Telling About Society (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) - Softcover

Becker, Howard S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226041263 ISBN 13: 9780226041261

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

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. But it nonetheless reveals profound truths about French society during the 1940s and 50s.

Taking Perec’s book as its cue, Telling About Society explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. The third in distinguished teacher Howard Becker’s best-selling series of writing guides for social scientists, the book explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling—fiction, films, photographs, maps, even mathematical models—many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science. Eight case studies, including the photographs of Walker Evans, the plays of George Bernard Shaw, the novels of Jane Austen and Italo Calvino, and the sociology of Erving Goffman, provide convincing support for Becker’s argument: that every way of telling about society is perfect—for some purpose. The trick is, as Becker notes, to discover what purpose is served by doing it this way rather than that.

With Becker’s trademark humor and eminently practical advice, Telling About Society is an ideal guide for social scientists in all fields, for artists interested in saying something about society, and for anyone interested in communicating knowledge in unconventional ways.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Howard Becker lives and works in San Francisco. He is the author of several books, including Outsiders, Writing for Social Scientists, and Tricks of the Trade, the latter two published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Telling About Society

By HOWARD S. BECKER

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-04126-1

Contents

List of Illustrations.................................................................ixPreface...............................................................................xiAcknowledgments.......................................................................xviiPart I : Ideas1 Telling About Society...............................................................22 Representations of Society as Organizational Products...............................153 Who Does What?......................................................................304 The Work Users Do...................................................................545 Standardization and Innovation......................................................716 Summarizing Details.................................................................927 Reality Aesthetics..................................................................1098 The Morality of Representations.....................................................129Part II : Examples9 Parables, Ideal Types, and Mathematical Models......................................15010 Charts: Thinking with Drawings.....................................................16711 Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism.....................18612 Drama and Multivocality: Shaw, Churchill, and Shawn................................20413 Goffman, Language, and the Comparative Strategy....................................22314 Jane Austen: The Novel as Social Analysis..........................................23815 Georges Perec's Experiments in Social Description..................................25216 Italo Calvino, Urbanologist........................................................270Finally ..............................................................................285References............................................................................289Index.................................................................................299

Chapter One

Telling About Society

I have lived for many years in San Francisco, on the lower slope of Russian Hill or in the upper reaches of North Beach; how I describe it depends on whom I am trying to impress. I live near Fisherman's Wharf, on the route many people take from that tourist attraction to their motel downtown or on Lombard Street's motel row. Looking out my front window, I often see small groups of tourists standing, alternately looking at their maps and at the large hills that stand between them and where they want to be. It's clear what has happened. The map's straight line looked like a nice walk through a residential neighborhood, one that might show them how the natives live. Now they are thinking, as a young Briton I offered to help said to me, "I've got to get to my motel and I am not climbing that bloody hill!"

Why don't the maps those people consult alert them to the hills? Cartographers know how to indicate hills, so it is not a restriction of the medium that inconveniences walkers. But the maps are made for motorists, originally (though no longer) paid for by gasoline companies and tire manufacturers, and distributed through service stations (Paumgarten 2006, 92)-and drivers worry less than pedestrians do about hills.

Those maps, and the networks of people and organizations who make and use them, exemplify a more general problem. An ordinary street map of San Francisco is a conventionalized representation of that urban society: a visual description of its streets and landmarks and of their arrangement in space. Social scientists and ordinary citizens routinely use not only maps but also a great variety of other representations of social reality-a few random examples are documentary films, statistical tables, and the stories people tell one another to explain who they are and what they are doing. All of them, like the maps, give a picture that is only partial but nevertheless adequate for some purpose. All of them arise in organizational settings, which constrain what can be done and define the purposes the work will have to satisfy. This understanding suggests several interesting problems: How do the needs and practices of organizations shape our descriptions and analyses (call them representations) of social reality? How do the people who use those representations come to define them as adequate? Such questions have a bearing on traditional questions about knowing and telling in science but go beyond them to include problems more traditionally associated with the arts and with the experience and analysis of everyday life.

For many years, I've been involved with a variety of ways of telling about society, professionally and out of native curiosity. I'm a sociologist, so the ways of telling that come most immediately to my mind are the ones sociologists routinely use: ethnographic description, theoretical discourse, statistical tables (and such visual representations of numbers as bar charts), historical narrative, and so on. But many years ago I went to art school and became a photographer, and in the process I developed a strong and lasting interest in photographic representations of society, which documentary and other photographers have been making since the invention of the medium. That led quite naturally to thinking about film as still another way of telling about society. And not just documentary films but fiction films as well. I'd been an avid reader of fiction since I was a kid, and like most other readers of stories, I knew that they are not just made-up fantasies, that they often contain observations worth reading about how society is constructed and works. Why not dramatic representations of stories on the stage too? Having always been interested and involved in all these ways of telling about society, I decided to take advantage of the somewhat haphazard and random collection of examples that had deposited in my brain.

To do what? To see the problems anyone who tries to do the job of representing society has to solve, what kinds of solutions have been found and tried, and with what results. To see what the problems of different media have in common and how solutions that work for one kind of telling look when you try them on some other kind. To see what, for instance, statistical tables have in common with documentary photographic projects, what mathematical models have in common with avant-garde fiction. To see what solutions to the problem of description one field might import from another.

So I'm interested in novels, statistics, histories, ethnographies, photographs, films, and any other way people have tried to tell others what they know about their society or some other society that interests them. I'll call the products of all this activity in all these media "reports about society" or, sometimes, "representations of society." What problems and issues arise in making those reports, in whatever medium? I've constructed a list of those issues from the things people who do this kind of work talk and complain about to each other, using as a basic principle of discovery this idea: if it's a problem in one way of making representations, it's a problem in every way of doing so. But the people who work in one area may have solved that problem to their own satisfaction, so that they don't even think of it as a problem, while for other people it seems an insoluble dilemma. Which means that the latter can learn something from the former.

I've been...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226041263
• ISBN 13: 9780226041261
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 333
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: The University of Chicago Press; https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html; ; 5801 S. Ellis Avenue; Chicago; IL; 60637; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar