Chicago, Jazz and Marijuana: Howard Becker on Outsiders

Chicago, Jazz and Marijuana: Howard BeckeronOutsiders*

Thaddeus MllerErasmus University Rotterdam

In this article on the social production of Outsiders I will situate itsmaking in the daily practice of the social worlds Becker was involvedin. Therefore I focus on the relations, interactions and situations whichwere relevant for the form, content and success of Outsiders. The frag-ments from my email communication with Becker, the collected inter-views and other publications show that Becker demysties Outsiders.In fact my contribution here is that I use Becker to demystify the ethno-graphic practice of Outsiders and describe its mundane backstage real-ity, which is described by Fine as the underside of ethnography (1993).Keywords: Becker, Outsiders, biography, methodology, Chicago

Within criminology and sociology,Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance byHoward Becker (1963) is seen as a pioneering study. In that book, he focuses on howprofessionals in the police and the court define crime. This theory became known aslabeling. His approach extended to showing how becoming a member of a deviantsubculture, like the jazz world, also involved learning how to label experiences, suchas the use of marijuana. The reviews ofOutsiderswere in general very positive. It washighly recommended (Erikson 1963: 419), exceptionally interesting (Sykes 1964:135), and an essential book (Cohen 1964: 197). Outsiders has become a sociologi-cal bestseller and had sold between 100,000 and 150,000 copies by the mid-nineties(Gans 1997). It remains one of the most highly cited studies within criminology.

Mymain interest here is to understand how it was possible for Becker towrite sucha breakthrough book in a period inwhich the commonunderstanding of cannabis andcrime was deeply conservative. How is his own (academic and social) deviance to beexplained? It is well known that Becker played piano professionally, as he states inOutsiders. However, a less well examined question is how his participation in the

Direct all correspondence to Thaddeus Mller, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738,Burgermeester Oudlaan 50 L Building, Rotterdam, Zuid Holland 3000, the Netherlands; e-mail:[email protected].

*This article is based on an earlier version published in Dutch. I want to thank the anonymousreviewers and Robert Dingwall for their supportive comments. Finally, I want to thank Howie forhis cooperation during the making of this article.

Symbolic Interaction, (2014), p. n/a, ISSN: 0195-6086 print/1533-8665 online. 2014 Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1002/SYMB.119

2 Symbolic Interaction 2014

Chicago jazz world influenced Outsiders. In this paper, I attempt to answer thesequestions by researching the creation of Outsiders from the perspective of Beckerhimself, and through textual analysis of existing interviews. As part of this study,I draw on email interviews with Howard Becker, who is now 86 (born 18-4-1928). Ialso include excerpts from other existing interviews and publications in which Beckerrefers toOutsiders. I reordered the selected fragments and put them in a timeline inorder to understand the historical development of Outsiders.

When I first initiated contact with Howard Becker, and asked him whether hewanted to be interviewed aboutOutsiders, he made it clear that his preference wouldbe an interview via email. Our communication also shows that he is not greatly inter-ested in Outsiders. Becker says that he never actually saw himself as a sociologist ofdeviance. At the beginning of his career he saw himself as a sociologist of professions,in the tradition of Everett Hughes, and later as a sociologist of art. Yet Becker revealshimself in his work as a demystifier. He does not accept commonsense ideas aboutdrugs and art, and confronts the front-stage rhetoric of institutions with what he dis-covers in the mundane social reality of back stage activities. After emailing him thischaracterization, he stated that he liked the idea of being a demystifier and added thatthat sounded right to him. An example of this approach is to be seen in Art Worlds(1982), where he does not focus on the individual special qualities of artists, and howthese shaped their art, which used to be the common approach in the sociology ofart. Instead, he looks at the whole process in which many are involved in the makingof art (Becker 1982:1).

In this article I will approach Outsiders in a similar way. Like an artwork, Out-siders is also the result of Doing Things Together, the title of a collection of articlesBecker published in 1986, which captures his sociological approach. To understandhow it was possible that Outsiders was published in the early 1960s, I will situateits making in the daily practice of the social worlds in which Becker was involved.Therefore, in this article I will focus on the relations, interactions and situationswhich were relevant for the form, content and success of Outsiders. The fragmentsfrom the collected interviews and other publications show that Becker also demysti-fies Outsiders. My contribution here is to use Becker to demystify the ethnographicpractice of Outsiders. I describe its mundane backstage reality, which is describedby others as the underside of ethnography (Fine 1993) and its true confessions(Ferrell 1998).

Shalin (2013) can also be seen as a demystifier of our sociological profession.He has been building up the Goffman Archives, based on many interviews withpersons who were close to Goffman, in order to explore the relationship betweenbiography, theory, and history. In fact Shalin can also be seen as a reputationalentrepreneur, meaning that he is managing the reputation of Goffman (Fine 1996).Shalins approach, which he himself describes as biocritical hermeneutics, showsthat there is a strong relation between Goffmans work and his biography. Althoughmy ambition is minute compared to Shalins project, in this article I will show that, inthe case of Becker, there are also intersections between his biography andOutsiders.

Howard Becker on Outsiders 3

Though the concept reputational entrepreneur, originally refers to a personwhoshapes the reputation of another in a particular way (Fine 1996: 1162), it can alsobe applied to the protagonist him or herself. In this sense, Becker can be seen as areputational entrepreneur in relation to his own career. Beckers strategy is a par-ticular oneof modesty. He has given many interviews in which he has been candidabout his past. Becker talks about himself in a modest and sober way as will becomeclear in this article. There is hardly any mystique. What you see is what you get.

