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Howard S. BECKER, Telling About Society

Howard S. BECKER, Telling About Society

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la maison d'édition)


Howard S. BECKER, Telling About Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 304 p.
ISBN 978-0-226-04126-1
ISBN-10: 0-226-04126-3


RÉSUMÉ

I Remember, one of French writer Georges Perec’s most famouspieces, consists of 480 numbered paragraphs—each just a few short linesrecalling a memory from his childhood. The work has neither a beginningnor an end. Nor does it contain any analysis. But it nonethelessreveals profound truths about French society during the 1940s and 50s.

Taking Perec’s book as its cue, Telling About Societyexplores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know aboutsociety to others. The third in distinguished teacher Howard Becker’sbest-selling series of writing guides for social scientists, the bookexplores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared andinterpreted through different forms of telling—fiction, films,photographs, maps, even mathematical models—many of which remainoutside the boundaries of conventional social science. Eight casestudies, including the photographs of Walker Evans, the plays of GeorgeBernard Shaw, the novels of Jane Austen and Italo Calvino, and thesociology of Erving Goffman, provide convincing support for Becker’sargument: that every way of telling about society is perfect—for somepurpose. The trick is, as Becker notes, to discover what purpose isserved by doing it this way rather than that.
With Becker’s trademark humor and eminently practical advice, Telling About Societyis an ideal guide for social scientists in all fields, for artistsinterested in saying something about society, and for anyone interestedin communicating knowledge in unconventional ways.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part I. Ideas
Chapter 1. Telling About Society
Chapter 2. Representations of Society as Organizational Products
Chapter 3. Who Does What?
Chapter 4. The Work Users Do
Chapter 5. Standardization and Innovation
Chapter 6. Summarizing Details
Chapter 7. Reality Aesthetics
Chapter 8. The Morality of Representations

Part II. Examples
Chapter 9. Parables, Ideal Types, and Mathematical Models
Chapter 10. Charts: Thinking with Drawings
Chapter 11. Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism
Chapter 12. Drama and Multivocality: Shaw, Churchill, and Shawn
Chapter 13. Goffman, Language, and the Comparative Strategy
Chapter 14. Jane Austen: The Novel as Social Analysis
Chapter 15. Georges Perec's Experiments in Social Description
Chapter 16. Italo Calvino, Urbanologist

Finally . . .
References
Index