Chicago, Jazz and Marijuana: Howard Becker

on Outsiders*
Thaddeus Mller
Erasmus University Rotterdam

In this article on the social production of Outsiders I will situate its

making in the daily practice of the social worlds Becker was involved
in. Therefore I focus on the relations, interactions and situations which
were relevant for the form, content and success of Outsiders. The fragments from my email communication with Becker, the collected interviews and other publications show that Becker demysties Outsiders.
In fact my contribution here is that I use Becker to demystify the ethnographic practice of Outsiders and describe its mundane backstage reality, 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 by

Howard Becker (1963) is seen as a pioneering study. In that book, he focuses on how
professionals in the police and the court define crime. This theory became known as
labeling. His approach extended to showing how becoming a member of a deviant
subculture, like the jazz world, also involved learning how to label experiences, such
as the use of marijuana. The reviews of Outsiders were in general very positive. It was
highly recommended (Erikson 1963: 419), exceptionally interesting (Sykes 1964:
135), and an essential book (Cohen 1964: 197). Outsiders has become a sociological 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.
My main interest here is to understand how it was possible for Becker to write such
a breakthrough book in a period in which the common understanding of cannabis and
crime was deeply conservative. How is his own (academic and social) deviance to be
explained? It is well known that Becker played piano professionally, as he states in
Outsiders. 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:
muller@law.eur.nl.
*This article is based on an earlier version published in Dutch. I want to thank the anonymous
reviewers and Robert Dingwall for their supportive comments. Finally, I want to thank Howie for
his 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

Symbolic Interaction 2014

Chicago jazz world influenced Outsiders. In this paper, I attempt to answer these
questions by researching the creation of Outsiders from the perspective of Becker
himself, 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). I
also include excerpts from other existing interviews and publications in which Becker
refers to Outsiders. I reordered the selected fragments and put them in a timeline in
order to understand the historical development of Outsiders.
When I first initiated contact with Howard Becker, and asked him whether he
wanted to be interviewed about Outsiders, he made it clear that his preference would
be an interview via email. Our communication also shows that he is not greatly interested in Outsiders. Becker says that he never actually saw himself as a sociologist of
deviance. 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 reveals
himself in his work as a demystifier. He does not accept commonsense ideas about
drugs and art, and confronts the front-stage rhetoric of institutions with what he discovers in the mundane social reality of back stage activities. After emailing him this
characterization, he stated that he liked the idea of being a demystifier and added that
that 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 how
these shaped their art, which used to be the common approach in the sociology of
art. Instead, he looks at the whole process in which many are involved in the making
of art (Becker 1982:1).
In this article I will approach Outsiders in a similar way. Like an artwork, Outsiders is also the result of Doing Things Together, the title of a collection of articles
Becker published in 1986, which captures his sociological approach. To understand
how it was possible that Outsiders was published in the early 1960s, I will situate
its 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 situations
which were relevant for the form, content and success of Outsiders. The fragments
from the collected interviews and other publications show that Becker also demystifies Outsiders. My contribution here is to use Becker to demystify the ethnographic
practice of Outsiders. I describe its mundane backstage reality, which is described
by 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 with
persons who were close to Goffman, in order to explore the relationship between
biography, theory, and history. In fact Shalin can also be seen as a reputational
entrepreneur, meaning that he is managing the reputation of Goffman (Fine 1996).
Shalins approach, which he himself describes as biocritical hermeneutics, shows
that there is a strong relation between Goffmans work and his biography. Although
my ambition is minute compared to Shalins project, in this article I will show that, in
the case of Becker, there are also intersections between his biography and Outsiders.

