Learning to Labor in New Times

Nadine Dolby, Greg Dimitriadis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415948548
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135934583
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learning to Labor in New Times foregrounds nine essays which re-examine the work of noted sociologist Paul Willis, 25 years after the publication of his seminal Learning to Labor, one of the most frequently cited and assigned texts in the cultural studies and social foundations of education.

CHAPTER 1

Learning to Labor in New Times

An Introduction

NADINE DOLBY AND GREG DIMITRIADIS

This book grew out of two panels at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association that honored the 25th anniversary of the U.S. publication of Learning to Labor, and the indispensable contribution of Paul Willis to educational research worldwide. Willis’s many contributions during his (still flourishing) career speak to the importance of everyday worlds and lives, and to his commitment to ensuring that youth’s realities—of school, of work, of home, of community, and of media culture—are consistently at the forefront of our agendas for research, and for political change. From the seminal Learning to Labor, to his more recent work on a major policy document, The Youth Review, Willis repeatedly insists that what youth do is important: they function as political actors, and they are not simply dupes of a wholly reproductive class system.

Several words continually reappear in the copious amounts of literature devoted to the study and critique of Willis’s work over the past quarter century: class, education, and ethnography. An exploration of these three connected aspects of his writing and research structures this volume’s engagement with his work. Such an emphasis is particularly appropriate at this moment, as all three terms are undergoing profound, substantive changes that reconfigure the way that educational researchers will approach their work in this century. First, as we discuss throughout this introduction and the book, “class”—as an explanatory category and a site of identification—is reemerging as a key locus of academic inquiry.¹ Second, “education” as a public good is under threat globally, as corporate practices and privatization are increasingly accepted as the norm (Apple, 2001; Klein, 2000; Stromquist, 2003). Finally, “ethnography,” as a practice is reshaping itself in light of decades of harsh critique, so that it can continue to be a significant force in academic practices that help us to understand, and transform, social and cultural worlds. In this introduction, we map theses three trajectories in Willis’s work, and then introduce the essays in this volume. As is evident throughout this volume, Paul Willis’s remarkable contributions to the rich literature on class, education, and ethnography are formative sparks that will undoubtedly mold how educational researchers make sense of, and attempt to influence, this new terrain.

Learning to Labor: Twenty-Five Years Later

Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs is arguably one of the most significant educational research studies of the 20th century. The book was originally published in Britain in 1977 by Gower Press. Since that time, it has been reprinted nine times in Britain, published in a separate U.S. edition in 1981, and published in German, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean. Based on an ethnographic study of a group of working-class boys in a secondary school in an industrial area of England in the 1970s, Willis’s analysis of the lads’ role in the production and reproduction of their position in the working class stands as major contribution to multiple fields, including education, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and political science. Within education, Willis’s work precipitated a major shift in the way that researchers have come to understand the school as a site of political, social, and cultural struggle, and the way that youth’s identities are constituted within schools, ground largely in their own particular autonomy.

Through the 1970s, the dominant approach to class analysis in education had been structural (see Morrow & Torres, 1995). Bowles and Gintis’s influential Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) was perhaps the most important text in this regard. For Bowles and Gintis, schools had a key functional role in the reproduction of capitalism, preparing young people to take their places in a differentiated class hierarchy. Schools operated on what they called a “correspondence principle,” and were anything but a meritocracy. One’s class position was determined by family income rather than one’s achievement in school. Schools helped, more often than not, to create and justify the illusion of meritocracy, but not its reality. For Bowles and Gintis, the pedagogical experience was about learning to take one’s place in the capitalist system. Ultimately, or “in the final instance,” capitalism was reproduced. There was little room for transformative action, for an understanding of human agency, or for the rearticulation of ones circumstances.

Willis’s Learning to Labor came out of a very different kind of history and academic tradition. Although Bowles and Gintis were both economists, trained in statistical methods, Willis situated himself within the more interpretive, humanistic, and ethnographic tradition of the Birmingham School for Cultural Studies. Here, there was an effort to understand the cultural dimensions of everyday life, how people lived through the structural conditions they found themselves in. There was, of course, a stress on agency and creativity in this regard, and an effort to understand social structures from the ground up.

Learning to Labor is an ethnography of working-class youth in an industrial town Willis calls Hammertown, conducted between 1972 and 1975. Hammertown is, for Willis, an “archetypal industrial town.” It had first been industrialized over 200 years before Willis began his work (p. 6). As Willis explains, the total labor force in this town was about 36,000, with an extremely high percentage—79%—involved in manufacturing. Half of these jobs were in metal and metal goods, wherease the other half included the production of bricks, pottery and glass, and food, beverages, and tobacco.

