In 1948, 19-year-old Howard S. Becker was playing piano in a bar on West 63rd Street six nights a week. He was also a graduate student in sociology: “I thought, well, if I write down what happens there, those are field notes.” Becker’s (PhB’46, AM’49, PhD’51) early observations about jazz musicians eventually grew into the groundbreaking Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), one of the first books to establish “labeling theory.” Deviance, that theory held, was not an innate quality of someone’s actions, but an interaction between the so-called deviants and those who labeled them that way.

Becker argued that deviants are not simply breaking rules set down by mainstream society (“squares,” in jazz musicians’ argot). Instead, musicians and other deviants follow different, but often equally strict, rules of their own. In July the University of Chicago Press will reissue the Outsiders chapter “Becoming a Marihuana User” (originally published in 1953 in the American Journal of Sociology) as an 88-page book.

https://mag.uchicago.edu/law-policy-society/whos-deviant-here