Howard S. Becker
Howard Saul Becker (1928) is an American sociologist who has made major contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art, and sociology of music. Before becoming a sociologist, Becker was a photographer and a piano jazz player.
Works
- Books (selection)
- with Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes and Anselm Strauss, Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961; 1977; 1992.
- Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York: The Free Press, 1963.
- Outsiders. Etudes de sociologie de la déviance, Paris: Métalié, 1985 [1]. (in French)
- Outsiders: estudos de sociologia do desvio, trans. Maria Luiza X. de A. Borges, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2009. (in Portuguese)
- Außenseiter. Zur Soziologie abweichenden Verhaltens, trans. Cori A. Mackrodt and Stefanie Loyal, Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2014. (in German)
- Art Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, 1984; 25th Anniversary Edition, updated and expanded, 2008 [2].
- Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; 2nd edition, 2007.
- with Michal M. McCall (ed.), Symbolic interaction and cultural studies, University of Chicago Press, 1990.
- with Robert R. Faulkner, Do You Know...? The Jazz Repertoire in Action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
- Articles (selection)
- "Notes on the Concept of Commitment", The American Journal of Sociology 66:1 (1960), pp 32-40. (in French)
- "Photography and Sociology", Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 1 (1974), pp 3-26.
- "Art Photography in America", Journal of Communication 25 (Winter 1975), pp 74-84.
- "Photographic strategies", Society 14:2 (1977), pp 85-87.
- "Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: It's (almost) all a matter of context", Visual Studies 10:1 (1995), pp 5-14.
- "Categories and Comparisons: How We Find Meaning in Photographs", Visual Anthropology 14:2 (1998), pp 3-10.