Howard Becker on Outsiders

Though the concept reputational entrepreneur, originally refers to a person who

shapes the reputation of another in a particular way (Fine 1996: 1162), it can also
be applied to the protagonist him or herself. In this sense, Becker can be seen as a
reputational entrepreneur in relation to his own career. Beckers strategy is a particular oneof modesty. He has given many interviews in which he has been candid
about his past. Becker talks about himself in a modest and sober way as will become
clear 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 Faulkner
relates 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 intellectuals
of the cats; and since they often know chord changes, they are being placed
in the position of being constrained to provide the basics for others and their
improvisation . . . . Having hung out with Becker and Piano Genius [sic] Bill
Evans (on separate occasions, of course). I will say they had remarkably similar
personal 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 the

naive outlook in which qualitative researchers need to listen carefully to what the
field tells them and to be open for new interpretations (see also Katz 1994). In the
next citation of Katz on artists, based on Art Worlds, the reader can actually discover
a description of Beckers own career.
In successful careers, humility about ones own contributions becomes not simply
a gracious posture but a foundation for continued originality (Katz 1994: 271).

His modesty is not only related to his methodological approach, but also to the
theoretical notions he develops in his work. The way Becker portrays himself as a
creative academic fits with his demystifying analysis of his research subjects.
That being said Beckers approach colors this article in the sense that he seems to
downplay his role. His outlook might actually mask his own role in the creation of
his work. This can be seen as a downside of choosing to reconstruct the creation of
Outsiders through the eyes of Becker. The perspective of colleagues, gained through
interviews, might be a good antidote to Beckers modesty. But this suggestion (for
further research) is beyond the scope of this article.
I have categorized different periods, which have been relevant for Beckers new
approach to deviant behavior. In the next section, I will describe how Becker, as a
jazz pianist, gets involved in the criminal world of Chicago and how this contributes
to the development of a kind of outsider view. Thirdly, I will show how Beckers
perspective 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, Beckers
personal involvement with this field of research. Beckers own hindsight evaluation

Symbolic Interaction 2014

of Outsiders will be discussed in the sixth section. I will end with some conclusions
and 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, the
elevated train system, he traveled across all parts of Chicago and encountered the
social, cultural and spatial diversity of urban life. Becker describes how he would
travel with his friends from the far West Side of the city (where he used to live) to
the Loop, the downtown center.
Travelling through the city, Becker developed an attentive eye for what went
on in its diverse public world of strangers. He practiced the basic social skill of
observingnecessary for any professional spectator of urban life. His personal
experience 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 to
avoid 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 the
businesses he went by. He saw people of different racial and ethnic groups as they
got on and off the train, and learned who lived where (Becker 2009). This contrasts
sharply with the depiction in Wirths (1938) famous article Urbanism as a Way of
Life, with its focus on the anonymous doom and gloom of cities. The statements on
urban life in this article are based on a diverse range of studies of social problems
inspired 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, Wirths
article was something of a swansong: the heyday of the so-called Chicago school
was actually over by 1938. Subsequently, its ethnographic tradition was carried forward on a much smaller scale, particularly by Everett Hughes, a student of Robert
Park and later Beckers mentor.
Before Becker was influenced by his training at the University of Chicago, his
perspective on crime and authority was already formed by his experiences as a jazz
musician. We have already seen that Becker was an independent child from his early
teens, enjoying the freedom of the city and developing an eye for urban life. From
the age of fourteen (1942), another dimension was added to his perspective when he
started to play in jazz bands and encountered the social world of club night life in the
city. The bandstand was a perfect platform to observe the interaction in the locations
where Becker played.
All the places I played in were sites of observation, though I didnt think of them
that way, and didnt think that I was doing anything as important or grand as
observing. I was just living (Becker 2009).

