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.
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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
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 )
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44 of 46 people found the following review helpful
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
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."
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
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.
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Learning to Labor
It has been many years since I read this book in graduate school. I actually bought a new copy for a friend who is a reading instructor and interested in the sociology of... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Secondhandrose
5.0 out of 5 stars
How a Cultural Study Should Be Done
This book is apparently a classic in the fields of cultural studies and ethnography, and I agree that it's certainly one of the stronger examples of the form. Read more
Published on February 11, 2004 by doomsdayer520
2.0 out of 5 stars
How outdated research Get outdated reviews
I thought this book was very outdated and hard to read because of the English accent Willis uses. The research was OK but a little bias against working class ( poor and broke)kids.
Published on May 30, 2000 by La'Toya
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 32
books:
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100
books
cite this book:
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- Prison Notebooks, Volume 3 (vol. 3) by Antonio Gramsci on page 137, page 170, and page 185
- Work and the Nature of Man by Frederick Herzberg on page 142, and page 183
- The Uses of Literacy (U.S.-Third World Policy Perspectives) by Richard Hoggart on page 116, and page 170
- Classes in Contemporary Capitalism by Nicos Poulantzas on page 159
- Career guidance: who needs it, who provides it, who can improve it by Eli Ginzberg on page 113
See all 32 books this book cites
- Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations And Attainment In A Low-income Neighborhood, Expanded Edition by Jay MacLeod on 12 pages
- Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas (Contemporary Ethnography) by Douglas E. Foley on 5 pages
- Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) by Victoria E. Bonnell on 4 pages
- Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture by Timothy D Taylor on 4 pages
- Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women by Ching Kwan Lee in Front Matter, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
See all 100 books citing this book
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