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Howard S. BECKER, Telling About Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 304 p.ISBN 978-0-226-04126-1ISBN-10: 0-226-04126-3RÉSUMÉI 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.TABLE DES MATIÈRESList of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsPart I. IdeasChapter 1. Telling About SocietyChapter 2. Representations of Society as Organizational ProductsChapter 3. Who Does What?Chapter 4. The Work Users DoChapter 5. Standardization and InnovationChapter 6. Summarizing DetailsChapter 7. Reality AestheticsChapter 8. The Morality of RepresentationsPart II. ExamplesChapter 9. Parables, Ideal Types, and Mathematical ModelsChapter 10. Charts: Thinking with DrawingsChapter 11. Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and PhotojournalismChapter 12. Drama and Multivocality: Shaw, Churchill, and ShawnChapter 13. Goffman, Language, and the Comparative StrategyChapter 14. Jane Austen: The Novel as Social AnalysisChapter 15. Georges Perec's Experiments in Social DescriptionChapter 16. Italo Calvino, UrbanologistFinally . . .ReferencesIndexUrl de référence : http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/235070.ctl