For this study, Willis followed a small group—about 12—of working-class youth throughout their school day. He attended classes and leisure activities and at points accompanied them onto the shop floor. He interviewed individual youth, recorded group discussions, and interviewed parents, senior masters at the school, the youth’s teachers, and career officers. As the study was multisited, Willis also interviewed and spent time with a smaller cohort of other youth.

Willis’s findings are, by now, well known. These working-class boys create a culture of resistance and opposition to authority. As Willis writes, “The opposition is expressed mainly as style. It is lived out in countless small ways which are special to the school institution, instantly recognized by the teachers, and an almost ritualistic part of the daily fabric of life for the kids” (p. 12). These boys spend their days “dosing, blagging, and wagging.” Above all else, “having a laff” is key. “Opposition to the school is principally manifested in the struggle to win symbolic and physical space from the institution and its rules and to defeat its main perceived purpose: to make you ‘work’” (p. 26). These boys enact everyday resistances to all symbols of school authority—teachers as well as conformist youth.

Willis powerfully documents the emergence of an aggressive, White working-class masculinity. The youth in his study violently mark out the boundaries of their lives: They are aggressively territorial about their neighborhood and are quick to fight. The lads are also sexist and racist. Young women must be sexually attractive, but “giving in” to sex devalues them immeasurably. Courtship is complicated business. “The referent is the home—dependability and domesticity—the opposite of the sexy bird on the scene. If the initial attraction is based on sex, the final settlement is based on a strange denial of sex” (p. 44). A kind of “domestic code” rules the day (Weis, 1990). In racial terms, the boys define themselves against Asians and West Indians, seeing both as “foreign,” “smelly,” and “dirty” yet still differentiated (and threatening) in sometimes divergent ways.

Willis displays the counters of an emergent White working-class masculinity. He focused on these young men’s resistance to school authority and the way they were able to subvert dominant culture on a local level through devaluing school life. Crucially, it also means that they are invested in masculine kinds of labor activities, the kinds of work associated with manual labor and heavy industry. Perhaps Willis’s most important insight is that these young men are complicit in their own class reproduction. The kinds of dispositions they generate in school prepare them for life on the shop floor. In addition to the immediate financial rewards, they are more likely to “have a laff” on the shop floor. The culture of resistance generated in school is entirely continuous with work culture. It is a cruel irony. In one of the book’s more trenchant moments, Willis asserts:

For no matter what the larger pattern of working class culture and cycle of its continuous regeneration, no matter what the severity of disillusionment amongst “the lads” as they get older, their passage is to all intents and purposes irreversible. When the cultural apprenticeship of the shopfloor is fully worked out, and its main real activity of arduous production for others in unpleasant surroundings is seen more clearly, there is a double kind of entrapment in what might be seen, as the school was seen before, as the prison of the workshop. Ironically, as the shopfloor becomes a prison, education is seen retrospectively, and hopelessly, as the only escape. (p. 107)

This is only one of the study’s most enduring findings. Along with this class reproduction, however, is the notion that there are cracks in this edifice. Reproduction is never total. In what Willis refers to as moments of “partial penetration,” the lads understand that they are positioned as abstract labor. These are key insights: insights about the nature of the lads’ labor and their control over it. However, as noted, these penetrations are largely subverted by their own resistant practices.

Youth, Common Culture, and The Ethnographic Imagination

One of the most sustained legacies of Learning to Labor is its focus on youth’s agency. Though the lads’ resistance and “victory” was pyrrhic, Willis drew attention to the importance of scrutinizing youth’s everyday lives and practices through ethnography. In Willis’s later work (Profane Culture [1978], Common Culture [l990], and The Ethnographic Imagination [2001]) he specifically extends and examines the substantive and methodological implications of what he terms youth’s everyday cultural lives. The “ethnographic imagination perspective” that Willis develops is one that acknowledges the “art” of everyday life, that understands people make sense out of their lives in creative ways and that there are moments of penetrating insight worth exploring and documenting (Willis, 2001, p. xx). Youth are a critical focus for understanding contemporary societal dynamics, for, as Willis notes, youth are at the forefront of confronting and negotiating the new modes of technological and human transformation at the core of modernization. He writes,

Young people respond in disorganized and chaotic ways, but to the best of their abilities and with relevance to the actual possibilities of their lives as they see, live, and embody them. These responses are actually embedded in the flows of cultural modernization, but to adult eyes they may seem to be mysterious, troubling, and even shocking and anti-social. (Willis, 2003, p. 391)

Yet, as Willis reflects, it is not enough to simply document or record the minutiae of youth’s everyday lives, as if it existed in some pretheoretical world. Instead, researchers must creatively bring this experiential material into “some relation to theory,” thereby “maximizing the illumination both of wider change and of the ethnographic data” (2001, p. 114). Indeed, Willis implores us to avoid the twin dangers in contemporary social scientific work—the danger of presenting empirical material divorced from theoretical reflection, as well as the danger of theoretical reflection divorced from an engagement with the empirical.

