Howard S. Becker

Howard S. Becker: The Piano Player Who Rewrote Deviance

At fifteen he was already working the bars and strip joints of Chicago as a professional pianist, a job available to a teenager only because the war had taken every musician over eighteen. He thought music was his career and sociology was the hobby. It took him decades to fully reverse the ranking, and arguably he never did — but somewhere in those smoky rooms, watching musicians talk about the squares who paid them, Howard S. Becker acquired the idea that would reorganize the study of crime and deviance for half a century.

Chicago, Piano, and a Doctorate at Twenty-Three

Becker was born in Chicago on 18 April 1928 to Allan and Donna Becker, a Jewish family whose great-grandfather had emigrated from Lithuania. He started piano young and never stopped. By the time he took his undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1946 — at eighteen — he was playing semi-professionally and continued to do so through his graduate work, including stints with a Northwestern campus band. The bar work also gave him something more useful than income: an unsentimental, first-hand acquaintance with the drug culture of postwar Chicago, on the inside, as a colleague rather than an investigator.

He stayed at Chicago for his MA and PhD, writing a dissertation on Chicago public school teachers, and finished at twenty-three. His mentor was Everett C. Hughes, the great analyst of occupations and careers, and it is Hughes rather than any theorist of crime whose fingerprints are all over Becker's later work. Becker himself named his lineage as Georg Simmel, Robert E. Park and Hughes, and pointedly refused the labels of symbolic interactionist and social constructionist that were repeatedly pinned on him.

Outsiders

*Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance* appeared in 1963 and rearranged the furniture of an entire subfield. Its central proposition is deceptively plain: deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits, nor a property of a bad person, but the consequence of other people applying a rule and a label. Social groups create deviance, Becker argued, by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance and then applying those rules to particular people. The deviant is one to whom the label has successfully stuck.

The evidence was drawn from the two worlds he knew best. His study of marijuana users — begun in research at the Institute for Juvenile Research after his doctorate — showed that becoming a user was a learned career with distinct stages: learning the technique, learning to perceive the effects, and learning to define those effects as pleasurable. The physiology alone explained nothing; the meaning was taught. His study of dance musicians, drawn straight from his own working life, described a professional culture organized around contempt for the audience that pays it, and around the constant negotiation between artistic self-respect and commercial survival.

*Outsiders* also introduced the moral entrepreneur — the crusading reformer who is not merely reacting to a social problem but manufacturing one, campaigning rules into existence and then constructing the enforcement apparatus that finds violators. It is a concept that has proved almost embarrassingly durable, and it explains a great deal about the last sixty years of drug policy, censorship campaigns and moral panics.

Art Worlds and the Craft of Writing

Becker taught at the University of Chicago and Stanford's Institute for the Study of Human Problems before settling as professor at Northwestern University from 1965 to 1991, then moving to the University of Washington from 1991 to 1999, where he was simultaneously adjunct professor of music. His later career took the same analytic move he had applied to deviance and applied it to culture.

*Art Worlds* (1982) argued that a work of art is not the emanation of a solitary genius but the product of collective action — a cooperative network of suppliers, performers, critics, curators, funders and audiences, each doing a piece of the work, and all of them together deciding what counts as art at all. Removing the artist from the centre of art was, in its way, the same operation as removing the criminal from the centre of crime.

He also became, improbably, one of the most useful writing teachers in the social sciences. *Writing for Social Scientists* (1986) is a sustained attack on academic prose — on the passive voice, the abstract noun, the defensive hedging that scholars use to sound authoritative — and remains in print because it works. *Tricks of the Trade* (1998) and *Telling About Society* (2007) extended his argument that method must be improvised to fit the situation rather than imported wholesale.

Why Howard Is Called a Genius

Becker's gift was a single, endlessly reusable move: take the thing everyone treats as an intrinsic property of an object or person, and relocate it into the social process that assigns it. Deviance becomes labelling. Art becomes an art world. Talent becomes a career. It is a simple manoeuvre, but performing it convincingly requires an ear for the way people actually talk about their own work, and Becker had that ear from the bandstand rather than the seminar. His prose is famously plain — he practised what he preached — and he made complex claims sound like common sense, which is a rarer skill than obscurity.

The recognition was substantial: a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978–79, the Charles Horton Cooley Award in 1980, the Common Wealth Award in 1981, the Cooley/Mead Award in 1985, the George Herbert Mead Award in 1987, the American Sociological Association's Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1998, and honorary degrees from Paris, Grenoble, Rotterdam and Lyon. In France he acquired something close to celebrity, lecturing extensively and spending three or four months of each year in Paris.

The counter-case is that his central insight is more a perspective than a theory — it reframes without predicting, and it has been criticised for treating the labelled as passive and for saying little about why some groups get to do the labelling. Becker himself was unbothered by the charge of not building a system; he rejected the theoretical labels attached to him and preferred, in the Chicago manner, to describe particular worlds well. The honest verdict is that he was an exceptionally sharp observer with one very good idea and the nerve to follow it everywhere, rather than a builder of theoretical architecture.

Legacy

Becker died in San Francisco on 16 August 2023, aged ninety-five, having gone on writing and recording music long after retirement. Associated with the second Chicago School alongside Erving Goffman and Anselm Strauss, he left a vocabulary — labelling, moral entrepreneur, art world — that has escaped sociology entirely and now belongs to anyone arguing about how rules get made and who gets caught by them.

Achievements

• Notable work: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance
• Held posts at Northwestern University, University of Washington and University of California, Santa Barbara
• Fields: sociology, sociology of art and art theory