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

Howard Becker on Outsiders

night after night as men who had come to Chicago for, perhaps, a business convention, bought drinks for the strippers in the first club where he played, spending
thousands of dollars without even getting any sex for it. Occasionally someone well
known could be seen sitting in the back of the club masturbating while the girls took
their clothes off. People flirted with each other. Fights between two people would
turn into major brawls, occasionally involving the club owner and the bartender as
well as the customers. Police officers stopped by to collect bribes from the owner of
the 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. Nevertheless, participation in the jazz world enabled Becker to observe a wide variety of
criminal behavior, such as bribery, violence and prostitution.
To my question whether he got used to crime and deviance by participating in
the jazz world he answers that my guess is right. He states that the easiest way to
understand this was that he was a musician long before he was a sociologist. Through
participating in the jazz world he not only got used to crime, but also developed a
critical stance towards society and its mores.
And, for a sociologist, I think it [jazz, TM] inoculated me against believing conventional pieties about the society I lived in and studied. I knew better (about
the police, about drugs, about music, about the motives of important people, all
that.) (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 that
was taken for granted by others, a position which was also advocated by his later
mentor 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 accepting
what 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 taverns
and watching the bar-owners bribe the police and seeing all kinds of shady things
going on. First of all, I knew that the policeman was not my friend. ( ). It gives
you a second standpoint (Jackson 2010).

EVERYTHING IS SOMEBODYS WORK

The independent critical view on social life which Becker used in Outsiders was
already roughly formed before Becker entered the academic world. Becker did
not make a conscious decision to study sociology. This was related to a diverse
range of circumstances, such as his relationship with his father, the violence in
the club scene, and his chance encounter with Black Metropolis (Drake and
Cayton 1945).

Symbolic Interaction 2014

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

Black Metropolis is a well written and sparkling study of the black community in
Chicago. It contains interviews and observations that give readers the perspective of
being in the midst of this community and seeing what goes on. Beckers enthusiasm
about 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 or
ethnographic approach to social life.
Because Becker wrote notes about where he was working as a jazz musician, a
tavern on 63rd Street, for one of Burgesss classes, he came into contact with Everett
Hughes.
At the end of the quarter I gave them (the notes, TM) to Burgess. And when he
gave them back he said, This is occupations and professions. Thats Professor
Hughes. ( ) He said, Well, give me your notes and come back in a week. He
was very brusque. Okay. I went away and came back in a week. Mr. Becker, come
right in. Sit down. ( ) So, he said, he read my notes, and [theyre] full of people
putting squares down and making fun of the people in the bar and all that. And he
said it was like gold to him. His methodological principle was that anything you
see in a lowly occupation is probably going on in a higher-status occupation, only
they wont tell you. He chose me for a completely venal reason: I would further
his 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 a
fundamental interest in doing fieldwork. In fact, Hughes was an important link, at
least as significant as Blumer, in passing this approach on to students in Chicago, such
as Erving Goffman and Anselm Strauss, at a time when quantitative methods were
starting to dominate sociology (Becker 1999; Strauss 1996; Vienne 2010). Several
of the students shared Beckers critical view on society (Galliher 1995: 165). Years
later Becker is still enthusiastic about his time at the University of Chicago after the
Second World War:

Howard Becker on Outsiders

It was a very exciting place. There were an awful lot of good sociologists in
my age group. ( ) I cant even begin to tell you all the people who were in
my classErving Goffman, David Gold, Bill Kornhauser, Eliot Freidson, Jim
ShortI could go on half a day naming them. We were all very excited about
sociology, and we talked very seriously about it so that there was a lot of education
going 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 fitted
the critical amoral view that he developed in the jazz-world (see also Galliher
1995:164165). In our email contact, Becker stated that what really solidified his
ideas about deviance was Everett Hughes remark that everything is somebodys
work, which Becker applied to deviance. Becker writes that once you have that idea
it almost writes itself. He remarks that two questions are central: Whose work is it
to create deviance and enforce rules against it? (See also Galliher 1995:167).
This was essential for Beckers approach in Outsiders. Because he did not look at
law-breaking from a criminological perspective, with its strong focus on why criminals behaved the way they did, he could shine a different light on criminal and deviant
behavior (Galliher 1995: 170, 181).
The study of crime lost its connection with the mainstream of sociological development and became a very bizarre deformation of sociology, designed to find out
why people were doing bad things instead of finding out the organization of interaction in that sphere. ( ) So I approached deviance as the study of people whose
occupation, one might say, was either crime or catching criminals. (..) In a way, Im
surprised that I had such notions in 1954. In another way, it was a natural idea for
a sociologist to have who hadnt been trained in criminology (Debro 1986: 33).

Hughes also influenced the accessible literary style of Outsiders, which made the
book 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 pretentious jargon. Once Hughes got angry with Becker because he gave him an article
which, according to Hughes, was so unreadable that it looked like a German article
translated into English.
Hughes was also influential in the theme of Beckers dissertation. After Becker
finished his masters thesis on jazz musicians, he wanted to do his dissertation on the
nightlife in Chicago, and the relation between different categories in this world, such
as waitresses, musicians and criminals.
When I did my masters thesis it was about that world [jazz, TM] and I intended
to write my dissertation about something like that world. Maybe the world of
nightlife in one of the big club areas of Chicago. Which I knew and I knew that
these areas of the city, that people from a lot of different world congregated there.
Not just the musicians, the people who worked in the bars, the bartenders, the people who serve drinks, the waitresses and the waiters, criminals who hung around in
these places. ( ) College students in from the suburbs for the weekend, having a
big time. It was a little like watching a big aquarium with a lot of different fishes, of

Symbolic Interaction 2014

different sizes. And the criminals were always ready to gobble up a college student
or two, or the waitresses. Or the college students were looking to gobble up the
waitresses. It was very complicated and I thought that would be a very wonderful
interesting thesis. And then my mentor, Everett Hughes, got a research grant, to
study the Chicago School system and he wanted to hire me to interview school
teachers. Well you know, it is a long way from the bars of West Street to talking
to 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 interviewing
schoolteachers (Back 2012).

Because of the mundane fact of earning ones living and the job offer by
Hughes, Beckers dissertation on the nightlife of Chicago became the classic urban
study that (sadly) was never done. Still his involvement in the jazz world continued to have a positive effect on his academic career. Because he focused on
his jazz career, he was less tense about his dissertation and did not take it too
seriously.
I got my PhD very young, I was 23, and that was for a variety of organizational
reasons. It didnt mean I was smarter than anybody else. It really didnt. I went
through the PhD program very quickly because I wasnt serious about it and it
was kind of a hobby. The real business was playing the piano: I was studying with
Tristano. So I never worried about exams, I never worried about any of it, I just
did it. Like I say, kind of as a hobby (Jackson 2010).

In accordance with his sociological line of reasoning, Becker did not focus on his
own qualities, but on organizational reasons to explain that he did his PhD in two
years, which, by any standards, is also an indication of his outstanding academic quality. At the same time, his early promotion turned out to be a disadvantage because
nobody wanted to offer a young man like him a job. Because of this he remained in
Chicago, where he knew how to make a living as a jazz musician. Later on he did his
study on marijuana users.
You see, I had trouble getting a teaching job. ( ) people could hire a grown-up
man 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 could
make a living playing the piano (Debro 1986: 29).

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

Howard Becker on Outsiders

From an initially sanguine view of personality and motivation as essentially free

from abiding collective pressure, Beckers work progressively understands motivational freedom as a challenge to be sustained in the face of determining pressures residing in the inevitably collective dimensions of personal action (Katz
1994: 268).

In relation to Outsiders, 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 in
society as essentially free from the influence of acts he had conducted and statuses
he had occupied earlier in his life. In a sense, his early work was a celebration of
youthful freedom in the face of shibboleths that would foolishly deny it (Katz
1994: 258).

