What About Mozart? What About Murder?

Conventional social science looks for correlations between small variables (thought to be causal ) in a large collection of cases, isolating such items as age or gender or social class. Becker s alternative is to investigate one or more cases intensively. The aim is to discover new elements of a situation, new steps in a process of thought, which reveal the inner workings of black boxes (input-output mechanisms). The challenge is to show how you get from the detailed knowledge of one case to more general ideas about how society, or some part of it, works. Becker s own now-classic research on careers, deviance, and art worlds supplies the cases he draws from. His work on art markets, to cite one, reveals the way in which social composition of art worlds leads to the hyping of certain styles and artists. Opiate addiction, another classic instance, has him comparing three cases (recreational drug use, prescription drug use, and chemical warfare administering of drugs), which untangles...

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