Paul Willis
Paul Willis | |
---|---|
Born | 1 April 1945 Wolverhampton, England |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge, BSc |
Known for | Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977) |
Paul Willis (born 1945) is a British
Background
Paul Willis’s work has focused mainly, but not exclusively, on the ethnographic study of lived cultural forms in a wide variety of contexts. From highly structured to weakly structured ones, Willis examines how practices of `informal cultural production` help to produce and construct cultural worlds `from below`.[2]
Trained in literary criticism at Cambridge,
Most recently, Paul Willis is a lecturer with the rank of professor in the Department of Sociology at
Famous works
Paul Willis is best known for his rich ethnographic studies of working-class youth culture. Willis is a prominent member of the celebrated Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and is the joint founding editor of the journal Ethnography. His most famous works include Learning to Labour, Profane Culture, and The Ethnographic Imagination. Willis' studies thrived on distinct fieldwork experiences with everyday people.
In 'Learning to Labour', Willis conducted an in-depth ethnography of a set of working class 'lads' in a town in the West Midlands referred to as 'Hammertown'. Published in 1975, Learning To Labour has become a standard in the field of sociology and portrays the enduring relevance of class in its cognitive and symbolic dimensions. In this book, Willis conducts a series of interviews and observations within a school, with the aim of discovering how and why 'working class kids get working class jobs'. Willis' raw interviews with 'rebel' students suggests that this counter-school culture of resistance and opposition to academia and authority has a strong resemblance to the culture one may find in the industrial workplaces, ironically the very same environment the 'rebel' lads were heading for.[8] Willis stresses that structural conditions constrain symbolic work to rigid boundaries, more specifically the ever-shifting, unrelenting structure of 'class'. Willis states that symbolic resistance is short-lived, but still, it may be favored, as well as undermined, by structural conditions which may include public policies.[2]
Willis states that the motive for his ethnographic recording of life was to show forms of humanistic creativity, and this is still the case today. "As a humanist, I'm attempting to make a theorized humanism which still preserves some element of creativity."[9]
Books and literature
- Learning to Labour in New Times, (ed with Nadine Dolby & Greg Dimitriadis). New York: Routledge, 2004, ISBN 0415948541
- The Ethnographic Imagination, Cambridge: Polity, 2000
- Nuevas Perspectivas Criticas en Educacion. (jointly edited with M Castells) et al. Barcelona: Paidós Educador, 1994
- Moving Culture, London: Gulbenkian Foundation, 1990
- Common Culture (with S Jones, J Canaan and G Hurd). Milton Keynes: Open University, Press 1990, reprinted 1994 & 1996
- The Youth Review (with A Bekenn, T Ellis and D Whitt) . Aldershot: Gower, 1988
- The Social Condition of Young People in Wolverhampton in 1984 (with A Bekenn, T Ellis and D Whitt). Wolverhampton: Wolverhampton Borough Council, 1985
- ISBN 0231053576
- Profane Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978
- Marvel of Nature
Critiques of Willis' work
Joan McFarland argues in the
Other arguments suggest that Willis' work suffers from two essential errors:
However, Willis interprets his own work differently. In a 2003 interview, Willis states "I see Learning to Labour — and my more recent work — as studies of forms of cultural production of meaning in everyday life. In this respect, I always feel pushed into a sociological straight-jacket when people take the outcomes of my work in terms of resistance or anomie, because my point is the general production of meanings within a context."[9]
References
- ^ Willis, Paul (1984). "Youth Unemployment-A New Social State". New Society. 67: 475. Retrieved 9 August 2015.
- ^ doi:10.1177/1368431009106205. Sage Publications. http://www.sagepublications.com
- ^ Taylor, L. & Taylor, I. (eds) (1972) Politics and Deviance, Harmondsworth: Penguin pg.213
- ISBN 9780691163697.
- ^ "Princeton Anthropology - Overview". Archived from the original on 26 May 2010.
- ^ "Ethnography". 29 October 2015.
- ^ "Prof Paul Willis".
- ^ Hechter, Michael. Christine Horne. Theories of Social Order: Paul Willis Learning to Labor. Stanford, California: the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, 2009.
- ^ a b Kleijer, Henk. Ger Tillekens. "Twenty-five years of Learning to Labour-Looking back at British cultural studies with Paul Willis". Soundscapes.info. 5 February 2003. http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME05/Paul_WillisUK.shtml Archived 22 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b McFarland, Joan. Cole, Mike. "An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle? A Response to Paul Willis’s Unemployment: The Final Inequality." British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1988), pp. 199-203. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1393034
- ^ Walker, J.C. "Romanticising Resistance, Romanticising Culture: Problems in Willis’s Theory of Cultural Production" British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 7 No. 1 (1986), pp 59-80. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1392779