Light,mind and spirit: Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour revisited on and beyond its 40th anniversary

Introduction

Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs was first published in 1977. Thus, in 2017 it had its 40th anniversary. During these four decades, Willis’s ethnographic study has never been out of print in English. In Britain, it has been reprinted at least nine times, and since 1981 there have been separate US editions. The last US edition was published in the fall of 2017. Learning to Labour has been translated into at least a dozen languages all over the world, including French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Finnish, and Swedish. Just recently, a second Chinese translation was published.

Learning to Labour, then, is read, explored and utilized all around the globe. Its use also stretches across the borders of social, cultural and educational sciences and to manifold research areas and settings. In the fall of 2017, Google Scholar reported close to 15,000 citations, which is remarkable for a study on, in the main, a small informal group of white working-class boys situated within time-bound and local circumstances of family, friends and school, on their way to manual work in a local community called ‘Hammertown’. In the early and mid-1970s, at the time when the study that led to Learning to Labour was conducted, it was an archetypical small industrial town on the outskirts of Birmingham, UK, that is, in the Silicon Valley of the Industrial Revolution. Less than a decade later the post-industrial change was in full swing.

Questions, aims and puzzles

Learning to Labour opens by posing two related research statements. First, ‘The difficult thing to explain about how middle class kids get middle class jobs is why others let them’ (1977: 1). Second, ‘The difficult thing to explain about how working class kids get working class jobs is why they let themselves’ (1977: 1). These statements are immediately followed by some remarks concerning the latter. ‘It is too facile to say’, Willis states, ‘that “they”, that is, the working class kids, “have no choice”’, because, he continues, ‘there is no obvious physical coercion’ or ‘mass ideological conviction’ that forces them to join the ‘industrial army’ (1977: 1). Moreover, these kids – or, rather, boys, or, using their own self-selected label, ‘lads’ – are aware of, as Willis puts it, ‘the inferior rewards, undesirable social definition, and increasing intrinsic meaninglessness, of manual work: in a word its location at the bottom of a class society’ (1977: 1). Indeed, it is this puzzle that inspires Willis to try to understand so that he can explain why ‘the lads’, as he puts it in the second statement ‘let themselves’, as it seems willingly, become part of a new generation of industrial workers.

With ‘the lads’, then, there is, as Willis puts it, ‘a degree of self-direction’ (1977: 1). Consequently, he must discern how they, as living subjects, enacted by their own thinking, feelings and doings, informally, through joint actions – that is, through their own culture in the making – take an active part in the social reproduction of the working class. The human stake in this is thus not being removed and, accordingly, there will be agents, objectives and endeavours. But what the lads think, feel and do is also understood in a broader sense, that is, as deeply embedded in the zeitgeist of a particular mass-industrialized capitalist society and the socio-material life conditions it represents. And so ends the very first paragraph of Learning to Labour with the establishment of its ‘primary aim’: ‘to cast some light on this surprising process’ (1977: 1, our emphasis). Again, to comprehend how and why workings-class boys in ‘Hammertown’ ‘let themselves’, seemingly willingly, resist schooling and end up reproducing their father’s positions as low-educated industrial workers. And thereby to reconnect with Willis’s first research question, how they let the middle-class kids get the middle-class jobs.

So let us begin by briefly introducing not only, in Willis’s own words, the ‘light’ that he came to cast on his research puzzle, but also by casting our own light on a second and parallel puzzle, namely how and why Learning to Labour itself came to be a travelling light – a light that has been sought out and followed by numerous ethnographers and others in so many corners of the world and walks of life. Or, to paraphrase Willis himself, why they ‘let themselves’ be energized by what Learning to Labour, having taken on a life of its own, has to offer. Because the book truly does offer us, to borrow two sensitizing concepts from Max Weber, a directing mind and a moving spirit (see Swedberg and Agevall, 2016: 119), also in our time and, surely, beyond. Thus, illuminating and exploring this enduring ‘light’, ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ of Learning to Labour – in collaboration with sincere followers of different generations, contexts and trajectories – constitute the overarching aim of this Special Issue of Ethnography, which actually had Learning to Labour as its blueprint when it was launched by founding editors Paul Willis and Mats Trondman in their ‘Manifesto for Ethnography’ (2000) nearly two decades ago (see also Trondman et al., 2018).

