What About Mozart? What About Murder?: Reasoning From Cases

217 Pages·2014·1.22 MB·English

by  Howard S. Becker

HOWARD S. BECKER is the author of several books, including Writing for Social Scientists, Telling
About Society, Tricks of the Trade, and Art Worlds. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2014.
Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-16635-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-16649-0 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-22616652-0
(e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226166520.001.0001
Becker, Howard Saul, 1928– author.
What about Mozart? What about murder? : reasoning from cases / Howard S. Becker.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-16635-3 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-16649-0 (paperback : alkaline paper)
— ISBN 978-0-22616652-0 (e-book) 1. Sociology — Methodology. 2. Case-based reasoning. I. Title.
HM511.B435 2014
301.01—dc23
2013048791
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
What About Mozart?
What About Murder?
REASONING FROM CASES
HOWARD S. BECKER
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
To the memory of
STAN COHEN,
LEIGH STAR, and
GILBERTO VELHO,
old friends and
intellectual companions
Some books are premeditated, others not. This one has grown by itself and
discovered by its own movement its form and its end, constantly baffling in the
course of its growth the intentions that I naively strove, again and again
mistaking a branch or twig for a stem, to impose upon it.
MARC FUMAROLI, When the World Spoke French (translated by Richard Howard)
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 FIRST LOOK
2 WHAT’S HAPPENING ELSEWHERE
Reasoning from a Case to the World
3 REASONING FROM ANALOGY
4 BLACK BOXES
Using Cases to Study Input-Output Machines
5 COMPLICATING AND COMBINING BLACK BOXES
Where Is the Value in Art?
6 IMAGINING CASES
7 WHERE DO YOU STOP?
8 IOU’S, PROMISSORY NOTES, AND KILLER QUESTIONS
What About Mozart? What About Murder?
9 LAST WORDS
References
Index
Acknowledgments
I have been thinking about these topics ever since I started studying sociology at
the University of Chicago in the 1940s. I could not in any reasonable way thank
all the people who helped shape my thinking over all these years, so I won’t try.
Some of my debts are obvious in the references and remarks in the text. Those
that aren’t recognized there—well, just know that I’m grateful even to the people
whose help I don’t remember.
I am, however, very mindful of what my long friendship and professional
association with Douglas Mitchell has done for me in such a variety of ways. So,
one more once, thanks, Doug.
Dianne Hagaman and I share our lives and I know how lucky I am to have
that life with her. She read every word of this book and helped me in more ways
than I can say.
I’m grateful for Matt Avery’s laid-back design, which welcomes readers and
makes them at home in my world.
Donald Westlake’s novels helped me finish this book. In troubled moments,
I turned to them for solace and refreshment.
I’ve been writing about these topics for at least thirty years, often for special
occasions. Portions of the following publications have been altered to a greater
or lesser degree for inclusion in this book.
“Distributing Modern Art,” New Art Examiner, December 1983, 5–6.
“E di Mozart che ne dici? E dell’omicidio?” in Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia
44, no. 4 (October–December 2003): 483–92. Reprinted with the permission
of the publisher, Il Mulino.
“History, Culture, and Subjective Experience: An Exploration of the Social
Bases of Drug-Induced Experiences,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior
8 (September 1967): 163–76.
“How Much Is Enough?” originally published in Public Culture 25, no. 3
(2013): 375–86. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Duke
University Press.
“How We Deal with the People We Study,” in Crime, Social Control, and
Human Rights: From Moral Panics to Denial: Essays in Honour of Stanley
Cohen, ed. Christine Chinkin, David Downes, Conor Gearty, and Paul Rock
(Cullompton, UK: Willan, 2007). Reprinted with the permission of the
publisher.
“La Confusion de Valeurs,” in L’art de la recherche: Melanges, ed. Pierre-
Michel Menger and Jean-Claude Passeron, 11–28 (Paris: La Documentation
Française, 1994). Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
“The Lay Referral System: The Problem of Professional Power,” Knowledge,
Work, and Society 4, no. 2 (2006): 63–76. © Editions l’Harmattan. Reprinted
with the permission of the publisher.
“Lessons from the Master, Everett C. Hughes,” Sociologica 2 (2010): 1–11.
Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Il Mulino.
“The Power of Inertia,” Qualitative Sociology 18 (1995): 301–9.
1 First Look
After the Civil War in the United States, after Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the
emancipation of black slaves and the Congress and the several states passed the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing full civil rights to all
Americans, regardless of race—after those things happened, as soon as African
Americans were able to vote, they voted overwhelmingly for candidates of the
Republican Party and continued to vote that way for many years. Everyone knew
the reason: Abraham Lincoln had been a Republican, and the Democrats had
opposed him and his forward-looking policies with respect to race, so no African
American person in his (women didn’t have the vote for a lot of this time) right
mind would vote otherwise. That relationship between race and voting for
Republicans persisted for a long time. Until it didn’t.
Until Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the Democratic party to power in 1932
and kept it there long enough to pass major legislation that changed the social
and economic position of poorer people, a group that included most black
citizens. The resulting relationship between race and voting for Democrats has
persisted for a long time and looks as if it will be as permanent as the
relationship between race and voting Republican once looked. Or will be until it
isn’t.
Similarly, after the post–World War II boom subsided, the United States
changed in many ways. Factory and other blue-collar workers, who Roosevelt
had also converted into persistent Democratic voters, stopped voting for the
party in such large numbers, and the relation between class and party, which had
seemed so permanent, stopped being so, and in a few years blue-collar voters
started voting Republican in large numbers and the Reagan years began.
These correlations exhibited all the strength anyone could require to use
them as building blocks of sociological thinking. But they disappeared and their
opposites replaced them in a relatively short time. Were the research methods
and theoretical strategies that produced those so-quickly falsified causal