293
The fierce opposition to school
exhibited by working-class boys in the
UK is evident, according to Willis, in
their “struggle to win symbolic and
physical space from its rules.”See also: Michel Foucault 52–55 ■ Friedrich Engels 66–67 ■ Pierre Bourdieu 76–79 ■ R.W. Connell 88–89 ■
Stuart Hall 200–01 ■ Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis 288–89
THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS
academic hard work will lead to
progress. Through language, dress,
and practices such as smoking
and drinking, they make clear their
rejection of middle-class ideals, and
instead emphasize their belief in
practical skills and life experience,
developing what Willis sees as a
chauvinistic or patriarchal attitude.
School’s out
The boys see academic knowledge
as “feminine,” and pupils who
aspire to achieve—the “ear’oles”
(conformists)—as “sissies” and
inferior. Factory work and similar
employment is viewed, says Willis,
as suitably masculine. Many
of the boys work part-time, for
example as shelf-stackers or key-
cutters, and learn the value of and
culture connected to such work.
Their attitudes to girls are
exploitative and hypocritical
(“sexy” girls are desired but also
become figures of contempt), and
are based, Willis claims, on a belief
in the gendered division of labor.
Another challenging aspect of their
culture is racism, which serves to
distinguish their white, working-
class group identity. The factory or
shop-floor culture mirrors the boys’
experiences in school—with a
stress in both places on having a
laugh and resisting too much work.
Factory fodder?
Willis argues that, in effect, the
boys’ “performance” of working-
class masculinity supports both
patriarchy and—crucially, from a
Marxist perspective—capitalism
by providing the low-paid (male)
workforce. The lads, however,
experience their employment as
a matter of their own free choice
rather than as exploitation.
Willis says that this is not simply
an example of Friedrich Engels’
“false consciousness,” whereby the
dominant ideology is imposed from
above. Instead, ideas about class,
gender, and ethnicity also emerge
from within their culture; they are
very aware that they would have
to sacrifice their class identity
to move up the social ladder.
Their teachers often have low
expectations of the boys, leading
them to gradually give up on the
idea of teaching them. Schools thus
play a crucial role in reproducing
cultural values, economic divisions,
and working-class trajectories.New questions
Willis’s work has been criticized,
for example, by British sociologists
David Blackledge and Barry Hunt,
for being based on insufficient
sampling. But in the 1990s British
sociologist Inge Bates reframed
Willis’s question to ask why
working-class girls end up
with working-class and gender-
stereotyped jobs. One of her studies
showed that girls who wanted towork in childcare ended up in
training programs for care of the
elderly. Another study focused
on girls who wanted to enter
the gender-stereotyped world of
fashion. These aspirations confirm,
says Bates, that working-class
girls have limited horizons. Overall,
Bates suggests that a constrained
labor market, few qualifications,
and socialization into “choosing”
gendered jobs means there is little
evidence of social mobility. ■Paul Willis
A cultural theorist, sociologist,
and ethnographer, Paul Willis
was born in Wolverhampton,
UK. After graduating from the
University of Cambridge with
a degree in literary criticism,
he studied for his PhD at the
Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the
University of Birmingham.
From 1989 to 1990, Willis
was a member of the Youth
Policy Working Group for the
Labour Party. Much of his
recent work has focused onethnographical studies of
culture; in 2000 he cofounded
the journal Ethnography. Having
been a professor of social and
cultural ethnography at Keele
University, he is now a professor
in the sociology department of
Princeton University.Key works1977 Learning to Labour: How
Working Class Kids Get Working
Class Jobs
1978 Profane Culture
2000 The Ethnographic
Imagination