISBN: 9780226040998 For Dianne CONTENTS Preface 1 TRICKS 2 IMAGERY 3 SAMPLING 4 CONCEPTS 5 LOGIC Coda References Index PREFACE Much of this book results from my experience teaching. Having to ex- plain what you do to students pushes you to find simple ways of saying things, examples that give concrete form to abstract ideas, and exer- cises that give students practice in new ways of thinking and manipu- lating what they learn in their research. As you listen to the individual, seemingly idiosyncratic problems students find in their work, you be- gin (like the local computer guru, who accumulates knowledge by solv- ing individual problems) to see family resemblances among them. You learn to identify the idiosyncratic as a variant of some general prob- lem. But every new problem is just different enough from all the oth- ers to give you something to add to your understanding of the general class of difficulties. After a while, I began to keep track of my ad hoc inventions, con- cocted for the needs of a particular day's class or a particular student's research problem. And then, having written a book on the problems of academic writing (Becker 1986b), I decided I could follow that up with a book on “thinking” if I started with the materials in the file of “tricks “I had started. Some of these ideas first saw daylight in earlier publica- tions, articles written for this or that occasion, and I have borrowed freely from those earlier formulations (at the end of this preface is a list of the publishers to whom I am indebted for permission to do that). Most of my work has been autobiographical, explicitly or other- wise, and this is especially so. I have drawn on my own experiences ex- tensively and repeatedly. Perhaps most importantly, I have recalled the way I was taught, the sociologists from whom I learned what soci- ological work could be and what a sociological life could be. In a cer- tain way, this book is an homage to the people who taught me, many of 7/318 them while I was in school, others after I had left school (but not stopped my education). I've paid my respects by often tying what I have to say to the words of people I learned from, using their thoughts as a springboard for my own. I have learned, over the years, what most people learn, which is that my teachers usually weren't as dumb as I sometimes thought. I've also learned from a number of people who have read what I write over the years with appreciation, but without sparing the criti- cism. Several of them read an earlier version of this manuscript, and I'm grateful for their extended commentaries, even though it meant more work. (Better I should hear it from them!) So I thank Kathryn Addelson, Eliot Freidson, Harvey Molotch, and Charles Ragin for their thoughtful critiques. Doug Mitchell is the editor authors dream about working with. He has waited for this book patiently, offered interesting and useful ideas, encouraged my flagging interest and confidence, and generally kept the project alive. Dianne Hagaman and I share an intellectual as well as a domestic life, and our mutual explorations of all sorts of research and conceptu- al problems have informed the whole book in ways that can't be separ- ated out and pointed to. She has, in addition, listened to practically everything here—in the form of disjointed monologues, casual re- marks, and even readings aloud—and her reactions and ideas helped to shape the final version. I am grateful to a number of individuals and publishers for per- mission to reprint materials that originally appeared in other publica- tions. Scattered portions of this book first appeared in Howard S. Becker, “Tricks of the Trade,” in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, ed. Norman K. Denzin (New York: JAI Press, 1989), 10B: 481–90. The photograph of René Boulet in chapter 2 originally appeared in Bruno 8/318 Latour, “The Pedofil of Boa Vista,” Common Knowledge 4 (1995): 165. Portions of the text in chapter 2 originally appeared in Howard S. Becker, “Foi por acaso: Conceptualizing Coincidence,” Sociological Quarterly 25 (1994): 183–94; Howard S. Becker, “The Epistemology of Qualitative Research,” in Ethnography and Human Development, ed. Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 53–71; Howard S. Becker, “Cases, Causes, Conjunctures, Stories, and Imagery,” n Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker, What Is Case? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 205–16, © 1992 by Cambridge University Press, reprin- ted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Portions of chapter 3 appeared in Howard S. Becker, “Letter to Charles Seeger “Ethnomusicology 33 (spring—summer 1989): 275–85, reprinted by permission of Ethnomusicology. Portions of chapter 4 originally ap- peared in Howard S. Becker, “Generalizing from Case Studies,” in Qu- alitative Inquiry in Education: The Continuing Debate, ed. E. W. Eis- ner and A. Peshkin (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University), 233–42, © 1990 by Teachers College, Columbia University, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of Teachers College Press. Portions of chapter 5 originally appeared in Howard S. Becker, “How I Learned What a Crock Was,” Journal of Contempor- ary Ethnography 22 (April 1993): 28–35. In addition, chapters 1, 3, and 5 contain excerpts of Everett C. Hughes, The Sociological Eye (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984), © 1984 by Transac- tion, Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted by permission of Transaction Publishers; chapter 3 contains excerpts of James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 125–26, 162–65, © 1939, 1940 by James Agee, © 1941 James Agee and Walker Evans, © renewed 1969 by Mia Fritsch Agee and Walker Evans, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co., all rights reserved; chapter 5 contains an excerpt of Arthur Danto, “The Artworld” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–84, reprinted by per- mission of the Journal of Philosophy. 1 TRICKS Undergraduates at the University of Chicago, when I was a student there, learned to deal with all difficult conceptual questions by saying, authoritatively, “Well, it all depends on how you define your terms.” rue enough, but it didn't help us much, since we didn't know anything special about how to do the defining. I stayed at the University of Chicago for my graduate training and so met Everett C. Hughes, who became my adviser and, eventually, re- search partner. Hughes was a student of Robert E. Park, who could be considered the “founder” of the “Chicago School” of sociology. Hughes taught me to trace my sociological descent, through him and Park, back to Georg Simel, the great German sociologist who had been Park's teacher. I am still proud of that lineage. Hughes had no love for abstract Theory. A group of us students once approached him after class, nervously, to ask what he thought about “theory.” He looked at us grumpily and asked, “Theory of what?” He thought that there were theories about specific things, like race and ethnicity or the organization of work, but that there wasn't any such animal as Theory in general. But he knew what to do when a class or a student got into a tangle over what we thought of as “theoretical” questions, like how to define ideas or concepts. We would wonder, for instance, how to define the concept of “ethnic group.” How did we know if a group was one of those or not? Hughes had identified our chronic mistake, in an essay he wrote on ethnic relations in Canada: 10/318 Almost anyone who uses the term [ethnic group] would say that it is a group distinguishable from others by one, or some combination of the following: physical characteristics, lan- guage, religion, customs, institutions, or “cultural traits.” (Hughes [1971] 1984, 153) That is, we thought you could define an “ethnic” group by the traits that differentiated it from some other, presumably “nonethnic,” group; it was an ethnic group because it was different. But, Hughes explained, we had it backwards. A simple trick could settle such a definitional conundrum: reverse the explanatory se- quence and see the differences as the result of the definitions the people in a network of group relations made: An ethnic group is not one because of the degree of measur- able or observable difference from other groups; it is an eth- nic group, on the contrary, because the people in and the people out of it know that it is one; because both the ins and the outs talk, feel, and act as if it were a separate group.
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