For Willis, there is something irreducible about the human experience. Reflecting on Learning to Labor, he noted that he had “a ‘common sense’ view which knew that your identity was always more than class, gender, or ethnicity, involving a whole set of points about the way you lived, how you fitted in, who you knew, what the myriad of your personal and domestic relations were: these things were separate from the theories that I picked up specifying obvious binary divisions” (Mills & Gibb, Appendix, this volume). Ethnography is a way at getting at some of this cultural complexity, a way to reflect on experience in ways that go beyond easy categories and distinctions.

Ultimately, this kind of work points us to a broader project that looks to understand the ways people creatively deal with their realities, which is one of the enduring lessons of Learning to Labor. Willis’s politics center on capturing this spark “of creativity or aspiration”—which is at the core of the lads paradoxical “moment of partial penetration”—and using it to propel us into the terrain of new possibilities. Here we find Willis’s hope, as he reflects that this spark is “routinely lost, distorted or alienated or turned into reified forms” though “never quite lost” (Mills & Gibb, Appendix, this volume).

Willis has spent much of the past few years extending these concerns, studying young people’s cultural lives. In particular, his influential Common Culture documented the multiple uses to which a group of young people put popular culture, or, as he writes, the “common culture” that young people create and sustain. Willis, for example, celebrates the ways that young people subvert dominant music and fashion industries by taping music from the radio for free and buying secondhand clothes and using them in exciting and interesting ways. He also documents the ways in which an all-pervasive media culture has come to wholly saturate the rituals of everyday life,

The omnipresent cultural media of the electronic age provide a wide range of symbolic resources for, and are a powerful stimulant of, the symbolic work and creativity of young people.... The media enter into virtually all of their very creative activities. But whilst the media invite certain interpretations, young people have not only learnt the codes, but have learnt to play with interpreting the codes, to reshape forms, to interrelate the media through their own grounded aesthetics. They add to and develop new meanings from given ones. (Willis, 1990, p. 30)

Willis does much to highlight the work that young people invest in popular culture and the ways in which popular culture is occluding contemporary school culture for many. If Learning to Labor focused largely on school life, Common Culture was a more fully contextualized look at young people’s creative lives as they traverse a wider range of spaces. Indeed, one of the major implications of Common Culture was its impulse to decenter “school” as the most relevant node in young people’s lives and open up a much wider range of texts and sites for study.

Willis’s expansive engagement with the lives of young people, it’s critical to note, is imperative to developing policy from below. Just as Willis challenges the official role that schools play in young people’s lives, he also opens up a space for us to ask what kind of policies make sense from “the ground up.” This was also a vital part of The Youth Review compendium he helped to put together. The study, undertaken in Wolverhampton and sponsored by the Labour party, was an effort to understand the effects of unemployment on local youth, asking one of the most persistent new questions about work and class: What happens to the working-class when work disappears? As Willis reflects, this study indexed the “new social condition” of youth, and, consistent with his commitments to youth’s realities and agency, asserted that “policies could be derived from the actual existing condition of the youth, rather than from the view of the powerful as to how they should change or be formed” (Mills & Gibb, Appendix, this volume).

Willis in New Times

At the time of publication, and shortly thereafter, Learning to Labor was critiqued for privileging class analysis over the persistent dynamics of gender and race. Most notably, Angela McRobbie charged that Willis overlooked the lives of young girls, reinforcing the lads’ own sexist stereotypes. She wrote:

Questions around sexism and working-class youth and around sexual violence make it possible to see how class and patriarchal relations work together, sometimes with an astonishing brutality and at other times in the ‘teeth gritting harmony’ of romance, love and marriage. One of Willis’s “lads” says of his girlfriend, “She loves doing fucking housework. Trousers I brought up yesterday, I took ’em up last night her turned ’em up for me. She’s as good as gold and I wanna get married as soon as I can.”

Until we come to grips with such expressions as they appear across the subcultural field, our portrayal of girls’ culture will remain one-sided and youth culture will continue to “mean” in uncritically masculine terms. Questions about girls, sexual relations and femininity in youth...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• The Critical Social Thought Series
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1.Learning to Labor in New Times
• Section I: Reflecting on Learning to Labor
• Section II: Learning to Labor in New Times
• Section III: Critical Ethnography, Culture, and Schooling:
• Appendix “Centre” and Periphery—An Interview with Paul Willis
• Notes on Contributor
• Index