new ebook by Howie Becker and Rob Faulkner: Thinking Together: An E-mail Exchange and All that Jazz

New ebook by Howie Becker and Rob Faulkner

What does it take to pull together a collaborative research project?  Howie Becker and Rob Faulkner reveal all, via a reconstruction of their prolific email correspondence collected in a new ebook Thinking Together: An E-mail Exchange and All that Jazz.  Prompted by the puzzling observation that younger musicians didn’t know the same repertoire of songs shared among older musicians, Becker and Faulkner, who are both practicing musicians, muscle through hammering out a research design and theoretical explanation for how musicians, including ones who have never practiced together before, can collectively perform.*  Their exchanges evidence the gradual refinement of categories with plenty of links to songs, descriptions of illustrative experiences, and recounting of interviews with fellow musicians while practicing in the field.  Here’s a blurb penned by Becker:

Would you like to know how people really think their way through all the problems of doing research and writing a book? Watch two old pros in action as they do that in the e-mail correspondence between sociologists Rob Faulkner and Howie Becker as they wrote Do You Know? The Jazz Repertoire in Action.

The book Thinking Together: An E-mail Exchange and All that Jazz shows the authors exchanging ideas and modifying them as the conversation proceeds. It shows them extracting ideas from their experiences in the field: performing in public, collaborating with other musicians, interviewing, using their field notes to generate ideas and test them, to elaborate theories as they go, all the thinking that goes on when you actually do research. No review of the literature—it’s replaced by the two of them drawing in work that seems relevant, that gives them something they can use to explain what they’ve seen and heard: using a study of Mexican witchcraft, for instance, to develop a research strategy, and painfully realizing that they have some substantial musical prejudices that they have to turn into a kind of historical sociology.

This is the way research really gets done, what you do after you write the research proposal and start working and find out that none of your plans are going to work because things were more complicated than you thought they were.

Bonus #1: learn more about the genesis of the controversial 2009 NSF qualitative research report.

Bonus #2: read what Becker and Faulkner really think of colleagues’ concepts and research.  For example:

Category A: Helpful

• Victoria Johnson’s concept of organizational imprinting
• David Grazian’s ethnography of blues clubs
• Art Stinchcombe’s Information and Organizations

Category B: Needs more work

• Ann Swidler’s culture as toolkit
• Pierre Bourdieu’ s explanation about why the upper class consume certain forms of art (“no help” p. 69)
• neoinstitutionalists’ use of repertoire

Interested in learning more about the authors’ other publications?  See:

• Faulkner’s Hollywood Studio Musicians and Music on Demand (also known for his seminal article with Wayne Baker on illegal collusion in networks)
• Becker, Faulkner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, editors, Art From Start to Finish
• Becker’s Art Worlds and Outsiders

HT: Howard Aldrich

Learn why British piano-players know this song, but American ones don’t on p. 215

* A challenge shared among other occupations: airline pilots and crew, medical teams, emergency response groups, improv groups, etc.