His humility has been related to several aspects of his social life. Robert Faulknerrelates Beckers modesty to his position as a piano player in a jazz ensemble:

This centrality [of the piano player, TM] has something to do with identity.Piano players are typically the most reflective, something of the intellectualsof the cats; and since they often know chord changes, they are being placedin the position of being constrained to provide the basics for others and theirimprovisation . . . . Having hung out with Becker and Piano Genius [sic] BillEvans (on separate occasions, of course). I will say they had remarkably similarpersonal styles: sweet, reasonable, articulate, deep, put up with no bullshit(Katz 1994: 275).

His modesty is also strongly related to his methodological approach. It is thenaive outlook in which qualitative researchers need to listen carefully to what thefield tells them and to be open for new interpretations (see also Katz 1994). In thenext citation of Katz on artists, based onArt Worlds, the reader can actually discovera description of Beckers own career.

In successful careers, humility about ones own contributions becomes not simplya gracious posture but a foundation for continued originality (Katz 1994: 271).

His modesty is not only related to his methodological approach, but also to thetheoretical notions he develops in his work. The way Becker portrays himself as acreative academic fits with his demystifying analysis of his research subjects.

That being said Beckers approach colors this article in the sense that he seems todownplay his role. His outlook might actually mask his own role in the creation ofhis work. This can be seen as a downside of choosing to reconstruct the creation ofOutsiders through the eyes of Becker. The perspective of colleagues, gained throughinterviews, might be a good antidote to Beckers modesty. But this suggestion (forfurther research) is beyond the scope of this article.

I have categorized different periods, which have been relevant for Beckers newapproach to deviant behavior. In the next section, I will describe how Becker, as ajazz pianist, gets involved in the criminal world of Chicago and how this contributesto the development of a kind of outsider view. Thirdly, I will show how Beckersperspective was formed by Hughess statement: everything is somebodys work.In the fourth section, I will describe the anthropological roots of Outsiders. Fifthly,I will focus on the methodological practice, in which I discuss, for instance, Beckerspersonal involvement with this field of research. Beckers own hindsight evaluation


of Outsiders will be discussed in the sixth section. I will end with some conclusionsand an afterword.

A KIND OF OUTSIDER VIEW

In his essay about his childhood in Chicago, where he was born and raised, Becker(2009) describes how he learned to observe when he was ten. Using the L, theelevated train system, he traveled across all parts of Chicago and encountered thesocial, cultural and spatial diversity of urban life. Becker describes how he wouldtravel with his friends from the far West Side of the city (where he used to live) tothe Loop, the downtown center.

Travelling through the city, Becker developed an attentive eye for what wenton in its diverse public world of strangers. He practiced the basic social skill ofobservingnecessary for any professional spectator of urban life. His personalexperience was one of enjoying the city by observing its adventurous diversity.Beckers Chicago was a city is of freedom, excitement and curiosity, not a place toavoid and fear. Becker saw the buildings and how they varied from place to place.He learned the characteristic ethnic patterns of the city by reading the signs on thebusinesses he went by. He saw people of different racial and ethnic groups as theygot on and off the train, and learned who lived where (Becker 2009). This contrastssharply with the depiction in Wirths (1938) famous article Urbanism as a Way ofLife, with its focus on the anonymous doom and gloom of cities. The statements onurban life in this article are based on a diverse range of studies of social problemsinspired by Robert Park, such as The Gold Coast and The Slum (Zorbaugh 1929),The Taxi Dance Hall (Cressey 1932) and The Gang (Thrasher 1927). In fact, Wirthsarticle was something of a swansong: the heyday of the so-called Chicago schoolwas actually over by 1938. Subsequently, its ethnographic tradition was carried for-ward on a much smaller scale, particularly by Everett Hughes, a student of RobertPark and later Beckers mentor.

Before Becker was influenced by his training at the University of Chicago, hisperspective on crime and authority was already formed by his experiences as a jazzmusician. We have already seen that Becker was an independent child from his earlyteens, enjoying the freedom of the city and developing an eye for urban life. Fromthe age of fourteen (1942), another dimension was added to his perspective when hestarted to play in jazz bands and encountered the social world of club night life in thecity. The bandstand was a perfect platform to observe the interaction in the locationswhere Becker played.

All the places I played in were sites of observation, though I didnt think of themthat way, and didnt think that I was doing anything as important or grand asobserving. I was just living (Becker 2009).

Part of what Becker called living included developing his observation skills whichhe already used as a child traversing the city. Becker (2009) writes that he watched


night after night as men who had come to Chicago for, perhaps, a business con-vention, bought drinks for the strippers in the first club where he played, spendingthousands of dollars without even getting any sex for it. Occasionally someone wellknown could be seen sitting in the back of the club masturbating while the girls tooktheir clothes off. People flirted with each other. Fights between two people wouldturn into major brawls, occasionally involving the club owner and the bartender aswell as the customers. Police officers stopped by to collect bribes from the owner ofthe club.

