Response to the 'Manifesto'

Author(s): Howard S. Becker

Source: Ethnography, Vol. 1, No. 2 (December 2000), pp. 257-260
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24047709
Accessed: 14-07-2017 04:38 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Ethnography

This content downloaded from 207.162.240.147 on Fri, 14 Jul 2017 04:38:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 RESPONSE

Ethno
graphy
Copyright 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New D
Vol 1(2): 257-260[1466-1381 (200012)1:2;257-260;014920]

Response to the 'Manifesto'

Howard S. Becker

University of California at Santa Barbara, USA

I don't have any real disagreements with the manifesto. Maybe a little appre
hension here and there.
I have never made any secret of my distrust of 'theory' and have even
referred to it in print as a 'necessary evil' (Becker, 1998). That has made a
lot of people properly suspicious about whether I can really be taken seri
ously. But I do mean both parts of that smartass characterization.
Theory is necessary in all the ways we all know - to guide inquiry, to
communicate our insights and experiences and understandings coherently
and intelligibly, to allow for generalization and learning from experience. It
is also dangerous in ways that the manifesto is rightly wary of. It can
consume energy better devoted to finding out about the world. It can easily
become an end in itself. It leads to logic chopping and other fruitless enter
prises. There's a fine line here, not always easy to pick out in the general
confusion we usually work in (and work ourselves into) between clarifying
concepts so that they do more for us and making meaningless and useless
distinctions. And what is one of those for one may be the other for someone
else. We'll hope (I'll hope, at any rate) that Ethnography will walk that line
sensibly. (One of my little apprehensions is that, for me, the manifesto
strayed a little over to the wrong side of the line, even in espousing what I
thought the right idea. Maybe this is just a matter of taste.)
I'd like to see the journal rectify what I think is the unfortunate overlook
ing of some important earlier work, as though nothing worth our attention
was written before, say, 1960 or even later. It's not that I worry about not giving
our ancestors their due, though I think that's important. It's rather that I think
good work has been done that we no longer pay much attention to. And so we
fail to learn from it things we need to know, things we (as a collective research

This content downloaded from 207.162.240.147 on Fri, 14 Jul 2017 04:38:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
258 Ethnography 1(2)

enterprise) used to know but somehow mislaid along the road to ou

state of high professionalism. I'll name a few such works (not surpri
are mostly connected with the 'Chicago School' of my youth) and s
about them, hoping the editors will take their cue to commission ess
at them, and other works like them, more closely. I might say - thi
ably a personal preference - that it always seems to me more useful
is good about a work than to say what is wrong with it, and I wou
the essays would take such a tack. What is wrong is usually obv
are all trained in school to find fault rather than to find models to im
accounts for the carping sound of so much sociological writing ('ba
'doesn't cite Weber' (or Marx, or whoever).
One such 'forgotten classic', an important model for studies
ing', and one deeply rooted in what is now fashionably called
experience' of the people whose condition it analyzes, is Alfred Lin
Opiate Addiction (1947). Through lengthy interviews and i
himself in the world of addicts of the 1930s, Lindesmith learne
tion did not result from the failings of a flawed personality or
sociologically, from the frustrations of an anomic social situati
he showed, people continued to use opiate drugs in an addicted
they had learned to do that by interacting with the drug and
who defined its meaning as a social object for them in such a way a
a motive for use that had not previously existed for them. This fu
recasting of the motivational schemes previously used to accoun
use is generalizable to all of social behavior, and has been pass
variety of specific topic areas, so that the general scheme of findin
that leads to a particular outcome is well known and often used
studies of drugs, but also in research on occupational careers, p
in social movements, and so on. Lindesmith's book does this ki
as carefully and as well as it has ever been done and we ought t
and rereading it, using it as an exemplar in the true Kuhnian se
In a quite different direction, the great community studies d
United States and Canada in the 1930s and 1940s are mostly for
dealt with in the obligatory footnote. These studies are filled w
vations and methodological tricks that deserve our serious atte
South (Davis et al., 1941), the comprehensive study of a South
can cotton town and its rural hinterland, shows in the loveliest
class can be studied, both in what we like to call its structural a
a phenomenon of daily life and experience. The analysis show
hensively how family, social cliques, and class and caste interact
what we would now call structures of domination in daily life.
forgotten, or not known, that this book not only analyzes social cl
Warnerian style that was long ago too quickly and thoughtlessly
but that it also contained a detailed account of the economic an

