Ed 7: Paul Willis Flashcards
D: What type of sociologist is Paul Willis?
E: What is the title of his study?
C: Does PW agree with other sociologists of the same perspective?
D: A Marxist
E: ‘Learning to Labour: How working class kids get working class jobs’
C: No, he doesn’t agree with Marxists Bowles and Gintis that working class students are made to be docile and compliant.
D: Name one research method that PW used.
E: Name 3 research methods that PW used.
C: Name one theoretical issue with PW’s research methods.
D: Observations
E: Participant observations, unstructured interviews/ group interviews, diaries.
C: Lacks reliability (unstructured, so not repeatable) and representativeness (only 12 boys).
D: What did the boys in PW’s study call themselves?
E: What kind of subculture did they create?
C: Who did the boys dislike?
D: ‘The Lads’
E: A counter-culture/ anti-school subculture
C: Conformist subcultures/ ‘The Ear’oles
D: How did The Lads spend their time?
E: What was the most important thing to The Lads?
C: How did their behaviour prepare them for working class jobs?
D: Truanting (skiving school), smoking, being rude to teachers, being aggressive to other students.
E: ‘Having a ‘laff’
C: They were learning to cope with the boredom of their future working class manual jobs. They were copying the culture of the working men who were their role models.
D: Were The Lads being taught to accept the authority of teachers in school (and bosses in the future)?
E: How can we criticise PWs study?
C: How did capitalism benefit from The Lad’s attitudes?
D: No- they actively rejected it (they had ‘agency’). They wanted the manual jobs that they saw as masculine.
E: There are far fewer working class, manual, unskilled jobs in GB today. The study ignores girls. It is outdated.
C: They may not have been docile workers, but they still met the needs of capitalism by filling unskilled, poorly paid jobs.
