Cover of What About Mozart? What About Murder?
What About Mozart? What About Murder? Reasoning From Cases
by Howard S. Becker
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cloth: 978-0-226-16635-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-16649-0 | Electronic: 978-0-226-16652-0
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In 1963, Howard S. Becker gave a lecture about deviance, challenging the then-conventional definition that deviance was inherently criminal and abnormal and arguing that instead, deviance was better understood as a function of labeling.  At the end of his lecture, a distinguished colleague standing at the back of the room, puffing a cigar, looked at Becker quizzically and asked, “What about murder? Isn’t that really deviant?” It sounded like Becker had been backed into a corner. Becker, however, wasn’t defeated! Reasonable people, he countered, differ over whether certain killings are murder or justified homicide, and these differences vary depending on what kinds of people did the killing. In What About Mozart? What About Murder?, Becker uses this example, along with many others, to demonstrate the different ways to study society, one that uses carefully investigated, specific cases and another that relies on speculation and on what he calls “killer questions,” aimed at taking down an opponent by citing invented cases.

Becker draws on a lifetime of sociological research and wisdom to show, in helpful detail, how to use a variety of kinds of cases to build sociological knowledge. With his trademark conversational flair and informal, personal perspective Becker provides a guide that researchers can use to produce general sociological knowledge through case studies. He champions research that has enough data to go beyond guesswork and urges researchers to avoid what he calls “skeleton cases,” which use fictional stories that pose as scientific evidence. Using his long career as a backdrop, Becker delivers a winning book that will surely change the way scholars in many fields approach their research.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Howard S. Becker is the author of several books, including Writing for Social Scientists, Telling About Society, Tricks of the Trade, and Art Worlds. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.

REVIEWS

“Becker’s gift for storytelling, his uncommon common sense, and his sly, contemporary eye make it clear that sociology, done right, is a liberal art, nimbly situated between philosophy and poetry. Nothing less than a handbook of how to think, What About Mozart? What About Murder? is a splendidly written and historically informed multicultural guide to forming questions that help make sense in and of our lives within a networked, global culture or, for that matter, a map of Paris or Chicago.”
— Michael Joyce, Vassar College

“What about Becker? By word and deed, a unique scholarly life shows us the simplicity of how the best work gets done. This is a 'how to' for the ages.”
— Harvey Molotch, New York University

"Becker is one of the masters of modern social science and each of his works is a much welcome event, not least since they are written in a style that mixes deep insight with wisdom and wit. In this particular volume, which consists of a series of brilliant individual studies, Becker shows how his approach to case studies can help to move social science forward. This is very exciting, especially since Becker always tries to translate his insights into practical rules and suggestions for how to go about things in concrete research. This is definitely a book that social scientists from all disciplines and paradigms will want to study and learn from."
— Richard Swedberg, Cornell University

"Though Becker’s arena is the academy, what he writes of is of immediate practical use for anyone trying to make sense of the world in which he or she lives. He writes with wit and grace and the book is a delight to read"
— The Key Reporter

“This book is a delight. Howard Becker is that rarity: an academic writer who brings you into his presence, makes you comfortable, then entertains and educates you from first to last page. . . . It is no small measure of that ability to make analogical reasoning, or argument from cases, into such an engrossing read. Alongside his other essential writing on how to do research, writing it up and getting it submittable, this book is chock-full of good sense and practical advice, laid on a bed of excellent examples in a range of subject areas, and covered in a delicious sauce of personal reminiscence and just great gossip. . . . To all new sociologists, as well as oldies: buy this. You will not regret it.”
— Times Higher Education

Book of the Year
— Times Higher Education

“Both a jocular personal testament of faith and a window into Becker’s beliefs. His accomplishment is hard to summarize in a sentence or catchphrase, since he’s resolutely anti-theoretical and suspicious of ‘models’ that are too neat.”
— New Yorker

“Becker is a sociologist known as much for his dry wit as for his groundbreaking work examining deviancy, art and music.”
— New York Times