The experience of the jazz world is very similar to that of the city: adventure,excitement and curiosity. Though the jazz world was heavily influenced by the mafia,fear, coercion and social control are not central to Beckers observations. Never-theless, participation in the jazz world enabled Becker to observe a wide variety ofcriminal behavior, such as bribery, violence and prostitution.

To my question whether he got used to crime and deviance by participating inthe jazz world he answers that my guess is right. He states that the easiest way tounderstand this was that he was a musician long before he was a sociologist. Throughparticipating in the jazz world he not only got used to crime, but also developed acritical stance towards society and its mores.

And, for a sociologist, I think it [jazz, TM] inoculated me against believing con-ventional pieties about the society I lived in and studied. I knew better (aboutthe police, about drugs, about music, about the motives of important people, allthat.) (2013).

By being part of the jazz world Becker developed the perspective of the outsider.This marginal position helped him to look from a critical distance at behavior thatwas taken for granted by others, a position which was also advocated by his latermentor Hughes.

I think that, in being a sociologist, one of the things that really is advantageous,is to have a kind of outsider view of things, so that youre not simply acceptingwhat everyone else believes as the God-given truth. Instead you say, Oh yeah,well lets have a look, lets see. At the age of 15 or so, I was playing in tavernsand watching the bar-owners bribe the police and seeing all kinds of shady thingsgoing on. First of all, I knew that the policeman was not my friend. ( ). It givesyou a second standpoint (Jackson 2010).

EVERYTHING IS SOMEBODYS WORK

The independent critical view on social life which Becker used in Outsiders wasalready roughly formed before Becker entered the academic world. Becker didnot make a conscious decision to study sociology. This was related to a diverserange of circumstances, such as his relationship with his father, the violence inthe club scene, and his chance encounter with Black Metropolis (Drake andCayton 1945).


I was playing the piano and . . . working for a bunch of Mafiosi in these bars. Ifigured that this is not a healthy business for a nice Jewish kid to be in. One ofthese days theyre going to get mad. And Id seen them get mad at people. Its notgood.Andmy father, although I wasnt payingmuch attention to him, but the ideathat his son would become a tavern piano player was, like, Jesus! So I thoughtId give this a try. ( ) I was beginning to see that I was probably not going tobe a great jazz pianist. And so, you know, Ill keep on going to school. Its kindof interesting ( ). It was something to do. Sociology was kind of a last minutechoice. I decided I should go to graduate school. So what field should I be in? AndI thought, English. Because I like to read novels, and, what the hell, Ill read a lotof novels and that will be school.What could be bad about that? And then, I thinkit was the summer maybe it was the spring before I entered the sociologydepartment, I read Black Metropolis. It was cool in the way that anthropologymust have seemed cool to a lot of people then. ( ). But Black Metropolis wasurban anthropology. ( ) So I went to the sociology department. It was just thatsimple. I barely knew what it was (Molotch 2012: 433).

Black Metropolis is a well written and sparkling study of the black community inChicago. It contains interviews and observations that give readers the perspective ofbeing in the midst of this community and seeing what goes on. Beckers enthusiasmabout the anthropological quality of Black Metropolis not only led him to sociology,but the book was also the beginning of a lifelong interest in an anthropological orethnographic approach to social life.

Because Becker wrote notes about where he was working as a jazz musician, atavern on 63rd Street, for one of Burgesss classes, he came into contact with EverettHughes.

At the end of the quarter I gave them (the notes, TM) to Burgess. And when hegave them back he said, This is occupations and professions. Thats ProfessorHughes. ( ) He said, Well, give me your notes and come back in a week. Hewas very brusque. Okay. I went away and came back in a week. Mr. Becker, comeright in. Sit down. ( ) So, he said, he read my notes, and [theyre] full of peopleputting squares down andmaking fun of the people in the bar and all that. And hesaid it was like gold to him. His methodological principle was that anything yousee in a lowly occupation is probably going on in a higher-status occupation, onlythey wont tell you. He chose me for a completely venal reason: I would furtherhis research (Molotch 2012: 434).

Hughes was one of the few later sociologists in Chicago, as I already mentioned,who conducted research in the tradition established by Robert Park and showed afundamental interest in doing fieldwork. In fact, Hughes was an important link, atleast as significant as Blumer, in passing this approach on to students in Chicago, suchas Erving Goffman and Anselm Strauss, at a time when quantitative methods werestarting to dominate sociology (Becker 1999; Strauss 1996; Vienne 2010). Severalof the students shared Beckers critical view on society (Galliher 1995: 165). Yearslater Becker is still enthusiastic about his time at the University of Chicago after theSecond World War:


It was a very exciting place. There were an awful lot of good sociologists inmy age group. ( ) I cant even begin to tell you all the people who were inmy classErving Goffman, David Gold, Bill Kornhauser, Eliot Freidson, JimShortI could go on half a day naming them. We were all very excited aboutsociology, andwe talked very seriously about it so that there was a lot of educationgoing on among students themselves (Debro 1986: 27, see also Fine 1995).

Hughes not only had a great influence on Beckers methodological approach,but also influenced how Becker perceived crime in a sociological way, which fittedthe critical amoral view that he developed in the jazz-world (see also Galliher1995:164165). In our email contact, Becker stated that what really solidified hisideas about deviance was Everett Hughes remark that everything is somebodyswork, which Becker applied to deviance. Becker writes that once you have that ideait almost writes itself. He remarks that two questions are central: Whose work is itto create deviance and enforce rules against it? (See also Galliher 1995:167).