Analytical locus

Indeed, Learning to Labour came alive and has travelled in a remarkably productive way. Now part of a selective tradition and, hence, an enacting socio-cultural fact in itself, the book continues to provide a wide range of ethnographers, theoreticians and cultural analysts ways to approach, understand, and explain societal issues and puzzles. Most strikingly, we think, it does so by showing how we can do engaged cultural analysis at the crossroad where the art of theorizing and the lived meanings of ethnographic evidence intersect, in the midst of the nitty-gritties of socio-material and relational everyday life.

Accordingly, the analytical locus of the ethnographic account concerns what Willis himself calls ‘the cultural’ (1977: 3), which is basically understood as production of culture and cultural autonomy – that is, what such a culture in the making, as a struggle for autonomy, enables but also confounds when it comes to human actors’ understanding and handling of such interlaced conditionings as socio-material orders, institutional regulations and social relationships. And these makings and struggles, in their lived forms, need to be explored by the interpreter ‘as if’ freed from the urgencies of these just-stated conditionings, which of course requires a particular way of seeing. Consequently, we need such theorizing from ethnographically informed cultural analysts and, thus, the illuminated outcomes it enables in terms of ‘analytical points’ and ‘aha-effects’ (Willis and Trondman, 2000: 12; see also Trondman et al., 2018). Yes, for sure, even theorizing, which in itself is production of culture, too, that is, an offering of another way of seeing, a new horizon, and an analytical resistance to taken-for-granted appearances of ‘reality’. This is similar to Willis’s understanding of the lads’ making of their own counter-school culture, which illuminates a true Shakespearean melting pot of history, comedy, tragedy and, not least, irony. In other words, Willis is trying to understand how the production of culture – through creative human agency and by striving for autonomy, without ever escaping the lived meanings of historically embedded social and material realities, institutional regulations and relationships – can, in the form of lived outcomes, end up in the clear-cut reproduction of class, as in the case of Learning to Labour. Indeed, a production of culture and a struggle for culturally autonomy ‘as if’ freed from the urgencies of such, again, conditionings. This is how Willis explains this complexity, that is, answers the how-question that makes answering the why-question possible:

The specific milieu, I argue, in which a certain subjective sense of manual labour power, and an objective decision to apply it to manual work, is produced in the working class counter-school culture. It is here where working class themes are mediated to individuals and groups in their own determinate context and where working class kids creatively develop, transform and finally reproduce aspects of the larger culture in their own praxis in such a way as to finally direct them to certain kinds of work. (1977: 2)

Indeed, Willis is a genuine cultural sociologist who is constantly exploring his deep interest in understanding ‘the cultural’ as a complex form of explanans – that is, that which explains what is to be explained – just as in Learning to Labour where social reproduction of class is the explanandum. And he does this without ever losing touch with the structure of modern capitalism, and the lads’ socio-material, institutional and relational conditionings, which comprise circumstances and an existence that can only be lived through their own active and creative meaning-making. This is how Willis specifies it:

This is vital to my purposes where I view the cultural not simply as a set of transferred internal structures (as in the usual notions of socialisation) nor as the passive result of the action of dominant ideology downward (as in certain kinds of Marxism), but at least in part as the product of collective human praxis. (1977: 3–4, our emphasis)

This is what scientist Hans Vaihinger, according to philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, said about the meaning of ‘as if’ in his book The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1968 [1911], namely, that ‘very often we can reasonable proceed as if what we know to be false is true because it is useful for some purpose to do so’ (2017: 3). It might be true then that the cultural production of the ‘as-if-autonomy’ is how we can understand so that we can explain the lads’ seeming willingness to reproduce class while they at the very same time symbolically display a strife and longing for other ‘alternative outcomes’, such as conditions of existence and school achievement. ‘Once we come to see’, Appiah states, ‘that many of our best theories are idealizations, we will also see why our best chance of understanding the world must be to have a plurality of ways of thinking about it’ (2017: x). This is also, we think, one of the puzzling lessons from Learning to Labour: how production of culture and cultural autonomy distinctly contribute to reproduce class and at the very same time uncover a lived critique of class reproduction and unequal opportunities for schooling.

Case, exemplar and classic

Learning to Labour should thus not solely be referred to as a particular study of a particular group at a particular time and place, focusing on a particular issue, that is, it should not be delimited as a case study among others. It has also, in a Kuhnian paradigmatic sense, become an exemplar, that is, as Jeffrey C. Alexander puts is, a ‘concrete example of successful empirical works’ and a ‘model of how specifically to explain the world’ (1989: 18; Kuhn, 1970).

