Howard S. Becker > Quotes

“All social groups groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them. Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as "right" and forbidding others as "wrong".”
― Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies In The Sociology Of Deviance

“Outlines can help, but not if you begin with them. If you begin, instead, by writing down everything, by spewing out your ideas as fast as you can type, you will discover the answer to the first question: the fragments you have to work with are the various things you have just written.”
― Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article

“None of these classy locutions mean anything different from the simpler ones they replace. They work ceremonially, not semantically. Writing in a classy way to sound smart means writing to sound like, maybe even be, a certain kind of person. Sociologists, and other scholars, do that because they think (or hope) that being the right kind of person will persuade others to accept what they say as a persuasive social science argument.”
― Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article

“write whatever comes into your head, as fast as you can type, without reference to outlines, notes, data, books or any other aids. The object is to find out what you would like to say, what all your earlier work on the topic or project has already led you to believe.”
― Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article

“It is unfeeling to speak of the people who cooperate in the production of art works as "personnel" or, worse yet, "support personnel", but that accurately reflects their importance in the conventional art world view. In that view, the person who does the "real work", making the choices that give the work its artistic importance and integrity, is the artist, who may be any of a number of people involved in its production, everyone else's job is to assist. I do not accept the view of the relative importance of the "personnel" involved that the term connotes, but i use it to emphasize that it is the common view in art worlds”
― Howard Becker

“That’s a general point. Nothing stays the same. Nothing is the same as anything else. We do not operate in the world of physicists, where we can take a sample of a pure substance off the shelf and know that it is, near enough as makes no difference, the same substance any other scientist in the world will be handling under that name. None of our “substances” are pure anything. They are all historically contingent, geographically influenced combinations of a variety of processes, no two of the combinations alike. So we can never ignore a topic just because someone has already studied it.”
― Howard S. Becker, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You're Doing It

“If you don't like my queer ways you can kiss my fucking ass”
― Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies In The Sociology Of Deviance

“Un músico que sepa por lo menos una frase de la melodía puede adivinar que las frases siguientes la repetiran, quizas en un grado diferente de la escala, y que las armonías discurrirán por ciertos patrones regulares.”
― Howard S. Becker, "Do You Know...?": The Jazz Repertoire in Action

“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.”
― Howard S. Becker

“Muazzam başeserler yazmaya mı çalışmalıyız; yoksa söylenmesi gereken şeyi ikna edici bir şekilde söyle- yen, eli yüzü düzgün, açık ve anlaşılır bir üslubu hedeflesek mi daha iyi olur? Bilimin, üslup konusunda iddialı olan başeserle- re ihtiyacı var midır? Biraz daha yakından bakarsak bu hevesin gösteriş merakından başka bir şey olmadığını görürüz. - s170”
― Howard S. Becker, Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article