ABSTRACT
Sociologists tend to learn a way of categorizing their work as they are socialized into their own professional community and learn its codes of practice, whether through a formal curriculum or their career experience. Howard Becker's major publications on education, doctors and artists challenge narrow views of science as a universal way of explaining human social organization. For Becker, talking about potheads and druggies is already deviant. In medicine, the "bad patient," who has caused their own illness and behaved like a pain in the ass – a "crock" in medical slang – reframes in local terms the way in which society makes moral judgments about health. Like Becker, the authors must be inventive, adaptive, and take risks, stepping out of our social class or career trajectory – studying new things at any age, becoming in their fifties an apprentice in photography or theatre arts, or taking a course in Boolean algebra.