Furthermore, it carries the meaning of a classic, as does Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920), with which Learning to Labour, we would like to argue, has a certain affinity. ¹ We think about the way Weber understood production of culture or, rather, a particular form of religion, the Protestant ethic, which – unconsciously and without a predetermined goal, in a very multi-layered and complex way, enacted through a deeply human meaningfully lived life – made modern capitalism possible (Weber, 2011 [1920]; see also Kalberg, 2011). And it is here we see its deep affinity with Willis’s understanding of the lads’ production of culture – a counter-school culture that made reproduction of class possible, embedded of course within an already established and cogent modern capitalism, that very capitalism, that is, its becoming, that Weber’s analysis explains.

Thus, in both these seemingly different and non-comparable studies, the actual outcomes came about due to a particular production of culture in the pursuit of lived forms of cultural autonomy – once again, ‘as if’ freed from the urgencies of the world, and so with intensely meaningful and enacted forms of accumulated self-understandings, feelings and doings among individuals and carrier groups embedded in specific historically meaning-bearing circumstances. Indeed, to paraphrase the latter, both Weber and Willis did cast some light on these surprising processes and their outcomes. It might also be analytically fruitful, at least as in future work, to think about these processes – the making of the Protestant ethic and the counter-school culture – and their outcomes – modern capitalism and social reproduction of class – as complex manifestations of the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the making and workings of production of culture and cultural autonomy, that is as a – at least to a certain degree misrecognized – culturally articulated unconscious. Just as in Learning to Labour where Willis’s understanding of the lads’ ability to see through culture is theorized as de-limited and partial, at the same time, however, it seems to change after grief reaches the ‘towers’ it was never supposed to reach.

‘Classics’, Alexander writes, ‘are earlier works which are given a privileged status vis-à-vis contemporary explorations in the same field’ (1989: 9). And there are, he argues, two significant reasons for having classics. First, there are extrinsic reasons. A classic helps in ‘integrating the field of theoretical discourse’. Accordingly, it ‘simplifies’ and ‘allows generalization’, hence becoming a ‘symbol’ that ‘stands for a range of diverse general commitments’ (1989: 27–8). Second, there are also intrinsic reasons for having classics. These concern the academic quality of the work itself. In Alexander’s vocabulary, this predominantly involves ‘logical coherence, expansiveness of scope, interpretative insights, value reference, rhetorical scope, beauty, and texture of argument’ (1989: 21). Hence, the meaning of a classic is not, as Alexander enunciates it, ‘determined and exhausted by its use on a particular occasion’ (1989: 56). Rather, it is a classic because we can again and again recapture the power of its intrinsic qualities. A classic’s significance, then, cannot be reduced to the historical circumstances of its making. In our view, Learning to Labour is a classic for both extrinsic and intrinsic reasons, and on those grounds it has its own legitimate cultural autonomy. It is there for us as a ‘model of’, that is, as a particular illumination of an actual social reproduction, an exemplar. But it is also there as a ‘model for’, that is, as a more generalized form of a theorized understanding of culture as explanans – a classic.

Mostly, it is a model when it comes to comprehending the webs of meaning that permeate all historicity, socio-material circumstances, institutional thinking, social relationships and forms of self-understanding, but also, for sure, due to its sensitivity to cultural production and cultural autonomy. Since, as philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, ‘we also build ourselves landscapes of meanings’ and ‘we make these meanings exist for us by enacting them, then expressing them, naming them, critically examining them, fighting (sometimes) about them (e.g., egalitarians struggling to transform a hierarchical culture)’ (2016: 332). Culture here, then, has a constructing and an enacting side, which, indeed, in their lived forms are deeply intertwined. And this potentiality of an independent cultural validity works, again, ‘as if’ pursued for its own sake; ‘as if’, in the lived moments of lads, purely for the fun of it.

Yet another reason for approaching Learning to Labour as an authoritative classic is that it is a work of creativity. It exists because it has its own specific maker, or as they say in filmmaking, its own auteur. Indeed, ethnographers too can have their stubbornly recognizable styles and analytical preoccupations. Therefore, a classic is simply not an outcome of someone who has merely learned to imitate how to do research. Rather, the making of a classic ‘depends’, as Alexander states, ‘on idiosyncratic abilities to experience, to understand, to know’ (1989: 29). In exactly that sense, a classic is also made of ‘personal knowledge; that ‘distinguishes itself’ (1989: 29). Like the lads, Willis himself, as the creator of Learning to Labour, had to work through his experiences, renderings, and theorizing until they had creatively crystallized into particularly meaning-bearing ethnographical evidence, ‘analytical points’ and ‘aha-effects’ (Willis and Trondman, 2000: 12.) Hence, an ethnographer, to borrow yet another phrase from Alexander, ‘who manifests such capacities to the highest degree becomes a classic from which those with the more mundane capacities must refer for insight into the subjective inclinations of humankind’ (1989: 29).

