Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs [Paperback]

Paul Willis (Author), Stanley Aronowitz (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1981 | ISBN-10: 0231053576 | ISBN-13: 978-0231053570 | Edition: Morningside

Hailed by the New Society as the "best book on male working class youth," this classic work, first published in 1977, has been translated into several foreign languages and remains the authority in ethnographical studies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

As fresh and challenging as when it was first published, Learning to Labor remains the text to inspire and teach ethnographers, from whatever disciplines,who probe unsentimentally human agency in institutions, political economy, and within the general constraints of modernity. -- George E. Marcus

The unique contribution of this book is that it shows, with glittering clarity, how the rebellion of poor and working class kids against school authority prepares them for working class jobs.No American interested in education or in labor can afford not to read and study this book carefully. -- Stanley Aranowitz

Review

A remarkable achievement...the best book on male working class youth since Whyte's Street Corner Society [1943].

(David H. Hargreaves New Society )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 226 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; Morningside edition (April 15, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231053576
• ISBN-13: 978-0231053570
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 0.6 x 5.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #272,202 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #71 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Adolescent Psychology

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Still The Best Ethnography in Sociology September 2, 2001

By Michael Spivey, Ph.D.

Format:Paperback

I came to Dr. Willis's Learning To Labor as a Ph.D. student at York University, Toronto. I was profoundly moved both theoretically and personally. Willis gives us a theoretical way of articulating macro and micro perspectives which shows how the two arise in dialectical fashion, e.g. class determines the working class lives of the lads through the very choices of the lads themselves! It was, and still is, a brilliant insight and contribution in relation to ongoing discussions of structure/agency and the whole question of determinism. Dr. Willis's work also touched base with my own life. I grew up in a cotton mill town in South Carolina. The local school was closely tied to the local manufacturing plants and the surrounding working-class, both in the fields and the mills. I saw the life of the lads as nearly identical with the life of the white, working class kids that I went to school with. Most of my high school friends saw going to college as a "waste of time" and for "sissies". Real work required real men! Most ended up in the local cotton mills. Many of these young men had promising lives that could have been realized, but at those structural moments choices were made that reproduced the local working-class. I have since written my own ethnographic work (Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000) and I have to say that Dr. Willis's work was always a big help and resource for thinking through the relationship between reproduction and resistance. A must read for anyone on the verge of ethnographic research and for the general reader as well.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Maybe the best ethnorgraphy ever written. May 22, 2009

By not a natural VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The two books that have contributed most to the way I think about the social world and what it means to be are Simone DeBeauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity and Paul Willis' Learing to Labor. The first one hundred pages of Willis' book are loaded with insights and antidotes to conventional wisdom: Why are working class students often anti-school and generally anti-authoritatian? Because schools ask a great deal in terms of work, conformity, fun foregone, and deference to school officials, but they offer little or nothing in return: working class children are almost certain to become working class adults. Thus, the absence of a basis for exchange generates hostility and resentment. Is that such a bad thing? It's tough on teachers, counselors, administrators, and on students who see reason to conform. But in the 1970's when Learning to Labor was written, a working class life in a British industrial city was reasonably comfortable and had it's own rewards. So from the classroom to the shopfloor was a natural and easy transition to the world of work for the sons of working class fathers.

For readers in the U.S., the absence of interest in upward mobility may seem self-defeating, and may be taken as evidence of family dysfunction. Oddly, however, the families studied by Willis seem supportive and warm; sons admire their fathers and have respect and affection for their mothers; fathers and mothers share their sons' alienation from schooling; and their reasons seem readily interpretable and in no way manifestations of family dysfunction.

The anti-authoritarian students embrace the ethos of masculinity and toughness that provides their occupationally devalued fathers with self-esteem. Sadly this way of valorizing a working class life assures that the British working class will remain suffused with pernicious sexism.

It's easy to romanticize Willis' working class rebels, and he sometimes makes this mistake. Whatever their attractive qualities, however, sexism, racism, and active derision toward same-aged students with a different mind-set are conspicuous characteristics of their way of life.

Perhaps the most troubling question for 21st century readers of Willis' book is what happens to working class students today? The factory floor is unoccupied. Working class jobs have been moved enmasse to third world countries to reduce labor costs. A well-defined social identity and lived culture have been destroyed. Again we see that whatever our position, nothing much is guaranteed. All this is part of the often very painful process of what DeBeauvoir called "disclosure of being in the world."

21 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A landmark effort at synthesizing theoretical frameworks February 6, 2002

By Jerry L. Rosiek

Format:Paperback

I use Willis' work every semester in my graduate level educational research methods class. It is one of first and
most influential efforts to bring together a marxist focus on macro-social dynamics, a symbolic interactionist focus on micro-social interactions, and a phenomenological focus on individual consicousness into a single study of class reproduction. It is a classic in every sense.