Willis, Paul (1945–)

While Learning to Labor (1977) is the project he is best known for, Paul Willis has continued to produce work on youth culture and also published a book on research methods, Ethnographic Imagination, in 2000. Adding to the contributions of Learning to Labor, relevant to qualitative researchers and radical scholars alike, an edited volume on his contributions, Learning to Labor in New Times, was released in 2004.

In Learning to Labor, Willis advanced the work of social reproduction theorists by providing an example of the partial autonomy of subversive working-class culture. He employed ethnographic research methods to understand how social, political, and economic forces come to shape the schooling experiences of 12 white working-class boys in one of the oldest industrial cities in England. Through thick descriptive data, he illustrates how working-class youth are not passive as they are pushed into the working-class world. Rather, “the lads” were quite aware of their oppressed status in the capitalist system and actively cemented their marginalization by adopting oppositional cultural practices in school as well as within their working-class community.

Updating Willis's analysis of his subjects' perception of their opportunities after graduating from school, Lois Weis, in Working-Class Without Work: High School Students in a De-Industrializing Economy (1990), found that the crisis in the capitalist system, which is marked by such characteristics as the export of many traditionally working-class U.S. factory jobs to Third World areas such as Mexico for cheaper, nonunionized labor, has reduced the life chances for those seeking working-class jobs after completing or leaving high school. According to Weiss, this has resulted in many people from working-class backgrounds abandoning the glorification of manual labor and replacing it with an often unfulfilled desire to enter the middle class through such means as college.

Similarly, in Ain't No Makin'It: Leveled Aspirations in a Low-Income Neighborhood (1987), Jay MacLeod attempted to highlight the dialectical and thus unfixed nature of social reproduction. Like Weis and Willis before him, MacLeod looked at student aspiration as an indicator of their perception of who they are and who they could become. A focus on aspiration is enlightening, argued MacLeod, because it highlights the dialectical nature of structure and agency. MacLeod notes how factors such as race affect a person's aspirations. Because economic crises have hurt people of color harder and faster than more privileged white workers, it is not surprising that people of color would tend to not find as much, if any, economic security, and thus hope, in working-class jobs.

These aforementioned studies are testament to the importance of Learning to Labor as the study that paved the way for a generation of scholars who examined the lived experience of working-class youth for the purpose of creating an egalitarian social order. Since neoliberalism, globalization of capital, and Western imperialism have ushered in more suffering and dislocation to working peoples, Willis's work will continue to find relevance and provide direction for new generations of ethnographers who seek to unearth whether the working-class youth can challenge systemic oppressions structuring their lives.