The emphasis on freedom is not only related to Beckers youth, but also to the
post war era, a time of conformity, control and security, to which Becker and other
colleagues reacted by focusing on the processes by which the individual actively
carves out a space within an institutional structure, a fundamental problem of postwar 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 lifelong
interest in anthropology. As I mentioned earlier, Beckers choice for sociology was
deeply 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 other
was a kind of vision of a comparative science of communities. That idea really
came from Lloyd Warner and it turned me on too. I think I probably had it more
in mind to be an anthropologist, not that I had made much distinction between
the two (Debro 1986: 26).

In Outsiders Becker showed that the method of field research is his favorite
method to describefirst handdeviant behavior and understand its meaning in
detail. I already mentioned that Hughes, who was a friend and colleague of the
anthropologist Robert Redfield (who was the son-in-law of Robert Park), was an
advocate of this method and that he passed this tradition on to his students. In our
email correspondence Becker indicates that students learned to do fieldwork by a
kind of informal apprenticeship. In the sociology department at Chicago, at the time,
there were always older students around who had done observation and who could
give tips on what to do.
The anthropological feel of Outsiders is not only related to Hughes, but also to
the anthropologist Lloyd Warner, who studied under Radcliffe Brown and wrote a
dissertation on the social organization of the Murngin, a tribal society in Australia.

10

Symbolic Interaction 2014

In an article on the Chicago School (Becker 1999), Becker referred to Warners

underestimated relevance for the ethnographic tradition in the sociology department
in Chicago (see also Fine 1995).1 Warner had a huge impact on the acceptance of this
method through his involvement as the supervisor of such studies as Street Corner
Society (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 Chicago
style field study ought to look like; as were Black Metropolis and the other Warner
inspired works (Becker 1999: 7).

Becker is still enthusiastic about Whyte. In our email-interaction he said that he

thought Whyte was one of the great fieldworkers of all time and that his methodological appendix was wonderful.
The importance of anthropology in the academic formation of Becker is also
indicated by the members of his dissertation-committee. Beside Hughes, there was
the 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. Even
recently he referred explicitly to his relation with anthropology during a lecture
in Paris (4 November 2011): I sometimes think of myself as an anthropologist
(Loloum 2011).

SO I CAME INTO CONTACT WITH DRUG USERS, YOU COULD SAY,

BECAUSE I WAS ONE
After his dissertation, in the early fifties, Becker continued to work as a professional
pianist. Because of this he remained, although at a distance, involved with the criminal world of Chicago night-life, which continued during his marijuana research for
Outsiders.
The big boss, Joe Contino, was a small-time hoodlum who claimed to be the uncle
of a well-known accordion-playing pop star (and he might have been). Joe wore
expensive suits and had a (sort of) dapper air. His assistant, Ralph, did the dirty
work, filling the bottles with Old Philadelphia and taking care of the horse-racing
business in the afternoons. Joe had an arrangement with the local police. I didnt
know the details, but I did on occasion see him quietly handing a police officer a
roll of bills (Faulkner and Becker 2009: 56).

Outsiders is related to various studies: 1) two chapters come from Beckers

masters thesis, which were published in 1951 and 1953 and 2) seven chapters were
(directly and indirectly) related to the marijuana research, of which two were
published in 1953 and 1955.2

Howard Becker on Outsiders

11

Masters Thesis
In Outsiders Becker states that his research forms an integrated part of his work
as a jazz pianist: I seldom did any formal interviewing, but concentrated rather on
listening to and recording the ordinary kinds of conversations that occurred among
musicians. Most of my observation was carried on the job and even on the stand as
we played (1963: 8384).
Besides observations, Becker had many fleeting conversations which were part
and parcel of the social world of the jazz musicians:
No, because a lot of my interviews were done not as interviews; I didnt call someone and say, I am going to interview you, can we meet? ( ) like my masters
thesis was about musicians so I was playing some place, we get off the stand, we
get a beer and we start talking. That counted as an interview for me; I am asking
questions. I dont say to the guy, I am interviewing you now. Now we are in a
different relationship. We were just chatting, talking about things that had happened: did you hear about this, do you know what happened to George? I think
we can get a job in this bar so we dont have to work here anymore, etc. So those
were, you know, its not an interview in the classical sense of an interview, but
I was asking questions and getting answers and it would be completely inappropriate 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 by
his academic education, but also his own habit, which developed in public transport
returning from his gigs in Chicago:
Well, on the other hand its a habit. When I was in school and learning all this, I
was also playing the piano in Chicago. Like most Chicagoans at that time, I didnt
have an automobile. I was playing in bars all over the city so I would take public
transportation home. We worked very late, so often at 3 or 4 oclock in the morning
I would be the only person on the streetcar or the bus, and I would talk to the
driver. Why not? So I learned a lot about the business of bus driving how they
arranged their schedules, what they liked about their work, what they tried to
avoid (Jackson 2010).

