I chose this book for our site section on Methods because it is readily available, by an author whom I respect, by a teacher whose ideas of teaching I respect. The first chapter of the book is available online for you to read. If you would like me to order copies in the bookstore, I'll be happy to. My copy cost $15 at Vroman's.

In the first chapter of the book, Becker tells us:

"The tricks that make up the content of this book help solve problems of thinking, the kind of problems social scientists usually see as "theoretical." Defining a term by looking for how its meaning arises in a network of relations is just the kind of trick I'm talking about . . ."

Becker, as I understand it, is talking about how to think like a social scientist, a good social scientist. I am always appalled when people complain that feminism, postmodernism, critical theory, postcolonialism, speak of the importance of perspective and situatedness. There is no good scientific way to avoid the problem of structural context as we try to decipher any text. As a physicist, I was trained to guard against biases and out-of-awareness assumptions. Physicists today are recognizing the need to train new physicists who can embrace both astral physics and molecular physics, for we cannot with impunity ignore either perspective, and yet that is what we have done until recent results brought us up short. (Pull citation from neutrino file.)

This admonition to train our scholars and thinkers to broaden rather than narrow their perspectives can hold no less a warning to social scientist, for whom "hard" data is rarely hard. Although mathematical machinations are impressive, they have little meaning unless we can translate them, as Becker puts it, into solving a problem in the real world. For years I have chafed at the "theoretical models" that show that Latinos have difficulty in completing studies in higher education. Really, Sherlock. What was your first clue? What we need is an in-depth understanding of what it's really like to be a Latino in such a structural context, and how that context interacts with the individual's agency to produce that difficulty, and how we can alter that effect. And that's what Becker is inviting us to bring to consciousness.

More soon,

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