Gouldner-Becker Debate By Dimitar Panchev 1 The aim of the following essay will be to provide a commentary and overview of the debate that is surrounding the issue of taking sides in social research, also known as the Gouldner- Becker debate. In the paper ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, published in 1967, Howard Becker provided the argument that doing value-free research is impossible and to a significant extent any form of inquiry into social issues is affected by personal sympathies. When social research is conducted, it is not undertaken into a vacuum, separate and completely detached by other external entities, but that rather it is done in the context of hierarchical relationships. This being reality, Becker argued that it is impossible not to take sides and the dilemma itself lied in the question of whose side the social researcher should take. For the sociology of deviance and its advocates, the main group of interest would be the so-called ‘underdogs’ – criminals, prisoners, mental patients and others, and it would be their views that a sociologist of deviance would try to express and represent. When such a perspective is adopted, however, the researcher is more likely to be labelled as being ‘biased’, because of the attempt to try and provide credibility to those that society abhors. Becker (1967) provides two explanations why taking the side of the ‘underdog’ and giving a voice to the ‘voiceless’ could be perceived as biased. His first explanation was that the majority of bias accusations would occur because of the pre-existing hierarchical levels of social organisation, where the superordinate groups would condemn any drift from the approved and official morality. Any attempt to give credence to the perspectives of the subordinate groups or any aspect of their alternative ‘morality’ or set of values would inevitably will be labelled as being biased, ultimately undermining its credibility. In the second case, accusations are made when a situation is frankly political. The parties in the political conflict engage in an organised conflict, attempting either to maintain or change 1 © 2015 Dimitar Panchev, e-mail : dimitar_panchev@yahoo.com