Hughes stimulated Becker to write his first article, which initially was rejected by
several journals. Finally it was published in the American Journal of Sociology, where
Hughes 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 something 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 was
the editor of. And it was accepted. This was my introduction to the politics of
publishing (Molotch 2012: 421422).

Symbolic Interaction 2014

12

Marijuana Research
After his PhD Becker tried to work as a part-time researcher, so he could still
spend time playing as professional jazz pianist. Becker was inspired by Lindesmiths
study, Opiate Addictions (1947) in which he states that opiate addiction is strongly
related to a social learning process, especially to how one gives meaning to the physical experience of taking drugs.
When I read Alfred Lindesmiths book, Opiate Addiction, ( ) I said, this is really
interesting because its like marijuana but it isnt, because nobody gets withdrawal
sickness from marijuana. So this would be a great comparative study (Campbell
2005, see also Galliher 1995: 170).

Becker tried to sell his idea for a marijuana study to the Institute for Juvenile
Research run by Shaw and McKay, who initially did not see its relevance.
I got a job at the Institute for Juvenile Research, which was a state agency, actually,
run by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, who were the grand old men of delinquency research. They had gotten a big grant to study teenage opiate addiction
from the National Institute of Mental Health, and I found out about it. I didnt
have a job and I persuaded them to hire me half-time to do this marijuana study I
wanted 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 decided
to take me on (Campbell 2005).

Becker says that his method for the marijuana research was nothing special and
that 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 other
talk about the use of marijuana.
So in a piece I did fifty years ago I was interested in how people learned to smoke
marijuana. I couldnt be there when they all learned, so I interviewed them and
said to them, How did you first happen to smoke marijuana? Who introduced
you to it? What did you think about it and when you first lit up a joint what did
you do? And then what happened?( ) I dont think of it as a very complex
or complicated thing to do; its really just a conversation. You are sitting next to
somebody on an airplane and you start talking to them: What kind of work do
you do? Oh, you are an art curator. How did you get started doing that? I mean
its just that kind of conversation (Obrist 2005).

Becker made it clear that his study has an inductive character, similar to Lindesmiths study. Becker started with a general heuristic model based on Blumers social
psychology. After his research, he read the literature on drugs.
Heres the thing. The marijuana thing didnt arise as a research problem or a
researchable problem in the context of the literature on drugs. It was a fairly
straightforward application of the kind of social psychological theory I learned
from Herbert Blumer. But after I did the research, then of course I had to go
read the literature. The literature on marijuana was almost nonexistent, so that

Howard Becker on Outsiders

13

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

Becker wrote the more theoretical chapters of Outsiders in the slipstream of his
published articles on marijuana use. At first he did not know what to do with this
more essayistic text.
And at that same time, when I was writing the marijuana stuff up, I sat down and
wrote ninety pages about deviance. This is in 1953 or 1954, and I wrote ninety
pages, too long for an article, not long enough for a book. My friend Erving Goffman would have figured out a way to make a book out of it right away, which I
didnt. Maybe ten years later I found this draft in a file and said, Hey, this isnt
bad, 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 pretty
interesting. And then I got the idea of sandwiching the marijuana stuff and the
musician stuff in between parts of the essay on deviance. One of the reviewers, I
think it was Kai Erickson, pointed out that there was a certain lack of coherence
in 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 marijuana
users. 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 in
Chicago, and I was working with a campus band at Northwestern University. I
wasnt a student there. There was another guy in the band, maybe a year older
than me, a saxophone player, and we got to talking and during the intermission
we went out in the parking lot and he produced a half pint of gin and asked if I
wanted 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 get
high. I said sure, and I quickly realized that that was better than drinking gin. So
I came into contact with drug users, you could say, because I was one, and I was
in a trade where most people did do that (Plummer 2003).

The use of drugs was common for jazz musicians. Some of the people Becker knew
also used hard drugs. Becker rejected heroin, because he saw the negative impact on
the life of his colleagues (see also Spunt 2014). He did try speed, but discovered it
did not have any extra value for him:
No, it was ridiculous. Same thing with amphetamines. I took Benzedrine a couple
of times and all that happened was I just talked nonstop for hours and I talked

14

Symbolic Interaction 2014

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

LABELING THEORY WAS A COUNTERREVOLUTION

After his research on marijuana users, Becker did not do any further research on
drugs or deviance. He commented on Outsiders in several publications, putting the
work into a more critical perspective and accepting that some insights were not well
developed. Because of his participation on several drug advisory committees in the
sixties and seventies, he had access to more recent drug research. This improved his
insights on the social learning process.
It (the discussion between personality and drugs use) led me down the wrong
path, actually, because it wasnt until years later that I realized what that research
was actually about because its not about is it personality or not. Its about how
people learn to interpret their own inner sensations. I wrote these two later papers
after LSD happened and that led me to understand what the marijuana research
had actually been about. It was a perfect place to study that phenomenon because
you have this very ambiguous physical and mental experience and then you have
to figure out what happened to you. That helped me make sense out of the LSD
thing (Campbell 2005).

Becker also criticized Outsiders because it was restricted in its findings: the book
did 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 wrote
about the development of these laws was very ignorant. Franois-Xavier Dudouet
wrote this wonderful thse about the international control of illicit drugs ( ) Its
not 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. The
representatives of these countries wanted to make sure that nobody brought illicit
drugs into that market and threatened their monopoly. So everything that had
been written about this by everyone was wrong. ( ) So now, I have a completely
different understanding of what happened. It is really a matter of political and
economic actors protecting their interests. (Peretz et al. 2011).

In our email exchange, Becker states that the success of Outsiders was greatly
influenced by societal change, especially the increase of marijuana use among students (see also Katz 1994: 257). In the 1950s, his research on marijuana hardly got
any attention. Becker indicates that, when he first gave a paper on marijuana at a
conference, no one thought it was very interesting. It was sort of an oddity that only
interested students, who were beginning to smoke dope then. The later persecution
of middle-class students in the U.S. for marijuana violations stimulated a lot of the
interest in Outsiders.
Becker states that his clear writing style, which he learned from Hughes, probably
also led to the success of Outsiders. In those days most sociology books were a hard
read, Becker said. Another way in which he puts Outsiders into perspective is by

