Abstract
Howard S. Becker has not only made a number of important contributions to sociological theory but, with his reassuring guides, Tricks of the Trade (1998) and Writing for Social Scientists (1986a), he has also contributed to the practice of sociology. Telling About Society (2007), the third instalment in Becker's series of writing-guides, is, though, very different from its predecessors. While Tricks of the Trade and Writing for Social Scientists are relatively straightforward advice books drawn from Becker's wide-ranging experience, Telling About Society is argumentative.
For readers familiar with Becker's sociology Telling About Society is founded on familiar ideas. Indeed, the book expands on an essay also called ‘Telling About Society’ (Becker, 1986b). As in the earlier essay, Becker argues that many texts, from photographs to telephone directories, should be viewed as reports about society that can be analysed sociologically because they are socially-produced. Yet Telling About Society also draws on two key ideas present throughout Becker's sociology: analysing ‘all human activity’ as ‘the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people’ (1982: 1) – Becker recently commented to Ken Plummer that the important point of symbolic interactionism is the interactionism – and analysing social phenomena as activities rather than objects. Becker tells us, for instance, that we should ‘understand the expression a film as shorthand for the activity of “making a film” or “seeing a film”’ (2007: 15).
Just as Becker begins Outsiders (1963: 4) and Art Worlds (1982: 14) by pointing out limits with popular accounts of deviants and artists, Becker begins Telling About Society by pointing out limits with his professional colleagues' accounts of sociology as ‘the only “real” knowledge’ about society (2007: 6). Becker does not believe sociologists hold a monopoly on representing society. Instead, he (2007: 2) sees all texts as giving us ‘a picture that is only partial but nevertheless adequate for some purpose’. All representations, from maps that do not tell you where a steep hill is to sociological reports that represent information in particular tables, only tell us something about a small part of the world. Becker (2007: 30) draws on actor-network theory to explain how all representations reduce society through ‘four kinds of work’: selection, translation, arrangement and interpretation. Importantly, these reductions are done by both the makers and users of texts: ‘the users of representations play a crucial role. No matter what the makers of representations do, if the users don't do their part, the story doesn't get told, or doesn't get told as the story the makers intended’ (2007: 286). For Becker (2007: 16), all texts are, then, the products of ‘worlds of makers and users … whose activities of making and using center on a particular kind of representation’. An example Becker draws on throughout the book is a map. He (2007: 16) explains that maps are produced in their specific form because of ‘all the cartographers, geography departments, pilots, ship captains, drivers, and pedestrians whose cooperation makes us a world of maps’. Makers and users of texts divide the work of representation between them. Becker labels texts where makers do the most work as arguments and those where a greater amount of work is left to the users as files. An argument, after all, is an attempt to inscribe a specific interpretation whereas a file is simply a container of information that can be used in a number of ways. The division of labour becomes conventional to a world. It is continually tested in the market of ideas: ‘users might not do the work left to them, might just not bother at all, not look at the photograph; they might go to sleep during the film, rush past the table, skip large sections of the novel’ (2007: 59).
After setting out this framework, in the second half of the book Becker works through examples of texts that represent some aspect of society. It is, however, worth looking at Becker's own text through the framework he constructs to ask what reductive work Becker has done and what work he leaves for the users of his text. Indeed, Becker (2007: 67) tells us: ‘If you know the audience the makers want to reach, you can understand the features of any particular representations as the result of the makers' attempt to produce something that will reach those people in a form they will understand and approve’.
There are two concerns in Telling About Society. First, the book is concerned with expanding the raw materials of sociology. ‘I'm convinced’, Becker (2007: 286) explains, ‘that contemporary social science has crippled itself by imposing strict limits on the permissible ways of telling what researchers find out about the things they study’. However, Becker (2007: 265) also admits ‘We (“we” here referring to sociologists first but also to all the critical and cultural analysts who do this) often speak of literary works as having value as renderings of social life … as embodying some kind of truth about not just those people but people like them, and some sort of general truth about events like those’. Consequently, the reader is left wondering precisely who or what is stopping Becker from interpreting a range of texts as representations of society as he does in the second half of Telling About Society. So, while Becker (2007: 287) tells us that every ‘world has its “right ways” of doing things, and people who don't use them take a chance with their careers and reputations’, it is not clear that what Becker is proposing goes against a ‘right way’.
The second concern at play in Telling About Society reflects more general problems of representing society. Becker (2007: 2) tells us he wants to find ‘the problems anyone who tries to do the job of representing society has to solve’. It is not clear how the ‘world’ approach Becker offers here differs, fundamentally, from his analysis in Art Worlds. Rather, you could say that Becker loses the specificity of that analysis. There is an inherent danger that when we reduce everything to sociology we ignore the potential for an art work, say, to transcend the conditions of its production. We put aesthetics to one side and see cultural texts as important not because they are beautiful or useful but because they tell us, sociologists, something. Becker (2007: 104) contends that it is ‘hard to imagine the prose you would need to convey what one of these pages of photographs tells you’. Yet, he offers pages analysing photographs. Indeed, the other examples Becker offers are interesting but they add very little to the ideas contained, quite neatly, in the earlier essay.
Consequently, Telling About Society makes for a strange read. As a file, the framework Becker sets out is useful but no more useful than his work in Art Worlds and ‘Telling About Society’. The book is definitely not a writing guide but as an argument it is unconvincing. In the reductive work Becker performs to make his argument he loses an important aspect of the texts he is talking about: they are not just raw materials for sociologists. He (2007: 151) openly admits: ‘I'm very imperialistic, always wanting to call smart people who do interesting work “sociologists”’. But no matter how imperialistic Becker wants to be, he has not been able to conquer all representations about society by telling us something essential to them all but by reducing them all to sociological reports. So, in a strange way, Becker ends up at the point he began criticising. He finds that sociological reports do have a monopoly on representing society. Like all monopolists sociology consumes its competition.