This was essential for Beckers approach inOutsiders. Because he did not look atlaw-breaking from a criminological perspective, with its strong focus on why crimi-nals behaved theway they did, he could shine a different light on criminal and deviantbehavior (Galliher 1995: 170, 181).

The study of crime lost its connection with the mainstream of sociological devel-opment and became a very bizarre deformation of sociology, designed to find outwhy people were doing bad things instead of finding out the organization of inter-action in that sphere. ( ) So I approached deviance as the study of people whoseoccupation, onemight say, was either crime or catching criminals. (..) In a way, Imsurprised that I had such notions in 1954. In another way, it was a natural idea fora sociologist to have who hadnt been trained in criminology (Debro 1986: 33).

Hughes also influenced the accessible literary style of Outsiders, which made thebook an easy read and contributed to it becoming a bestseller. According to Hughes,any sociological publication should be written in a clear style without the use of pre-tentious jargon. Once Hughes got angry with Becker because he gave him an articlewhich, according to Hughes, was so unreadable that it looked like a German articletranslated into English.

Hughes was also influential in the theme of Beckers dissertation. After Beckerfinished his masters thesis on jazz musicians, he wanted to do his dissertation on thenightlife in Chicago, and the relation between different categories in this world, suchas waitresses, musicians and criminals.

When I did my masters thesis it was about that world [jazz, TM] and I intendedto write my dissertation about something like that world. Maybe the world ofnightlife in one of the big club areas of Chicago. Which I knew and I knew thatthese areas of the city, that people from a lot of different world congregated there.Not just themusicians, the people whoworked in the bars, the bartenders, the peo-ple who serve drinks, the waitresses and the waiters, criminals who hung around inthese places. ( ) College students in from the suburbs for the weekend, having abig time. It was a little like watching a big aquariumwith a lot of different fishes, of


different sizes. And the criminals were always ready to gobble up a college studentor two, or the waitresses. Or the college students were looking to gobble up thewaitresses. It was very complicated and I thought that would be a very wonderfulinteresting thesis. And then my mentor, Everett Hughes, got a research grant, tostudy the Chicago School system and he wanted to hire me to interview schoolteachers. Well you know, it is a long way from the bars of West Street to talkingto school teachers. And that did not sound to me like a very exciting prospect,but I needed a job. I just got married, so I said okay and began interviewingschoolteachers (Back 2012).

Because of the mundane fact of earning ones living and the job offer byHughes, Beckers dissertation on the nightlife of Chicago became the classic urbanstudy that (sadly) was never done. Still his involvement in the jazz world con-tinued to have a positive effect on his academic career. Because he focused onhis jazz career, he was less tense about his dissertation and did not take it tooseriously.

I got my PhD very young, I was 23, and that was for a variety of organizationalreasons. It didnt mean I was smarter than anybody else. It really didnt. I wentthrough the PhD program very quickly because I wasnt serious about it and itwas kind of a hobby. The real business was playing the piano: I was studying withTristano. So I never worried about exams, I never worried about any of it, I justdid it. Like I say, kind of as a hobby (Jackson 2010).

In accordance with his sociological line of reasoning, Becker did not focus on hisown qualities, but on organizational reasons to explain that he did his PhD in twoyears, which, by any standards, is also an indication of his outstanding academic qual-ity. At the same time, his early promotion turned out to be a disadvantage becausenobody wanted to offer a young man like him a job. Because of this he remained inChicago, where he knew how to make a living as a jazz musician. Later on he did hisstudy on marijuana users.

You see, I had trouble getting a teaching job. ( ) people could hire a grown-upman for the same price. They didnt want some kid. I really had a difficult time,because jobs were quite tight. So I hung around Chicago where I knew I couldmake a living playing the piano (Debro 1986: 29).

His youth had another effect on his academic career. It affected his research inseveral ways: the access to persons with whom he could hang around with and thebehavior he could observe. Another issue related to his age has been raised by JackKatz (1994). He has described eloquently how the different ages of Becker duringhis career have influenced his interpretation of the social world he studied. In hisfirst work on marihuana users the dominant theme is freedom, which is related to hisown personal experience of Chicago (and its jazz word) as a place of freedom, adven-ture and curiosity, while in later publications structural constraints for the individualbecome more visible:


From an initially sanguine view of personality and motivation as essentially freefrom abiding collective pressure, Beckers work progressively understands moti-vational freedom as a challenge to be sustained in the face of determining pres-sures residing in the inevitably collective dimensions of personal action (Katz1994: 268).

In relation toOutsiders, Katz states the following:

As in the marijuana user essay itself, in his labelling perspective on deviance,Becker was denying determinism and sustaining an image of the individual insociety as essentially free from the influence of acts he had conducted and statuseshe had occupied earlier in his life. In a sense, his early work was a celebration ofyouthful freedom in the face of shibboleths that would foolishly deny it (Katz1994: 258).

The emphasis on freedom is not only related to Beckers youth, but also to thepost war era, a time of conformity, control and security, to which Becker and othercolleagues reacted by focusing on the processes by which the individual activelycarves out a space within an institutional structure, a fundamental problem of post-war American society (Fine and Ducharme 1995: 125).

