Paul Willis

Paul E. Willis (* 1945 in Wolverhampton ) is a British cultural sociologist and anthropologist . He was Professor of Ethnography at Keele University and has been at Princeton University since 2010 .

Willis studied at the University of Birmingham , worked at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies and at the university in his hometown of Wolverhampton. He was in the United Kingdom as an empirical social researchers, by appearing in his 1977 Young Lad study ( "Learning to Labor: how working class kids get working class jobs" ) presented view of resistance areas conventionally-proletarian young lads against a middle class -imprinted Learning culture known with its central school. Since Learning Labor , the author has been considered one of the leading theorists of contemporary British cultural studies .

Willis later published as a cultural ethnographer, among other things, both on the deviant subculture of motorcyclist gangs and on pop music, and as a theorist on the general development of everyday culture in the United Kingdom.

In his studies and research , Willis combines traditional ethnographic-empirical approaches as approaches to the ethnography of small everyday and living worlds (in the sense of Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt ) with theoretical questions and perspectives in the reflexive-social-scientific sense ( double hermeneutics ).

So far there are three books by Willis in German: Fun am Resistance (1979), Profane Culture (1981) and Jugend-Stile (1991). The debut was published in 2013 under the title Fun am Resistance: Learning to Labor revised a second time in German.

rating

“In contrast to the German sociology of education, there are also interesting theoretical controversies and something like a paradigm shift in the Anglo-Saxon scene. Since the beginning of the 1970s, the Anglo-Saxon region has been talking about a New Sociology of Education , referring to the criticism of the positivist and functionalist sociology of education . This criticism was based on Marxism and critical theory, but at the same time advocated the inclusion of qualitative research methods as an essential element. It has thus expanded both the theoretical repertoire and the method repertoire. An example of this New Sociology of Education is the study by Paul Willis, “Learning to Labor”, which is still exciting and well worth reading. Published in German under the somewhat misleading title “Fun at Resistance”. In it, he describes the strategies of male working-class youth to develop their later identity as workers or as a member of the working class in resistance to the middle-class-oriented culture of the school (hence the German title Fun in Resistance). Incidentally, I see the way Willis describes the reproduction of the (male) working class through concrete action in school, an early example of what is later traded as the "duality of structure and action" under the Anthony Giddens trademark . "

- Michael Sertl

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Willis in the catalog of the German National Library
• Sociology - Themes & Perspectives, engl.
• Paul Willis at Princeton University
• Term paper: having fun with resistance. Counterculture in the working school - Paul Willis. University of Linz , by Ulrike Kliemstein, 2002

notes

1. ↑ after Michael Sertl: ÖFEB-Newsletter, 1.2002, p. 8 f.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.