Laid a lot of the foundation of commitment theory. See Why people make commitments.

Fun facts about Howie (as he indicates he prefers to be called) - he grew up playing piano at Illinois strip clubs while “most of the good musicians were off to WW2” and considered sociology a “hobby” well into his PhD.

See the New Yorker article on him

Those “field notes” gathered at the strip clubs and night spots helped inspire a seminal paper of 1953, “Becoming a Marihuana User,” in the American Journal of Sociology. (Asked if he knew so much because he was smoking weed himself, he says, “Yeah. Obviously.” And does he still smoke it? “Yeah. Obviously.”)

Becker insists that his accomplishment in the paper was no more than the elimination of a single needless syllable: “Instead of talking about drug abuse, I talked about drug use.”

“A ‘world’ as I understand it consists of real people who are trying to get things done, largely by getting other people to do things that will assist them in their project. . . . The resulting collective activity is something that perhaps no one wanted, but is the best everyone could get out of this situation and therefore what they all, in effect, agreed to.” In a Beckerian world, we act the way we do because of a certain logic of events—jazz musicians are supposed to smoke dope, graduate students learn how to please their supervisors—but there are lots of different roles within the world, and we can choose which one to play, and how to play it. We’re all actors, not angels or completely free agents. But we are looking for applause, so we put on the best show we can.

Interestingly aligns with the Nash Equilibrium