How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs by Paul Willis - Book Report/Review Example

Learning to Labour: How Working Kids Get Working Jobs By Paul Willis A Critical Book Review By and Number Date As the limb is bent so grows the tree. The quote is a familiar one, appearing in many places and used to emphasize the crucial role early learning and example play in choices children make later on as adults. Paul Willis’ work, Learning to Labour, takes this concept to new levels of understanding, as he explores all of the psychological, sociological and cultural implications connected with children reared in working class environments and the impact that experience has on later career decisions. Preliminary Justifications for the Study “It is the future in the present that hammers freedom to inequality ...” (Willis, 1977: 120). In the early 1970s Willis’s work at the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) of the Birmingham University was pioneering ethnographic research on subjects transitioning from school to work. According to Kleijer et al (2003) the study was “widely acclaimed not only within the field of cultural studies but also among sociologists” (para. 2). Willis himself in Kleijer’s interview provides a firm defense for his approach and the work itself. “I thought the Birmingham school, and I still think my own ethnographic approach is so to speak holistic and theoretically informed” (Willis to Kleijer, 2003). While no doubt as a social scientist Willis was interested in presenting a valid empirical document and statistical study for professionals, in his Preface to Learning to Labour (1981) he clearly relates his intention in conducting and publishing a study that offers a coherent and useful document valuable to professionals and the general public alike. “A general objective of the book is to make its arguments accessible to audiences of social scientists, practitioners and general readers” (Willis, Preface, 1981: vii). In 1976 other followers of the Marxist approach, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, conducted a survey of the education system published as Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. It provided them similar information to that of Karl Marx in that schools reproduce existing inequalities. Their theory of Reproduction held that “Schools reproduced the prevailing relations of production...those who failed to move up the class ladder were taught to blame themselves” (Willis, Preface, 1981: x). They rejected the notion that there are equal opportunities for all. In this way they argue that education justifies and explains social inequality, not a focus stance of Willis. They also advance the notion that it is the schools which are consciously and seditiously preparing certain students to quietly accept their place in the lower echelon of the workforce. Their “work is widely considered groundbreaking for its introduction of the ‘correspondence principle,’ which explains how the internal organisation of schools corresponds to the internal organisation of the capitalist workforce in its structures, norms, and values” (Schooling in Capitalist, 2009: para. 1). In 1977 Willis provided a critical analysis of Bowles and Gintis as a precursor to his own Learning to Labour. While Willis did not disagree with the essential truth of correspondence theory, he criticized the authors for failing to carry out detailed research into life in schools (Schooling in Capitalist, 2009)—an empirical method he introduced in his own study. He also challenged their assumption that a hidden curriculum set their by the capitalist bourgeoisie was the sole and actual influence on pupils. “While many pupils showed disrespect for school rules and for the authority of teachers... [as also found by Willis] Working class ‘lads’ learned to behave at school, albeit in ways that do not suit capitalisms need for a passive workforce” (Schooling in Capitalist, 2009, Criticisms: para. 6). This he believed significant, extrapolating in his study that other forces are work that incline students of working class families to shun academics in favor of the assuredness of moving naturally into the (low wage) workforce. Summarizing the Study Willis, a cultural theorist, conducted the in-depth ethnographic study of a set of working class young boys ‘lads’ in a West Midlands community he called Hammertown (technically Birmingham). Through a series of interviews combined with astute observation in a local school, he sought to discover the truth behind what many have perceived for years: that children of working class parents more often than not end up adults doing working class jobs. Using Marxist and sociological standards to study and analyze their behavior, Willis formulates conclusions through sociological analysis that suggests the effect (entrenchment in working class jobs later in life) has a cause much to do with rebelliousness on the part of working-class culture itself—a culture which refutes white-collar, higher wage work as inappropriate, unacceptable and in a sense, unmanly to a male-dominated working class culture. It is this culture that indoctrinates its younger members toward factory and industrial employment, suggesting that both family and community pressure that encourages the lads to actually allow themselves to be employed in working class (low wage) employment. The community instills within the lads a hyper-valuation of community, a strong working class sense of belonging, and a masculine-based tradition that places more value on manual labour then on academic achievement. These notions are confirmed by fathers and repeated in those fathers’ strong relationships to their low-wage work. The paper also examines the lads’ perception of women in the rearing process, as well as other groups of boys, authority, and the overall environment in which the working class family/working class future mentality develops. While empirical, the study is also highly personal, with much to say about family and community influence on young members. The catalyst behind this study is clearly stated by Willis (1981): “The difficult thing to explain about how middle class kids get middle class jobs is why others let them. The difficult thing to explain about how working class kids get working class jobs is why they let themselves” (1) Whether he achieves this goal in Learning to Labor bears evaluation. Study Evaluation/Report One of the first assumptions Willis makes supports his intention that the study and its results be generally relevant to professionals and