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. Sociologist Howard S. Becker has written th[...]

One of French writer Georges Perec's most famous pieces, "I Remember", 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 ab[...]

In 1963, Howard S. Becker gave a lecture about deviance, challenging the then-conventional definition that deviance was inherently criminal and abnormal and arguing that instead, deviance was better understood as a function of labeling. At the end of his lecture, a distinguished colleague standing a[...]

Howard S. Becker is a name to conjure with on two continents --in the United States and in France. He has enjoyed renown in France for his work in sociology, which in the United States goes back more than fifty years to pathbreaking studies of deviance, professions, sociology of the arts, and a stea[...]

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

Marijuanarökare och jazzmusiker är två av de avvikande grupper som den amerikanske sociologen Howard S. Becker studerar i den moderna klassikern Utanför (originalet Outsiders gavs ut 1963). Han visar här hur och varför någon blir en avvikare. Därigenom kan vi också förstå hur samhällets [...]