Cultural, Class Reproductions in the West Midlands

In the first portion of Paul Willis's monograph Learning to Labor, Willis probes cultural and class reproductions through a case study in a British town in the West Midlands that Willis dubs "Hammertown" of how the reaction of working class "lads" and "ear'oles" to formal institutions of education shapes them (the lads and ear'oles) and their future. Roughly, the lads dismiss and actively sabotage both the education system and peers who place value in it (the ear'oles), seeking (the lads do) "laffs" and desiring to start a generic, physical job in the real world. Once they receive real jobs, they trade in their nonconformist scholastic identity for a conformist blue-collar identity that incorporates disillusionment and still relies on laffs but ultimately encompasses a cultural embrace of their situation even as it conspires to "settl[e] to their disadvantage."

In the closing portion of the book, which this essay will seek to address, Willis tries to go beyond ethnography and explain the reasons for the lads' choices: How "do their genuinely held insights and convictions lead finally to an objective work situation which seems to be entrapment rather than liberation"?

Willis identifies two oppositional notions in the manufacturing of culture: penetration and limitation. Penetration is a (non-individual) tendency for a culture to attempt to spread its own truths to the wider society. This can lead to myth making and be self-serving. For example, the upper and middle classes in capitalism have a maximizing strategy to spread narratives, true or not, that justify their own possession of wealth. The working class, Willis notes, "is the only group in capitalism that does not have to believe in capitalist legitimations as a condition of its own survival." So the working class has a unique ability to de-mystify "its members' real conditions an possibilities within a class society." Furthermore, the informal group, Willis says, is most suitable for penetrating class myths.

The lads, initially, present themselves as poster children for penetration. Their dismissal of the crumbs the education system offers them serves to puncture some class myths (viz., upward mobility). Additionally, the ear'oles' own middling futures serve to reinforce the logic of the lads protestations. Willis agrees with the lads about "the commonality of all forms of modern labor," and notes that this accurate identification is a form of penetration (although the lads' actual acceptance of such a job might seem hypocritical). The lads also present (mostly small) instances of penetration to larger capitalist structures in a way that "makes clear that their collective culture shows both a responsiveness to the uniqueness of human labour power and in its own way constitutes an attempt to defeat a certain ideological definition of it." One example is the pranks pulled on the shopfloor that aim to "limit production and the potentially voracious demands of capitalist production on individuals."

While the lads' unalloyed penetration has a clear trajectory (social change) and a clear target (the status quo), there are "simultaneous forces of distortion, limitation, and mystification"-for brevity, "limitations"-that act oppositionally to penetrations, explain the paucity of "transformative political activity," and simmer down the "pure logic of cultural penetration" into a "partial logic" influenced by realism. The divisions between physical and manual labor and between the genders act as limitations. The understanding of women as inferior, leads the lads to view white collar jobs as effeminate and inferior and allows the lads to dismiss white collar workers "because the mode of their success can be discredited as passive, mental and lacking a robust masculinity." Consequently, the lads embrace the disadvantageous side of an in some ways self-imposed manual/mental binary. Racial divisions act similarly, providing the lads with a group to look down upon and furthering divisions.

Willis notes how other parts of culture reflect the above divisions in a manner he calls ideology. Movies that show women doing intricate things and men doing masculine things-motor skills vs. muscle skills-perpetuate gender inequalities. When the lads' ideology assumes that all jobs are the same-not just all manual jobs-this acts as a limitation.

Willis's argument presents a clear explanation for both the working class's aspirational attempts to rebel against the larger society and the ultimate failure of these attempts. Willis does not sacrifice complexity for a pat story, and his tracing the evolution of the lads from non-conformist to conformist rings true. Willis strikes the right balance between ascribing motivation, fault, and reason to individual choices and to larger societal forces. The main weakness I found in his argument was the emphasis on Marxist-type thinking. I may just be a little more amenable to capitalism than Willis, but his emphasis on an exploitation inherent in manual labor seemed deprived of the circumspect, objective analysis of the rest of his book. At times, he would state how it is not the manual labor that is the problem, but instead the lack of a choice about whether to engage in manual labor and the view of all manual labor as identical. But at other times he would decry how with the sale of labor, "an infinite capacity has been bought for a finite sum and socially legitimated." It was also easy to infer that Willis saw capitalism as an unjust system in regards to the working class. I think this is an acceptable position, but besides the point to some of Willis's contentions.

The Marxist influence on Willis's work is clear in his theory of penetration and his discussion of how much of the cultural outlook of the lads derives from their subaltern societal position. The Frankfurt School also exerts a directional force on the book with the idea of their being very real limitations on class rebellion and penetration. Additionally, the section on ideology and Willis' emphasis on the power of "ruling ideas" and "informal media (TV, radio, press, film)" calls to mind the Frankfurt school's ideas about the catatonic and placating effects of culture that prevent class rebellion. The discussion of the tension between the working class and the middle class is reminiscent of Bourdieux's ideas about symbolic class violence.

When I read Willis's book, I found myself thinking about my experience at an overwhelmingly white, middle class high school. Large swaths of students would routinely drink on weeknights and decline to do homework at home, but there were few students who were disrespectful in class and most students would at least partially complete their assignments-even if it was during the previous class-to receive some credit. I think this shows how not caring about school can be both a type of penetration and a type of conformity. The context is of paramount importance.

The few students who genuinely rebelled at my high school-by fighting, taking drugs, etc.-traced more closely the pattern Willis sets out. I knew a student who would sneak off campus for cigarettes several times a day in 10th grade. He truly did not care about school and one time was expelled for cursing out a science teacher.

When I was home last summer, I went to get my mail early one morning and found the student picking up my trash. Willis's book reminded me of this sort of transition. In high school, I had admired the student for his non-conformist moxie, and I felt let down to see him transformed into a conformist.

Work Cited

Willis, Paul. "Learning to Labor: How working class kids get working class jobs." 1977. Columbia University Press. New York.