Tricks of the trade: how to think about your research while you're doing it

242 Pages·1998·1.58 MB·English

by  Howard Saul Becker

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 explain what
you do to students pushes you to find simple ways of saying things, examples
that give concrete form to abstract ideas, and exercises that give students
practice in new ways of thinking and manipulating what they learn in their
research. As you listen to the individual, seemingly idiosyncratic problems
students find in their work, you begin (like the local computer guru, who
accumulates knowledge by solving individual problems) to see family
resemblances among them. You learn to identify the idiosyncratic as a variant of
some general problem. But every new problem is just different enough from all
the others 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, concocted 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 publications, 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 otherwise, and this
is especially so. I have drawn on my own experiences extensively and
repeatedly. Perhaps most importantly, I have recalled the way I was taught, the
sociologists from whom I learned what sociological work could be and what a
sociological life could be. In a certain way, this book is an homage to the people
who taught me, many of 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 criticism. 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 conceptual problems have
informed the whole book in ways that can't be separated out and pointed to. She
has, in addition, listened to practically everything here—in the form of disjointed
monologues, casual remarks, 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 permission to
reprint materials that originally appeared in other publications. 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 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, reprinted 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 appeared in Howard S.
Becker, “Generalizing from Case Studies,” in Qualitative Inquiry in Education:
The Continuing Debate, ed. E. W. Eisner 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 Contemporary 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 Transaction, 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 permission 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, research 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:
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, language, 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 sequence 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 measurable or
observable difference from other groups; it is an ethnic 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. (Hughes [1971] 1984, 153–54)
So French Canadians were not an ethnic group because they spoke French
while other Canadians spoke English, or because they were usually Catholic
while the English were usually Protestant. They were an ethnic group because
both French and English regarded the two groups as different. The differences in
language, religion, culture and the rest we thought defined ethnicity were
important, but only because two groups can treat each other as different only if
“there are ways of telling who belongs to the group and who does not, and if a
person learns early, deeply, and usually irrevocably to what group he belongs.”
The heart of the trick, which can be applied to all sorts of other definitional
problems (for example, the problem of deviance, to which I'll return later in the
book), is recognizing that you can't study an ethnic group all by itself and must
instead trace its “ethnicity” to the network of relations with other groups in
which it arises. Hughes says:
It takes more than one ethnic group to make ethnic relations. The
relations can no more be understood by studying one or the other of
the groups than can a chemical combination by the study of one
element only, or a boxing bout by the observation of only one of the
fighters. (Hughes [1971] 1984, 155)
That's what a trick is—a simple device that helps you solve a problem (in this
case, the device of looking for the network in which definitions arise and are
used). Every trade has its tricks, its solutions to its own distinctive problems,
easy ways of doing something lay people have a lot of trouble with. The social
science trades, no less than plumbing or carpentry, have their tricks, designed to
solve their peculiar problems. Some of these tricks are simple rules of thumb
derived from experience, like the advice that putting colorful commemorative
stamps on the return envelopes will get more people to send their questionnaires
back. Others come out of a social scientific analysis of the situation in which the
problem arises, like Julius Roth's (1965) suggestion that researchers consider the
problem of cheating survey interviewers not as a kind of police matter, a
problem of chasing down irresponsible employees, but rather as the way people