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Telling About Society

By: Howard S. Becker

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Paperback | 1 November 2007 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
304 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.15 x 1.68 x 0.2

Paperback

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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.
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.

Industry Reviews

"Telling About Society should carry a warning label: 'Do not start reading unless you're prepared to spend the next few hours having your horizons broadened and your understanding of social sciences deepened. Further, prepare to abandon any belief that insight and originality are incompatible with clarity, accessibility, and plain good writing.' This book will immediately take its place on my shelves and my students' reading lists alongside Becker's Tricks of the Trade as an indispensable introduction to thinking about social science theory and research." - Larry Gross, professor and director, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California"

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Sociology & Anthropology Sociology Social Theory Reference, Information & Interdisciplinary Subjects Interdisciplinary Studies Communication Studies Encyclopaedias & Reference Works Social Research & Statistics Biographies & True Stories Biographies Language & Linguistics

Reference, Dictionaries & Guides Writing & Editing Guides

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Ideas
Telling About Society	p. 2
Representations of Society as Organizational Products	p. 15
Who Does What?	p. 30
The Work Users Do	p. 54
Standardization and Innovation	p. 71
Summarizing Details	p. 92
Reality Aesthetics	p. 109
The Morality of Representations	p. 129
Examples
Parables, Ideal Types, and Mathematical Models	p. 150
Charts: Thinking with Drawings	p. 167
Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism	p. 186
Drama and Multivocality: Shaw, Churchill, and Shawn	p. 204
Goffman, Language, and the Comparative Strategy	p. 223
Jane Austen: The Novel as Social Analysis	p. 238
Georges Perec's Experiments in Social Description	p. 252
Italo Calvino, Urbanologist	p. 270
Finally	p. 285
References	p. 289
Index	p. 299
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Telling About Society

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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