Howard S. Becker

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

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.

— Howard S. Becker

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

— Howard S. Becker

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.

— Howard S. Becker

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

— Howard S. Becker

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.

— Howard S. Becker

In addition to recognizing that deviance is created by the responses of people to particular kinds of behavior, by the labeling of that behavior as deviant, we must also keep in mind that the rules created and maintained by such labeling are not universally agreed to. Instead, they are the object of conflict and disagreement, part of the political process of society.

— Howard S. Becker

The normal development of people in our society (and probably in any society) can be seen as a series of progressively increasing commitments to conventional norms and institutions.

— Howard S. Becker

The “normal” person, when he discovers a deviant impulse in himself, is able to check that impulse by thinking of the manifold consequences acting on it would produce for him. He has staked too much on continuing to be normal to allow himself to be swayed by unconventional impulses.

— Howard S. Becker

Even though no one else discovers the nonconformity or enforces the rules against it, the individual who has committed the impropriety may himself act as the enforcer. He may brand himself as deviant because of what he has done and punish himself in one way or another for his behavior.

— Howard S. Becker

I think it is generally true that sociology does not discover what no one ever knew before.

— Howard S. Becker

The dominant tradition in the sociology of art... defines art as something more special, in which creativity comes to the surface and the essential character if the society expresses itself, especially in the great work of the genius.

— Howard S. Becker

All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number of people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation.

— Howard S. Becker

(Art worlds) consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.

— Howard S. Becker

John Cage said that music is the moral evaluation of sound. We might generalize his remark: when we speak of art, we make a moral evaluation of the relative worth of the various contributions to a work. It is no surprise that many of the participants differ with more conventional evaluations and rank their own contributions as more important than that of the artist as conventionally defined.

— Howard S. Becker

The audience is unpredictable, and the people who produce and distribute the artistic work have no real contact with it. They market the work in large quantities as with books and records, or through a mechanical system, as with radio and television, so that they could not, if they tried, know audience members personally.

— Howard S. Becker

[Professionals] define the problems of their art similarly and agree on criteria for an acceptable solution. They know the history of previous attempts to solve those problems, or some of it, and the new problems those attempts generated. They know the history of work like theirs, so that they, their support personnel, and their audiences can understand what they have attempted and how and to what degree it works.

— Howard S. Becker

[ Folk art, consists of] work done by ordinary people in the course of their lives, work seldom thought of by those who make or use it as art at all.

— Howard S. Becker

The point is professionalization. Academics-in-training worry about whether they are yet, can ever be, or even want to be professional intellectuals of the kind they are changing themselves into. Second or third or fourth year graduate students have not taken binding vows. They may have second thoughts. Nor have they been finally chosen. They might flunk out. Their committee might turn their theses down. Who knows what might happen?

— Howard S. Becker

Doesn't every sentence somehow contain in itself, at least by implication, the whole argument? Sure. So what? Remember that any sentence can be changed, rewritten, thrown out or contradicted. That lets you write anything at all.

— Howard S. Becker

The tension between making it better and getting it done appears wherever people have work to finish or a product to get out: a computer, a dinner, a term paper, an automobile, a book. We want to get it done and out to the people who will use it, eat it, read it. But no object ever fully embodies its maker's conception of what it could have been. Human frailty, your own and that of others, makes flaws and mistakes inevitable.

— Howard S. Becker

The marketing people don't care about the elegance and perfection that impresses the engineers' peers. They think engineers are impractical cuckoos who would just as soon bankrupt the company by pursuing perfectionist pipe dreams.

— Howard S. Becker