Howard Becker on Outsiders

15

explaining that he was influenced by several sociologists who already worked in the
field of labeling, such as Tannenbaum (1938) and Lemert (1951). He also makes clear
that 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 by
stating 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 of
sociological thought were overturned. The definition of the situation, for
instance W.I. Thomass great contribution to sociologys vocabulary and way
of 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 into
the 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 counterrevolution, a conservative return to a strand of basic sociological thinking that
had 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 to
describe the mundane backstage reality of the making of Outsiders. This article also
shows how Outsiders is the result of a collective action in which a range of persons were involved over several years. I have described several periods in which
different social worlds influenced Beckers perspective in Outsiders. His participation in the social world of jazz musicians has had a major impact on his notions on
crime, mores and the police. He developed a kind of outsider view. His youth
was also a major influence in how he perceived the social world he studied. His
focus was on individual freedom over structural constrains (Fine & Ducharme 1995,
Katz 1994).
Everett Hughes had a great impact on Outsiders because of his dictum everything is somebodys work. Because Becker approached crime from sociology of
professions perspective, he was able to create his deviant perspective on crime (See
also Galliher 1995:171,180). Beckers interest in anthropology and his mentoring by
Hughes and Warner in field research were decisive for the ethnographic character of
Outsiders.
The findings described here also show that Becker was (fleetingly) involved in
the criminal night life of Chicago, in which the mob played an important role. It is
a 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 was
more interested in studying occupations and professions. From this perspective, it
is understandable that Becker never perceived himself as a sociologist of deviant

Symbolic Interaction 2014

16

behavior. But, paradoxically, this did lead to his breakthrough within criminology
and his new approach on deviancy in Outsiders.
Becker does mention his personal relationship with his field of study in Outsiders,
but not to the full extent he could have done, for obvious reasons. Later, he did
acknowledge that he was a native in the social world of marijuana users and that
he interviewed his buddies and observed a social world of which he was a full member. But Becker refrained from discussing in depth how his personal experiences
contributed 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 the
revolutionary status of Outsiders because it was part of a tradition within sociology
that got forgotten. The success of his book was largely related to a major change in
society: the increase in students smoking marijuana. They could defend themselves
with Outsiders in their hands against conservative policymakers who criminalized
smoking marijuana.
Throughout the article, Beckers modesty is dominant in almost all citations. He
downplays his role in favor of emphasizing the influence of other academics and circumstances. Still, the citations also show the natural ease with which Becker created
Outsiders. It seems almost deceivingly effortless how he researches, does the analysis
and writes. Without any doubt this is an indication of his supreme academic talent
which was needed to create Outsiders. The downplaying of his role in the creation
of Outsiders does not only mask his unique talent, but also downplays the personal
roots of Beckers perspective on crime and society which partly shaped his approach
in Outsiders. By focusing on his youth it became evident that his biography had a
major influence on Outsiders.

AFTERWORD
After a break of some months, Becker emailed me and explained that he had not
replied to some of my emails because he was involved in finishing two books (What
About Mozart? What About Murder? Reasoning From Cases and Thinking
Together 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 email
I referred to the importance of freedom in Beckers career, which has been discussed
in this article several times:
I also enjoyed reading the article by Clint Sanders. He captures you well. One
of my favorite quotes is this one: For, as Anselm Strauss succinctly described
Beckers work, Youre easy....Its liberty, freedom, thats what youre interested
in. I can relate to that, but then again if you are interested in freedom you need a
lot of discipline and self-control. That is what people seem to forget. What I like
of our kind of qualitative research is the improvisation part. ( ).

Howard Becker on Outsiders

17

I end my article by giving Becker the last word with his short and witty reaction
to my previous email, which characterizes the slight subversive character of his mild
irony.
Dear Thaddeus,
I have the feeling that you know more about me than I know myself. Could this be
true?
Howie

NOTES
1. Warner is mentioned many times in A Second Chicago School? (Fine 1995) but his influence
on 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 acknowledgements of Outsiders 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 to
notice this glaring error. This is evidence for my strong belief that no one ever
actually reads the things they cite (well, almost no one, you are the first). Congratulations!

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR(S)

Thaddeus Mller has a position as a faculty member at the section criminology at the Rotterdam
Erasmus University. His PhD-dissertation, The warm city (2002) is based on a micro-sociological
study of the (positive) meanings of fleeting interactions among strangers in the public realm. After
working for the University of Amsterdam and doing applied commercial research, mostly related
to urban communities, safety and youth hanging around, Thaddeus Mller started at his current
position in 2009. His main interests are qualitative methods, urban ethnography, social life in public
spaces, 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 psychologists
Diederik Stapel.