Howard S. Becker

Boys in white : student culture in medical school

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. The difficulty of this process and how medical students feel about their training, their doctor-teachers, and the profession they are entering is the target of this study. Now regarded as a classic, Boys in White is of vital interest to medical educators and sociologists. By daily interviews and observations in classes, wards, laboratories, and operating theaters, the team of sociologists who carried out this firsthand research have not only captured the worries, cynicism, and basic idealism of medical students--they have also documented many other realities of medical education in relation to society. With some sixty tables and illustrations, the book is a major experiment in analyzing and presenting qualitative data.

Becoming a Marihuana User

An individual will be able to use marihuana for pleasure only when he 1. learns to smoke it in a way that will produce real effects; 2. learns to recognize the effects and connect them with drug use; and 3. learns to enjoy the sensations he perceives. This proposition, based on an analysis of fifty interviews with marihuana users, calls into question theories which ascribe behavior to antecedent predispositions and suggests the utility of explaining behavior in terms of the emergence of motives and dispositions in the course of experience.

Sociological work : method and substance

Howard S. Becker is a leading contemporary sociologist who interprets society as collective action and sociology, therefore, as the study of collective action. This volume explores the theory and methods necessary to study collective action and social interaction. Becker includes most of his work on theory and method that has not previously appeared in book form. It reflects his unique way of thinking about and studying society. The first part of the book treats methodological problems as problems of social interaction and lists a series of research problems requiring analytic attention. The second part illustrates Beckers approach through full reports on two of his major research projects. Four theoretical statements on how people change comprise the third part, and the fourth part includes important contributions to the study of deviance. These essays illustrate the need to study deviance as part of the general study of society, not as an isolated specialty. Sociological Work is an important statement of the distinctive theoretical and methodological views associated with the Chicago School of Sociology; it shows a deep concern with the first-hand study of processes and human consequences of collective action and interaction. This illuminating volume is an engaging introduction to some of the issues of importance to sociologists and those interested in the studies of collective action and deviance, and it is well adapted to use in courses in these areas.

Labeling the Mentally Retarded.

Who is retarded? After an eight-year study of the labeling process, Mercer finds that schools label more persons as mentally retarded than any other agency. She contends that the use of IQ scores and the unicultural viewpoint of educators and clinicians work against the poor and the ethnic minorities. Her recommendations include a broader assessment procedure that would take into consideration sociocultural characteristics.

Careers, Personality, and Adult Socialization

Adult identity is largely a function of career movement within occupations and work organizations. Mannheims model of the bureaucratic career is too simple to apply to most occupations. Recruitment for positions exhibits typical, but not necessarily obvious, regularities. Positions offer characteristic opportunities for training for mobility or impediments to it, among which loyalty is important. The timing of change raises problems for organization and personnel. The psychological stress attendant upon mobility varies by type of career.

The Development of Identification with an Occupation

Interviews with graduate students in physiology, philosophy, and mechanical engineering indicate that changes in social participation in the course of graduate work lead to the acquisition or maintenance of specific kinds of occupational identities. Such participation affects identity through the operation of the social-psychological mechanisms of development of interest in problems and pride in skills, acquisition of idelogies, investment, the internalization of motives, and sponsorship. This mode of analysis may have more general utility in the understanding of changes in individual identity in the course of experience in groups.

Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism: It's (almost) all a matter of context

Visual sociology, documentary photography, and photojournalism are social constructions whose meaning arises in the contexts, organizational and historical, of different worlds of photographic work. Rereading photographs made in one genre as though they had been made in another illustrates this contextuality of meaning.

The fate of idealism in medical school

Статья Говарда Бекера и Бланш Гир «Судьба идеализма в медицинской школе» посвящена вопросам профессиональной социализации студентов медицинских школ. Исследуются позитивные и негативные составляющие данного процесса. Отмечается, что студенты приходят в медицинские школы с идеалистическими представлениями как о характере своей будущей профессиональной деятельности, так и о содержании своего образования. Студенты полагают, что на профессиональном поприще их ожидает важное общественное служение, что полученная ими подготовка будет востребованной в их медицинской практике. Однако в процессе обучения студентам приходится расставаться со многими иллюзиями относительно своей профессии и качества получаемого образования. Оказывается, что учебная программа первых лет обучения не предполагает практического знакомства с медициной, то есть взаимодействия с пациентами, и большинство дисциплин имеют лишь отдаленное отношение к врачебной практике. Это ведет к разочарованию в профессиональном образовании и подталкивает студентов к поиску прагматичных и даже циничных стратегий своего поведения во время обучения. Уже в первый год обучения в медицинской школе оказывается провальным с точки зрения усвоения будущими врачами альтруистических ценностей своей профессии. Формируется характерная субкультура студенческого сообщества, характеризующаяся ярко выраженным цинизмом. На втором и последующих курсах содержание обучения меняется ﷓ студенты получают возможность практического использования теоретических знаний, взаимодействуя с «живыми» пациентами: студенты берут клинические интервью, выясняют историю болезни, составляют карту пациента и пытаются ставить предварительный диагноз. Изменения учебныз программ создают новые обстоятельства, однако не восстанавливают прежнего идеалистического отношения к медицинской профессии. Авторы делают вывод, что идеалистические ценности профессионального служения могут быть возрождены, если будет снижено влияние субкультуры студенческого сообщества медицинских школ, субкультуры, ключевым звеном которой является цинизм.

The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience

Members of service occupations are subject to the interference of clients at their work. In the meeting of a professional whose self is deeply involved in his work and a more casually involved customer conflict arises from the professionals feeling that outsiders neither are capable nor posses the right to judge their performance. Dance musicians feel themselves to be different from their audiences-people who lack understanding and who should have no control over their work but in fact exert great control. Musicians feel isolated from society and increase this isolation through a process of self-segregation.

Music as Social Text.

Part 1 Music as Social Knowledge: music premises the inadequacy of psychological theories the post-renaissance, industrial world the blocks against a social theory. Part 2 Music as social text: meaning in music functional tonality - a basis for musical hegemony the analysis of popular music - class, generation and ethnicity music and male hegemony music, text and subjectivity. Part 3 musical sociality and musicology: musicology and popular music studies towards a musicology of society.