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0001
[correlations, case study, drug use, race, gender]
Correlations between such variables as age, gender or class and behavioral results which have lasted for decades quite often suddenly fail to explain what they are supposed to explain. For instance, in the late 19th century, opiate addiction in the United States was most often found in middle-class, white menopausal women. But, early in the 20th century, that correlation disappeared. Instead, addicts were more likely be young, African American men. The study of cases like that suggests that research which looks for the processes that produce such contradictory results, are better understood as the workings of processes which investigate in detail the situations that behavior like addiction arises in. This book describes, on the basis of my own research experiences and those of others, the logic of reasoning from individual cases. (pages 1 - 4)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0002
[International, Comparison, Brazil, France, Industrialization, Everett Hughes]
This chapter demonstrates the use of case-based investigations to understand variations between countries in social phenomena of interest (Brazilian bureaucracy and French universities), and to locate variables of lasting interest in explaining the variety of outcomes observed internationally. The chapter ends with a detailed explication of a historically important research paper by Everett Hughes, which analyzes international variations in the phenomenon of industrialization. (pages 5 - 39)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0003
[analogy, publishing, referral structures, medical practice, medical patients, computer users, gurus]
Social scientists can reason by analogy from an already-studied case to one about which less is known. The chapter, for instance, interprets phenomena in the publishing industry by analogy to a well-known study of embezzling. And then uses the same procedure to understand a famous study of "referral structures," of the way laypeople search for help for medical problems by analogy from the way doctors find specialists to deal with their patients' specialized problems. The chapter uses these results to understand the way people search for someone--a guru--who can help them solve their computer problems. (pages 40 - 60)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0004
[drugs, medical practice, recreational drug use, chemical warfare, forced medication, drug research]
This chapter takes up a problem about which I wrote a lengthy paper: what accounts for the different experiences people have when they take drugs? By comparing three cases--recreational drug use undertaken by lay people for their own purposes, use when prescribed by a medical or other authority, and use when the drug is administered by a third party for their own purposes, as in chemical warfare. The chapter presents the original paper as it was published, and then explains the steps in the analytic case analysis that produced the paper's results. (pages 61 - 93)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0005
[art worlds, Raymonde Moulin, Dennis Adrian, painting, photography, money, aesthetics]
Raymonde Moulin's study of the market in paintings in Paris in the 1960s suggested a mixture of artistic and economic value in that market. She and others have since used that result to inform studies of a variety of cases of kinds of art markets. The chapter shows how social scientists can elaborate an idea through further case studies, which explore the workings of the black boxes at work. The case includes markets in household objects, photography, the unusual case of a quixotic gesture by a curator/collector, and the generational shift in the collecting worlds of contemporary painting. (pages 94 - 121)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0006
[imaginary cases, inertia, social change, social stability, bamboo flute, research subjects, violence]
Investigators can use fictional or totally imagined cases to uncover some of the operations that go on in the black box that explains the answer to a puzzle. The chapter gives two examples of this. An imagined case helps explain how the phenomenon of inertia keeps people from changing what they do all the time, explaining this by the inertia produced when the elements of a specific world of activity--in this case, the production of music--makes it easier and less trouble to do things the way they've been done than to start all over again. A quite different imagined case--the invasion of a university campus by the people sociologists study--informs the analysis of the problem of relations between the people social scientists study and the researchers who study them. (pages 122 - 143)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0007
[heat waves, snowstorms, earthquakes, collections, clothing, shoes, books, toys]
The chapter uses a great variety of cases--heat waves, snow storms, earthquakes, collections, etc.--to explore the problem of how people solve, individually and collectively, the problem of the trade-offs involved in dealing with such common collective problems as how to take care of older people in a heat wave to how many pairs of shoes a person should have or how many books a scholar needs to work. It ends by applying the findings of this analysis to the question of when we can consider our research finished. (pages 144 - 166)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0008
[debate, rhetoric, murder, Mozart, incomplete cases]
Scholarly debate sometimes uses incomplete cases, cases about which the user knows little or nothing, to try to trap an opponent into taking a ridiculous position. The chapter analyzes this common debating tactic as a form of promissory note, an allusion to case which promises, but does not deliver, a full-blown case study. The title of the book alludes to this tactic, since a favorite debating ploy is to ask a sociologist of art or science if they don't agree that, for instance, Mozart is really a genius or that murder is really a terrible thing, trying to demolish a more sociological approach to these questions with this rhetorical IOU. (pages 167 - 183)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.003.0009
[researchable problems, case-based research]
This short chapter summarizes the underlying approach involved in all that's gone before, explaining how a case-based approach produces more viable and durable results, and has the further good effect of producing an endless supply of researchable problems. (pages 184 - 188)

References

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2014. Page maintained by BiblioVault.