I SOMETIMES THINK OF MYSELF AS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST

The strong ethnographic quality of Outsiders can be traced to Beckers lifelonginterest in anthropology. As I mentioned earlier, Beckers choice for sociology wasdeeply related to his strong appreciation of Black Metropolis. For different reasons,its anthropological nature made Becker enthusiastic:

One of the things that turned me on was the ethnographic detail ( ). The otherwas a kind of vision of a comparative science of communities. That idea reallycame from Lloyd Warner and it turned me on too. I think I probably had it morein mind to be an anthropologist, not that I had made much distinction betweenthe two (Debro 1986: 26).

In Outsiders Becker showed that the method of field research is his favoritemethod to describefirst handdeviant behavior and understand its meaning indetail. I already mentioned that Hughes, who was a friend and colleague of theanthropologist Robert Redfield (who was the son-in-law of Robert Park), was anadvocate of this method and that he passed this tradition on to his students. In ouremail correspondence Becker indicates that students learned to do fieldwork by akind of informal apprenticeship. In the sociology department at Chicago, at the time,there were always older students around who had done observation and who couldgive tips on what to do.

The anthropological feel of Outsiders is not only related to Hughes, but also tothe anthropologist Lloyd Warner, who studied under Radcliffe Brown and wrote adissertation on the social organization of the Murngin, a tribal society in Australia.


In an article on the Chicago School (Becker 1999), Becker referred to Warnersunderestimated relevance for the ethnographic tradition in the sociology departmentin Chicago (see also Fine 1995).1 Warner had a huge impact on the acceptance of thismethod through his involvement as the supervisor of such studies as Street CornerSociety (Whyte 1943), Black Metropolis (Drake and Cayton 1945) and Deep South(Davis, Gardner and Gardner 1941).

Whytes Street Corner Society ( ) was a model for all of us of what a Chicagostyle field study ought to look like; as wereBlackMetropolis and the otherWarnerinspired works (Becker 1999: 7).

Becker is still enthusiastic about Whyte. In our email-interaction he said that hethoughtWhyte was one of the great fieldworkers of all time and that his methodolog-ical appendix was wonderful.

The importance of anthropology in the academic formation of Becker is alsoindicated by the members of his dissertation-committee. Beside Hughes, there wasthe anthropologist Allison Davis from the School of Education and Lloyd Warner.Warner not only shaped Becker indirectly by the studies in which he was involved,but also directly by mentoring him.

His love for anthropology continued through his career and shows, for instance,in his affection for the work of the French anthropologist Bruno Latour. Evenrecently he referred explicitly to his relation with anthropology during a lecturein Paris (4 November 2011): I sometimes think of myself as an anthropologist(Loloum 2011).

SO I CAME INTO CONTACTWITH DRUG USERS, YOU COULD SAY,BECAUSE I WAS ONE

After his dissertation, in the early fifties, Becker continued to work as a professionalpianist. Because of this he remained, although at a distance, involved with the crim-inal world of Chicago night-life, which continued during his marijuana research forOutsiders.

The big boss, Joe Contino, was a small-time hoodlum who claimed to be the uncleof a well-known accordion-playing pop star (and he might have been). Joe woreexpensive suits and had a (sort of) dapper air. His assistant, Ralph, did the dirtywork, filling the bottles with Old Philadelphia and taking care of the horse-racingbusiness in the afternoons. Joe had an arrangementwith the local police. I didntknow the details, but I did on occasion see him quietly handing a police officer aroll of bills (Faulkner and Becker 2009: 56).

Outsiders is related to various studies: 1) two chapters come from Beckersmasters thesis, which were published in 1951 and 1953 and 2) seven chapters were(directly and indirectly) related to the marijuana research, of which two werepublished in 1953 and 1955.2


Masters Thesis

In Outsiders Becker states that his research forms an integrated part of his workas a jazz pianist: I seldom did any formal interviewing, but concentrated rather onlistening to and recording the ordinary kinds of conversations that occurred amongmusicians. Most of my observation was carried on the job and even on the stand aswe played (1963: 8384).

Besides observations, Becker had many fleeting conversations which were partand parcel of the social world of the jazz musicians:

No, because a lot of my interviews were done not as interviews; I didnt call some-one and say, I am going to interview you, can we meet? ( ) like my mastersthesis was about musicians so I was playing some place, we get off the stand, weget a beer and we start talking. That counted as an interview for me; I am askingquestions. I dont say to the guy, I am interviewing you now. Now we are in adifferent relationship. We were just chatting, talking about things that had hap-pened: did you hear about this, do you know what happened to George? I thinkwe can get a job in this bar so we dont have to work here anymore, etc. So thosewere, you know, its not an interview in the classical sense of an interview, butI was asking questions and getting answers and it would be completely inappro-priate to pull out a notepad and start taking notes or pull out my tape-recorder(Obrist 2005).

Becker has made it clear that his way of interviewing was not only shaped byhis academic education, but also his own habit, which developed in public transportreturning from his gigs in Chicago:

Well, on the other hand its a habit. When I was in school and learning all this, Iwas also playing the piano in Chicago. Like most Chicagoans at that time, I didnthave an automobile. I was playing in bars all over the city so I would take publictransportation home.Weworked very late, so often at 3 or 4 oclock in themorningI would be the only person on the streetcar or the bus, and I would talk to thedriver. Why not? So I learned a lot about the business of bus driving how theyarranged their schedules, what they liked about their work, what they tried toavoid (Jackson 2010).

Hughes stimulated Becker to write his first article, which initially was rejected byseveral journals. Finally it was published in theAmerican Journal of Sociology, whereHughes was one of the editors.

I was working in Everetts office, and he said, About time you wrote an article,the way he did. So I said, What should I write about? He said, Take some-thing out of your masters thesis. I said, What? He said, Just take some idea,and whatever sticks to it leave in, and whatever doesnt leave out. I said, okay,sounds good. I did that. And then he said, Now send it out to get it reviewed.So I sent it to six different journals, all of which turned it down. So Everett said,Goddamnit, send it to the AJS [American Journal of Sociology], which he wasthe editor of. And it was accepted. This was my introduction to the politics ofpublishing (Molotch 2012: 421422).


Marijuana Research

After his PhD Becker tried to work as a part-time researcher, so he could stillspend time playing as professional jazz pianist. Becker was inspired by Lindesmithsstudy, Opiate Addictions (1947) in which he states that opiate addiction is stronglyrelated to a social learning process, especially to how one gives meaning to the phys-ical experience of taking drugs.

When I readAlfred Lindesmiths book,Opiate Addiction, ( ) I said, this is reallyinteresting because its likemarijuana but it isnt, because nobody gets withdrawalsickness from marijuana. So this would be a great comparative study (Campbell2005, see also Galliher 1995: 170).

Becker tried to sell his idea for a marijuana study to the Institute for JuvenileResearch run by Shaw and McKay, who initially did not see its relevance.

I got a job at the Institute for Juvenile Research, whichwas a state agency, actually,run by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, who were the grand old men of delin-quency research. They had gotten a big grant to study teenage opiate addictionfrom the National Institute of Mental Health, and I found out about it. I didnthave a job and I persuaded them to hire me half-time to do this marijuana study Iwanted to do. They thought it was trivial because marijuana wasnt habit-forming,so it wasnt a social problem. But somehow, I dont quite know why, they decidedto take me on (Campbell 2005).

Becker says that his method for the marijuana research was nothing special andthat he did not think of spending much time on explaining his approach thoroughly.His way of interviewing is like a conversation in which he focuses on letting the othertalk about the use of marijuana.

So in a piece I did fifty years ago I was interested in how people learned to smokemarijuana. I couldnt be there when they all learned, so I interviewed them andsaid to them, How did you first happen to smoke marijuana? Who introducedyou to it? What did you think about it and when you first lit up a joint what didyou do? And then what happened?( ) I dont think of it as a very complexor complicated thing to do; its really just a conversation. You are sitting next tosomebody on an airplane and you start talking to them: What kind of work doyou do? Oh, you are an art curator. How did you get started doing that? I meanits just that kind of conversation (Obrist 2005).

Becker made it clear that his study has an inductive character, similar to Linde-smiths study. Becker started with a general heuristic model based on Blumers socialpsychology. After his research, he read the literature on drugs.

Heres the thing. The marijuana thing didnt arise as a research problem or aresearchable problem in the context of the literature on drugs. It was a fairlystraightforward application of the kind of social psychological theory I learnedfrom Herbert Blumer. But after I did the research, then of course I had to goread the literature. The literature on marijuana was almost nonexistent, so that


was good since Im not a great scholar. I read the LaGuardia Commission reportand I read whatever there was of the literature, which wasnt much. ( ) I waslooking for a hook to hang this on and it seemed obvious that all these other the-ories were theories about personality, that there was a kind of personality that wasaddiction-prone. (Campbell 2005, see also Galliher 1995: 167).My own experience was that people of quite a variety of personality types who Iknew in the music business smoked dope and enjoyed it, even though they werenot, at least in any way that you could see on the surface, particularly crazy. So Ithought that was probably malarkey. And the answer seemed to me that it lay ina series of steps. And the steps are really important (Campbell 2005).

Becker wrote the more theoretical chapters of Outsiders in the slipstream of hispublished articles on marijuana use. At first he did not know what to do with thismore essayistic text.

And at that same time, when I was writing the marijuana stuff up, I sat down andwrote ninety pages about deviance. This is in 1953 or 1954, and I wrote ninetypages, too long for an article, not long enough for a book. My friend Erving Goff-man would have figured out a way to make a book out of it right away, which Ididnt. Maybe ten years later I found this draft in a file and said, Hey, this isntbad, and I sent it to Irwin Deutscher, who I knew from Kansas City, and he said,You ought to publish this. You ought to make a book out of this, this is prettyinteresting. And then I got the idea of sandwiching the marijuana stuff and themusician stuff in between parts of the essay on deviance. One of the reviewers, Ithink it was Kai Erickson, pointed out that there was a certain lack of coherencein this volume, which was absolutely right (Plummer 2003: 22).

In Outsiders Becker does discuss his relation with the field, but he does not state,for obvious reasons, that he was an active participant in the social world of marijuanausers. He has since become more explicit about his own use of drugs:

I came into contact with drug users because I was a 15-year-old piano player inChicago, and I was working with a campus band at Northwestern University. Iwasnt a student there. There was another guy in the band, maybe a year olderthan me, a saxophone player, and we got to talking and during the intermissionwe went out in the parking lot and he produced a half pint of gin and asked if Iwanted a drink. I didnt want to look square so I got it down, and the next week,since I was such a good student, he produced a joint and asked if I wanted to gethigh. I said sure, and I quickly realized that that was better than drinking gin. SoI came into contact with drug users, you could say, because I was one, and I wasin a trade where most people did do that (Plummer 2003).

The use of drugs was common for jazzmusicians. Some of the people Becker knewalso used hard drugs. Becker rejected heroin, because he saw the negative impact onthe life of his colleagues (see also Spunt 2014). He did try speed, but discovered itdid not have any extra value for him:

No, it was ridiculous. Same thing with amphetamines. I took Benzedrine a coupleof times and all that happened was I just talked nonstop for hours and I talked


enough without any help. I couldnt see that that was any fun, so I didnt do thatanymore (Campbell 2005).

LABELING THEORY WAS A COUNTERREVOLUTION

After his research on marijuana users, Becker did not do any further research ondrugs or deviance. He commented on Outsiders in several publications, putting thework into a more critical perspective and accepting that some insights were not welldeveloped. Because of his participation on several drug advisory committees in thesixties and seventies, he had access to more recent drug research. This improved hisinsights on the social learning process.

It (the discussion between personality and drugs use) led me down the wrongpath, actually, because it wasnt until years later that I realized what that researchwas actually about because its not about is it personality or not. Its about howpeople learn to interpret their own inner sensations. I wrote these two later papersafter LSD happened and that led me to understand what the marijuana researchhad actually been about. It was a perfect place to study that phenomenon becauseyou have this very ambiguous physical and mental experience and then you haveto figure out what happened to you. That helped me make sense out of the LSDthing (Campbell 2005).

Becker also criticized Outsiders because it was restricted in its findings: the bookdid not look at the political and economic interests related to the drugs laws.

I found out many years later, through a young French scholar, that what I wroteabout the development of these laws was very ignorant. Franois-Xavier Dudouetwrote this wonderful thse about the international control of illicit drugs ( ) Itsnot junkies in the streets. Its the hospital and the doctors office where, every day,there is so much cocaine, so much morphine used. Thats where the money is. Therepresentatives of these countries wanted tomake sure that nobody brought illicitdrugs into that market and threatened their monopoly. So everything that hadbeen written about this by everyone was wrong. ( ) So now, I have a completelydifferent understanding of what happened. It is really a matter of political andeconomic actors protecting their interests. (Peretz et al. 2011).

In our email exchange, Becker states that the success of Outsiders was greatlyinfluenced by societal change, especially the increase of marijuana use among stu-dents (see also Katz 1994: 257). In the 1950s, his research on marijuana hardly gotany attention. Becker indicates that, when he first gave a paper on marijuana at aconference, no one thought it was very interesting. It was sort of an oddity that onlyinterested students, who were beginning to smoke dope then. The later persecutionof middle-class students in the U.S. for marijuana violations stimulated a lot of theinterest inOutsiders.

Becker states that his clear writing style, which he learned fromHughes, probablyalso led to the success of Outsiders. In those days most sociology books were a hardread, Becker said. Another way in which he puts Outsiders into perspective is by


explaining that he was influenced by several sociologists who already worked in thefield of labeling, such as Tannenbaum (1938) and Lemert (1951). He also makes clearthat others have improved his insight on labeling such as Spector and Kitsuse (1977).

In Tricks of the Trade (1998), Becker debated the new character of Outsiders bystating that he just used traditional sociological concepts:

The so-called labeling theory revolution should have never been required.It was not an intellectual or scientific revolution ( ). No basic paradigms ofsociological thought were overturned. The definition of the situation, forinstance W.I. Thomass great contribution to sociologys vocabulary and wayof thinkingdirects us to understand how the situation looks to the actors in it,to find out what they think is going on so that we will understand what goes intothe making of their activity (Becker 1998: 37).

Beckers opinion is that Outsiders never was a revolutionary book:

Far from being a revolution, you could say that labeling theory was a counter-revolution, a conservative return to a strand of basic sociological thinking thathad somehow gotten lost in the disciplines practice (Becker 1998: 38).

SOME CONCLUSIONS

By using Beckers demystifying observations of his own work; I have been able todescribe the mundane backstage reality of the making ofOutsiders. This article alsoshows how Outsiders is the result of a collective action in which a range of per-sons were involved over several years. I have described several periods in whichdifferent social worlds influenced Beckers perspective in Outsiders. His participa-tion in the social world of jazz musicians has had a major impact on his notions oncrime, mores and the police. He developed a kind of outsider view. His youthwas also a major influence in how he perceived the social world he studied. Hisfocus was on individual freedom over structural constrains (Fine & Ducharme 1995,Katz 1994).

Everett Hughes had a great impact on Outsiders because of his dictum every-thing is somebodys work. Because Becker approached crime from sociology ofprofessions perspective, he was able to create his deviant perspective on crime (Seealso Galliher 1995:171,180). Beckers interest in anthropology and his mentoring byHughes andWarner in field research were decisive for the ethnographic character ofOutsiders.

The findings described here also show that Becker was (fleetingly) involved inthe criminal night life of Chicago, in which the mob played an important role. It isa shame that Becker did not follow up his initial idea to do research on this topic,because of the mundane facts that one has to make a living, and that Hughes wasmore interested in studying occupations and professions. From this perspective, itis understandable that Becker never perceived himself as a sociologist of deviant


behavior. But, paradoxically, this did lead to his breakthrough within criminologyand his new approach on deviancy in Outsiders.

Becker does mention his personal relationship with his field of study inOutsiders,but not to the full extent he could have done, for obvious reasons. Later, he didacknowledge that he was a native in the social world of marijuana users and thathe interviewed his buddies and observed a social world of which he was a full mem-ber. But Becker refrained from discussing in depth how his personal experiencescontributed to the insights he described in Outsiders.

Becker gives credit to a range of persons who influenced him such as Hughes,Lindesmith, Thomas, Blumer, Tannenbaum and Lemert. Becker disagrees with therevolutionary status of Outsiders because it was part of a tradition within sociologythat got forgotten. The success of his book was largely related to a major change insociety: the increase in students smoking marijuana. They could defend themselveswith Outsiders in their hands against conservative policymakers who criminalizedsmoking marijuana.

Throughout the article, Beckers modesty is dominant in almost all citations. Hedownplays his role in favor of emphasizing the influence of other academics and cir-cumstances. Still, the citations also show the natural ease with which Becker createdOutsiders. It seems almost deceivingly effortless how he researches, does the analysisand writes. Without any doubt this is an indication of his supreme academic talentwhich was needed to create Outsiders. The downplaying of his role in the creationof Outsiders does not only mask his unique talent, but also downplays the personalroots of Beckers perspective on crime and society which partly shaped his approachin Outsiders. By focusing on his youth it became evident that his biography had amajor influence on Outsiders.

AFTERWORD

After a break of some months, Becker emailed me and explained that he had notreplied to some of my emails because he was involved in finishing two books (WhatAbout Mozart? What About Murder? Reasoning From Cases and ThinkingTogether with Rob Faulkner). At the same time he sent me an article by Sanders(2013) about his relation with Becker as his mentor and colleague. In my next emailI referred to the importance of freedom in Beckers career, which has been discussedin this article several times:

I also enjoyed reading the article by Clint Sanders. He captures you well. Oneof my favorite quotes is this one: For, as Anselm Strauss succinctly describedBeckers work, Youre easy....Its liberty, freedom, thats what youre interestedin. I can relate to that, but then again if you are interested in freedom you need alot of discipline and self-control. That is what people seem to forget. What I likeof our kind of qualitative research is the improvisation part. ( ).


I end my article by giving Becker the last word with his short and witty reactionto my previous email, which characterizes the slight subversive character of his mildirony.

Dear Thaddeus,I have the feeling that you know more about me than I know myself. Could this betrue?Howie

NOTES

1. Warner is mentioned many times in A Second Chicago School? (Fine 1995) but his influenceon the ethnographic tradition is not highlighted in the way that Becker (1999) does in his article.

2. While I was trying to locate the four publications I discovered that the references in the acknowl-edgements ofOutsiders were incorrect. When I checked this with Becker, he reacted as follows:

You are right! Its amazing that in all these years you are the first person tonotice this glaring error. This is evidence for my strong belief that no one everactually reads the things they cite (well, almost no one, you are the first). Con-gratulations!

REFERENCES

Back, L. 2012. The Craft of Sociology. Interview with Howard Becker. Goldsmiths University.Retrieved September 24, 2013 (http://www.gold.ac.uk/podcasts/).

Becker, Howard S. 2009. Learning to Observe in Chicago. Howies Homepage. RetrievedSeptember 23, 2013 (www.home.earthlink.net/hsbecker/articles/observe.html).. 1999. The Chicago School, So-Called. Qualitative Sociology 22(1):312.. 1998.Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your ResearchWhile YoureDoing It. Chicago,IL: University of Chicago Press.. 1986. Doing Things Together. Howard S. Becker. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UniversityPress.. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.. 1973. Consciousness, Power and Drug Effects. Society 10:2631.. 1967. History, Culture, and Subjective Experience. Journal of Health and Social Behavior8:16376.. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press.

Campbell, Nancy. 2005. Howard S. Becker Oral History Interviews with Substance AbuseResearchers. SubstanceAbuseResearchCenter,University ofMichigan.Retrieved Septem-ber 23, 2013 (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/substance.abuse.history/oral_history_interviews&mode=single&recordID=2287158&nextMode=list).

Cohen, Albert K. 1964. Review of Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance by Howard S.Becker. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 351:1978.

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Spunt, Barry. 2014. Heroin and Music in New York City. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Strauss, Anselm. 1996. Everett Hughes: Sociologys Mission. Symbolic Interaction 19(4):27183.Sykes, Gresham. 1964. Review of Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance by Howard S.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR(S)

Thaddeus Mller has a position as a faculty member at the section criminology at the RotterdamErasmus University. His PhD-dissertation, The warm city (2002) is based on a micro-sociologicalstudy of the (positive) meanings of fleeting interactions among strangers in the public realm. Afterworking for the University of Amsterdam and doing applied commercial research, mostly relatedto urban communities, safety and youth hanging around, Thaddeus Mller started at his currentposition in 2009. His main interests are qualitative methods, urban ethnography, social life in publicspaces, multicultural neighborhoods, drugs, especially cannabis, and transgression and rock music(Lou Reed). He has also published on academic fraud, especially the case of the social psychologistsDiederik Stapel.

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Chicago, Jazz and Marijuana: Howard Becker on Outsiders

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