the public at large is confirmed in the most rational way in which he has ordered the information for groups with varying interests. “The more specialist arguments and references have... been removed to end-notes. Practitioners may be most interested in Part I and the Conclusion; social theorists in Part II” [The theoretical section which analyses inner meaning] (Willis, Preface, 1981: vii). Willis thus puts information in a coherent form that allows amplification and discussion of methods separate from analytical material argued in Part II that substantiates the results of the study where he analyses the ethnographic details in Part I and illuminates in empirical discussion the “objective basis for these subjective feelings and cultural processes” (Willis, 1981: 3), finally arguing in Part II “that the processes of self-induction into the labour process constitute an aspect of the regeneration of working class culture in general, and an important example of how this culture is related in complex ways to regulative state institutions [a stance not completely unlike that of Bowles and Gintis that capitalist society does play a role in working class choices] (and their)... important function in the overall reproduction of the social totality and especially in relation to reproducing the social conditions for a certain kind of production.(Willis, 1981:3) While the depth of the ethnographic material is impressive we must be careful of automatically accepting many of Willis’s future premises which, by his own admission regarding Penetration and Limitations suggests a caution. “Ethnography describes the field of play in which the impulses and limitations combine but cannot isolate them theoretically or show them separately” (Willis, 1981: 119). I found curious his discussion about how in the study “certain cultural penetrations...pass through internal limitations into a surprising affirmation of manual labour power’ (Willis, 1981:160), suggesting this was done “at the risk of underemphasizing the impact of external forces, state institutions and dominant ideologies acting upon working class kids” (160). Here he fails to mention his own Neo-Marxist ideologies as working subconsciously in the background on the conduct and very likely the outcome of the study. Also, to underestimate the impact of external forces is to place undo emphasis upon areas of study likely to support his conclusions. While Bowles and G may be too heavily weighted in political ideology, Willis, it may be said, may be too focused on cultural and social factors that pre-empt the reality as presented by Bowles and G. What is positive in Willis is his willingness to be an “add-on” of sorts to the work of other theorists rather than claiming himself a new messiah in the field. Perhaps that is why his work today is so widely though cautiously accepted as one study focusing on an important aspect of the working class experience. He is never reluctant to provide cautions regarding his methodology or the study in general. “... it warns against a too reductive or crude materialist notion of the cultural level. It is not true, for instance, that the manpower requirements of industry in any direct sense determine the subjective and cultural formation of particular kinds of labour power” (Willis, 1981: 171). To the degree that the study examines the how and why of what makes a significant portion of working class youths accept working class jobs Willis (1981) responds: We can say that for a good proportion, the disaffected - in relation to whom the conformist case can be better understood - this is in the form of a partial cultural penetration of their own real conditions and a mystified celebration of manual work which nevertheless preserves something of a collective, rational, though incomplete, logic” (185). He further suggests the conclusion can be best understood as a form of cultural reproduction which helps to contribute towards social reproduction in general. Ethically the study of one group selected from a school population may be discriminatory in that certain behaviours are assumed then extrapolated to family practices that may or may not justify the conclusion. Are certain responses necessarily indicative of uniform cause and effect when it comes to working class boys, their relationship to their fathers, community and subsequent decisions. I think, for instance, of the award-winning story of Billy Elliot, a working class youth determine to become a dancer. To what does Willis owe this—to anomaly? Perhaps the anomaly may be worth studying over a group already subject to preconceived perceptions. The difference in language between Part I [for general audiences] and Part II, for professionals and theoreticians is striking and appropriate. The information in Part I, which he has said is meant of the non-professional and others unfamiliar with the nomenclature of empirical sociological and cultural studies, is clearly presented in language and concepts immediately understandable. Part II is understandable written in more clinical language that often takes quite a lot of further reading to comprehend. However, as the book was written for a wide audience one can not criticize the format or the writing. As a study specifically targeting family and community influence on working class males and their job decisions later in life, the work provides invaluable information for sociologists, anthropologists and any professional studying aspects of labor, job and wealth creation and distribution. It also provides guidelines for education professionals in dealing with the realities of familial, cultural and community influences on working class students, and a means of better understanding what they are up against in encouraging students toward higher levels of work within the society. Bibliography Dolb, N., Dimitriadis, G. with Paul Willis. (2004). Learning to Labor in New Times. New York: RoutledgeFalmer Kleijer, H., Tellekens, G. (2003). ‘Twenty-Five Years of Learning to Labour: Looking Back at British Cultural Studies with Paul Willis’. Journal on Media Culture, Vol 5, February, 2003. Retrieved 3 August, 2010 from: http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME05/Paul_WillisUK.shtml ‘Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life: Criticisms’. Wikipedia, 3 July, 2009. Retrieved 3 August, 2010 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooling_in_Capitalist_America:_Educational_Reform_and_the_Contradictions_of_Economic_Life Willis, P. (1981). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Read More