Indeed, in our view, this is what Learning to Labour represents for those of us who deeply care about it and learn from it in a variety of ways. Herein lies its contribution as a puzzle, a case, an exemplar and a classic – that is, in its stated desire to illuminate and challenge the making and outcomes of lived forms of cultural production and the struggle for cultural autonomy in all possible contexts and walks of life. In other words, the book represents the eternal human need to understand so that we can explain ourselves as well as others as producers of culture in the face of diverse, multifaceted and changing socio-material life conditions. Once again, herein lies the traveling light, the directing mind and the moving spirit that Learning to Labour provides, as an enacting meaning system itself, since it is culture produced for the sake of analytical autonomy: a striving not only for an age but, we think, possibly for all human times.

Disposition: The contributors’ angles of approach

This Special Issue includes eight original contributions organized in three clusters. In different ways, they all explore the light, mind and spirit of Learning to Labour on its 40th anniversary, and beyond. The first cluster is personal and existential, but also political in focus. It deals with the way Learning to Labour has been and still is a springboard for ways of reading the world that at the same time can explain why people might want to become theorizing ethnographers with a passion for lived forms of culture. Here we have two contributions. First, ‘Educating Mats: Encountering Finnish “Lads” and Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour in Sweden’, in which Mats Trondman tells an ethnographical tale about how he came to read and understand Willis’s study while being a non-qualified junior high school teacher of Finnish ‘lads’ whose parents had come to Sweden as industrial workers in the late 1960s or early 1970s. While most of these lads came to reproduce class, Trondman himself continued to higher education to become a ‘class traveller’. Obviously, cultural production and cultural autonomy can work in more than one way, even at the very same time.

Second, in ‘“I’m a Kid from the Bronx”: A Reflection on the Enduring Contributions of Willis’s Cultural Production Perspective in Learning to Labour” by Kathleen Nolan, the reader will hear a personal tale about how the work of Nolan, as a teacher of ‘lads’ in the late 1990s, came to be informed by Willis’s study, but also how she gained an understanding of the continuing significance and usefulness of his work, specifically with regard to theorizing cultural production, including the critical logic that is embedded in it, and the social reproduction that tends to come out of it in new contexts, settings and relationships conditioned by our new neoliberal era. And still the lived possibility of cultural autonomy is alive. So, how do we theorize and through pedagogical praxis make possible a transgressive cultural production for transformative politics?

The second cluster concerns the trajectory of Learning to Labour in four different national contexts. In ‘Apprendre à travailler: The Uneasy Journey of Counter-School Culture in the Country of Cultural Capital Theory’, Sylvain Laurens and Julian Mischi describe and analyse the slow, but nevertheless developing, import of Learning to Labour within the French intellectual landscape, especially in relation to the Marxism of Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, as well as debates on schooling and prevalent postmodern theories. They also discuss how Learning to Labour is being used by ethnographers in contemporary France, for instance in relation to working-class young people’s self-exclusion from higher education and forms of cultural autonomy among working-class girls in vocational high schools in Paris.

Second, in ‘Theorizing Race and Cultural Autonomy in Education: An Extension of Differentiation and Integration in Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour’, Brooke Dinsmore informs us about how the treatment of culture as autonomous from social reproduction has often been ignored in the US research context. However, Dinsmore does not only point this out by examining specific theoretical approaches, she also corrects this fault-line by arguing for the strength of Willis’s informed understanding of class, gender and race relations. In doing so, she illuminates the significance of understanding cultural autonomy by demonstrating how young people’s oppositional counter-cultures emerge through conflicts with the cultural logic of schools. Furthermore, she shows how such a production of cultures also enables collective reinterpretation of institutional logics that have different outcomes in terms of how African American boys relate to the possibility of schooling and education.