This content downloaded from 207.162.240.147 on Fri, 14 Jul 2017 04:38:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Becker m Response to the'Manifesto' 259

system that kept the black population in servitude, if not slavery. The
control of farm land in the Mississippi Delta, the financing of farm pro
duction, the intimidation of black labor are all given their place in the social
organization of life in this quintessential plantation economy.
A perennial question for fieldworkers is how to display in summary form
the understanding of daily social life we put together from the masses of field
notes we collect. We know so much about so many things. How can we
display that detailed knowledge in a way that will not lose the interest of
readers? The authors of Deep South devised a large number of graphic devices
to do that job. One simple chart shows how people in each of the six social
classes they identified talked about the other classes. A more complex chart
shows the social linkages that let members of lower social groups use personal
relationships to rise in the class system of this small town. Here too we can
find models worth imitating, though the most immediate lesson the Davises
and Gardners teach is that such graphic displays cannot take a generic form,
but must be tailored to the exact information you want to display. So we can
use their inventions as places to take off from as we make our own inventions
to suit the requirements of our own messages.
Melville Dalton's Men Who Manage (Dalton, 1959), a wry and probing
book about corporate life at levels above the shop floor and the assembly
line, teaches us not only how business organizations function, but also how
to study them. Dalton worked for years in a variety of staff positions in
several large US corporations, keeping careful notes in the standard Chicago
style. The book describes internal power struggles, corporate career contin
gencies, and similar matters, in a matter-of-fact prose that avoids all the
clichs of management talk that so permeate the sociological literature on
organizations and, especially, avoids the common emphasis on efficiency,
rationality, and the common acceptance by the researcher of the putative
aims of the organization as what its people are actually doing.
In a classic piece of analysis, he describes 'employee theft' as, first of all,
being committed by people at every level of the corporation but, more
importantly, as not being 'theft' at all. Rather, he shows, what goes by that
name in the standard literature is an informal reward system, in which
employees are allowed to steal company property as a payoff for doing
things their superiors want done but which they cannot legitimately ask to
have done. If a vice-president wanted workers to build a large aviary at his
home, on company time and using company lumber, he would make it clear
that, in return for this 'favor' which he could not legitimately request, the
cooperating employees would be able to steal company lumber for their own
home improvement projects. Dalton thus turns a case of 'deviance' into a
standard and recognized feature of corporate cooperation.
One final thing I'd like to see the new journal do is entertain some dis
cussion on the teaching of fieldwork. In my experience, almost everyone

This content downloaded from 207.162.240.147 on Fri, 14 Jul 2017 04:38:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
260 Ethnography 1(2)

does this differently. Everett Hughes, from whom I learned, had a

of exercises students were to do in a small area of the city of
assigned to them: you collected genealogies, observed group m
informal neighborhood settings, interviewed people (on whate
Hughes was interested in during the year you took the class), a
sulted official statistics on the area. Devoted student of Hughes th
I have always taught fieldwork quite differently. I insist that stud
topic of their own the first meeting of the class, go somewhere th
them observe the situation they want to study or talk to the
want to study, and write everything down. I read what they write
plain, at first, that they haven't written enough (they almost neve
then on, I try to show them how they can use what they have so f
to reshape their projects, which usually end up being quite diff
the projects they thought they were going to do. To my surp
people do not use this perfectly sensible method and instead ha
do exercises in the Hughes style, or look, in the way recomm
Michael Burawoy (1991), for theories that 'highlight some asp
situation under study as being anomalous'. Each way carries its
ale and justifications and some open discussion of this variety
cal styles would surely be helpful. My email exchanges with Sh
(Becker and Hecht, 1997) about this convinced me that many p
profit from some honest exchange on the topic.

References

Becker, Howard S. (1998) Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your
Research While You're Doing It. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Becker, Howard S. and Shirah Hecht (1997) 'Talks Between Teachers', Quali
tative Sociology 20: 565-79.
Burawoy, Michael et al. (1991) Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance
in the Modern Metropolis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dalton, Melville (1959) Men Who Manage. New York: Wiley.
Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner (1941) Deep South:
A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Lindesmith, Alfred (1947) Opiate Addiction. Evanston, IL: Principia Press.

HOWARD S. BECKER is Professor of Sociology at the University

of California at Santa Barbara and is the author of Tricks of the
Trade, Writing for Social Scientists, Art Worlds and other works. He
lives and works in San Francisco.
[email: hbecker@alishaw.sscf.ucsb.edu]

This content downloaded from 207.162.240.147 on Fri, 14 Jul 2017 04:38:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms