Telling About Society
9780226041261
9780226041254
9780226125985
Telling About Society
I Remember, one of French writer Georges Perec’s most famous pieces, 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 about French society during the 1940s and 50s.
Taking Perec’s book as its cue, Telling About Society explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. The third in distinguished teacher Howard Becker’s best-selling series of writing guides for social scientists, the book explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling—fiction, films, photographs, maps, even mathematical models—many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science. Eight case studies, including the photographs of Walker Evans, the plays of George Bernard Shaw, the novels of Jane Austen and Italo Calvino, and the sociology of Erving Goffman, provide convincing support for Becker’s argument: that every way of telling about society is perfect—for some purpose. The trick is, as Becker notes, to discover what purpose is served by doing it this way rather than that.
Taking Perec’s book as its cue, Telling About Society explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. The third in distinguished teacher Howard Becker’s best-selling series of writing guides for social scientists, the book explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling—fiction, films, photographs, maps, even mathematical models—many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science. Eight case studies, including the photographs of Walker Evans, the plays of George Bernard Shaw, the novels of Jane Austen and Italo Calvino, and the sociology of Erving Goffman, provide convincing support for Becker’s argument: that every way of telling about society is perfect—for some purpose. The trick is, as Becker notes, to discover what purpose is served by doing it this way rather than that.
With Becker’s trademark humor and eminently practical advice, Telling About Society is an ideal guide for social scientists in all fields, for artists interested in saying something about society, and for anyone interested in communicating knowledge in unconventional ways.
304 pages | 10 halftones, 15 line drawings | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2007
Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Sociology: General Sociology, Methodology, Statistics, and Mathematical Sociology
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
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
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
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
References
Index
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