ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of the "social world", at the intermediate level of Becker's analysis. He defined this in a discussion at Grenoble with Alan Pessin, in contrast to Bourdieu's concept of a "field". The "subjects" of Becker's work are not individuals, agents or rational actors, neither are they obscure forces or mysterious structures. They are recognizable groups, concrete organizations, visible professions or identifiable institutions. Becker has turned his uncommitted perspective on many of the social processes that avoid permanent negotiation in dealing with unusual events or serious problems. The idea of a "social lottery," one of Becker's main concepts, only seems to be paradoxical. At the biggest scale of "social worlds," large collectivities of people in organizations supported by states with explicit structures, their complexity demands concepts that have been little used until by empirical researchers. The manufacture of automobiles is also a social world of its own, much like that of the art world.
