ABSTRACT
Howard Becker's article, ‘Whose side are we on?’, published in 1967, has been very widely cited in the literature of the social sciences. 1 Furthermore, there is considerable consensus about its message. It is generally taken to argue that sociologists are inevitably partisan, and that they should be explicitly so. Gouldner provided one of the earliest and most influential interpretations along these lines, even though he was critical of the kind of partisanship he took Becker's article to imply (Gouldner 1968). And we find much the same interpretation prevailing today. Thus, writing in 1995 about the work of the ‘second Chicago School’, Galliher describes the message of Becker's article as follows:
he argued that since some type of bias is inevitable in all research on human subjects, to gain a full understanding of the world it is essential that we consciously take the perspective of the oppressed rather than the oppressor.
