Product Description: Every night, somewhere in the world, three or four musicians will climb on stage together. Whether the gig is at a jazz club, a bar, or a bar mitzvah, the performance never begins with a note, but with a question. The trumpet player might turn to the bassist and ask, “Do you know ‘Body and Soul’?”—and from there the subtle craft of playing the jazz repertoire is tested in front of a live audience...read more

Product Description: This classic sociological examination of art as collective action explores the cooperative network of suppliers, performers, dealers, critics, and consumers who--along with the artist--"produce" a work of art. Howard S. Becker looks at the conventions essential to this operation and, prospectively, at the extent to which art is shaped by this collective activity...read more

Product Description: Students and researchers all write under pressure, and those pressures—most lamentably, the desire to impress your audience rather than to communicate with them—often lead to pretentious prose, academic posturing, and, not infrequently, writer’s block...read more

Product Description: I Remember, one of French writer Georges Perec’s most famous pieces, consists of 480 numbered paragraphs—each just a few short lines recalling a memory from his childhood. The work has neither a beginning nor an end. Nor does it contain any analysis...read more

Product Description: When is an artistic work finished? When the copyeditor makes the final correction to a manuscript, when the composer writes the last note of a symphony, or when the painter puts the last brushstroke on the canvas? Perhaps it's even later, when someone reads the work, when an ensemble performs, or when the painting is hung on a gallery wall for viewing?Art from Start to Finish gathers a unique group of contributors from the worlds of sociology, musicology, literature, and communications—many of them practicing artists in their own right—to discuss how artists from jazz musicians to painters work: how they coordinate their efforts, how they think, how they start, and, of course, how they finish their productions.Speci...read more

Product Description: Drawing on more than four decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, Howard Becker now brings to students and researchers the many valuable techniques he has learned. Tricks of the Trade will help students learn how to think about research projects...read more

Product Description: "First Free Press paperback edition 1966"--T.p. verso.

Product Description: Here Howard Becker makes available for an English- speaking audience a collection of the provocative work of Antonio Candido, one of the leading men of letters in Brazil. Trained as a sociologist, Candido conceives of literature as a social project and is equally at home in textual analyses, discussions of literary theory, and sociological, anthropological, and historical argument...read more

Product Description: The concept of the case is a basic feature of social science research and yet many questions about how a case should be defined, how cases should be selected and what the criteria are for a good case or set of cases are far from settled...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The transition from young layman aspiring to be a physician to the young physician skilled in technique and confident in his dealings with patients is slow and halting. To study medicine is generally rated one of the major educational ordeals of American youth...read more

Product Description: Symbolic interactionism, resolutely empirical in practice, shares theoretical concerns with cultural studies and humanistic discourse. Recognizing that the humanities have engaged many of the important intellectual currents of the last twenty-five years in ways that sociology has not, the contributors to this volume fully acknowledge that the boundary between the social sciences and the humanities has begun to dissolve...read more

Product Description: "First Free Press paperback edition 1966"--T.p. verso.

Product Description: The papers in this volume, including two important and previously unpublished essays on sociological method, represent most of Howard Becker's work of the past twenty years that has not appeared in book form. They reflect the way of thinking about society and how to study it that has established Professor Becker's place among the leading sociologists of our time...read more