With Scott Moskowitz, Xi She and Chunwen Xiong, we get to know the trajectory, reception and adoption of ‘Learning to Labour in China’, which is also the title of their contribution. The focal point here is the early introduction of this reception and adoption. What we learn is that the cultural dimension of social structure to a great extent was lost in the way Learning to Labour was understood and put to analytic work within the Chinese context. Cultural production and cultural autonomy, then, were not emphasized in the Chinese ethnographical endeavour on such phenomena as education and schooling. Instead, a very strong and taken-for-granted focus on social production became predominant. Accordingly, the authors argue that much more attention should be given to lived culture and autonomy within the changing Chinese society. Thus, Learning to Labour still carries a not fully recognized potential for Chinese ethnographers.

We end the second cluster with Ove Sernhede’s contribution ‘From Learning to Labour to Custody for the Precariat’, in which we become familiar with the marginalized lives of young immigrants in the Swedish post-industrial landscape, which is marked by increasing social, economic and cultural disparities. The setting is an economically poor metropolitan area in Gothenburg, where Sernhede has long experience of doing ethnographic work. The key question posed concerns the school’s role for young marginalized people in segregated areas. We learn that working-class kids no longer perceive themselves as ‘the lads’ did more than 40 years ago in ‘Hammertown’. Despite this, Sernhede argues that the theoretical and methodological approaches formulated by Willis in Learning to Labour are still of crucial importance if we wish to understand pupils’ production of culture and endeavours to achieve cultural autonomy in schools located in the poor, high-rise suburbs of the metropolitan districts in Sweden. What is it, then, that constitutes these groups, their shared beliefs, forms of self-understanding and practices? What are they learning while handling their marginalized and stigmatized life conditions? And what are the actual outcomes? Is it possible that the schools and the working-class kids could work together for social justice?

In the third and final cluster, we find two contributions that offer, at least partly, a more critical approach to Learning to Labour. In both cases, one could argue, the understanding of production of culture and cultural autonomy is turned upside down. Anna Lund’s contribution – ‘Time, Memory and Class: The Unintended Consequences of the Bourgeois Gaze’ – reconsiders Learning to Labour through the lens of time, memory and class. In doing so, it enables an additional understanding of the lads’ and their families’ orientations toward time and memory. Lund wants us to see how they are living not only for the present, but also for the future. The way memories are construed leads to insights that concern the past, present and future in ways that both transcend and reinforce their class culture. Thus, how time, perceived as a cultural structure, plays a role in the processes of social differentiation is the focus of Lund’s article. Learning to Labour, then, is read heuristically, that is, as a way not only to learn from and problematize the memory work of the lads and their families, but also to critically investigate the enacting values within society and the social sciences, specifically the tendency to focus on outcomes and to see upward mobility as a rational or pragmatic choice. Such an understanding of time, and what we ought to fill time with, is seen as strongly connected to middle-class values. This can have unintentional consequences in terms of how and why class structures are reproduced. So even when we as sociologists are motivated by the desire to create humane sets of conditions for everyone, Lund argues, we should also be aware of what ticks in and is appreciated by the social worlds we study, how this is expressed and what the potentials are for social recognition. Might, then, the lads’ more complex relation to time be missed as a consequence of the unintended bourgeois gaze?

In ‘Of Lads and Ear’oles: School, Work, and the Microsociology of Social Reproduction’, Andrea Voyer investigates the lives of the ‘ear’oles’ – students with a working-class background who focus on schooling and possibly seek mobility. She argues that the ‘ear’oles’ need to distance themselves socially and emotionally from those with a firm working-class identity. If the lads’ positive evaluation of their membership in a working-class group allows them to reject the idea of school, the ear’oles, on the other hand, opt for school at considerable social cost. Voyer suggests that it is the lads who display conformity with the behavioural norms and values of the cultural milieu of their class. It is thus, somewhat paradoxically, the ear’oles who produce a counter-culture in relation to the dominant social and cultural expectations of their own working-class culture.

Addressing Paul Willis

Paul Willis can still vividly remember his first appointment with his first academic supervisor, that is, Richard Hoggart (1918–2014) who, among other things, wrote the well-known book The Uses of Literacy (1957). At that time Willis was 23 years old, and had just started to embark on his first ethnographic endeavour. This is what Hoggart told him:

Paul, it’s very important to immerse yourself in the destructive element, and don’t get rushed into anything too quickly. Unless you feel confused, you can’t then put together a new thing. So, I’m not going to ask you exactly what you are going to do or what your theory is. (quoted from Mills and Gibb, 2001: 394)