The original book looked at a small group of young men - "the lads" - who epitomised an anti-school culture within which machismo was paramount.
Paradoxically, their resistance to conformity also helped to prepare them for their working-class futures on building sites and on the shop floor.
Willis's work has been subject to considerable criticism as well as widespread celebration. His empirical study was firmly located in a time and place - the Midlands - where there was still a largely homogenous White working class, and jobs to be had. But it was a disappearing world. He has been accused of romanticising working-class culture, of ignoring wider dimensions of young people's lives, and of failing to comment sufficiently on cultural forms of patriarchy and racism. On the other hand, his analysis demanded a reappraisal of the relationship between schooling and the economy. His approach to "critical ethnography" is one that has endured, for both its academic and political implications. This book explores, from a variety of perspectives, the extent to which Willis's methodology and ideas still have meaning in changing times.
Different contributors forge very different arguments from different points of departure. Many draw on the author's further work, including The Youth Review he led for Wolverhampton in the mid-1980s, when he sought to develop a local youth policy grounded in the experience of young people, when national youth policy was increasingly centrally determined, and Common Culture, reflecting on the symbolic creativity of young people.
Despite pursuing various criticisms of Learning to Labour, different authors argue for its continuing relevance in the study of, among other things, masculinities, educational resistance, social class and class consciousness, in relation to the labour market and the wider destinations of young people - notably Black young people in the US prison system.
Willis himself concludes the book by first assessing the widespread social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place since 1977, and then - as the subject of an interview - offering a more autobiographical account.
It is gripping stuff, particularly for those who consider Learning to Labour a powerful text.
LEARNING TO LABOR IN NEW TIMES
Edited by Nadine Dolby and Greg Dimitriadis with Paul Willis Published by RoutledgeFalmer 2004 Price 50 (hardback) 240 pages ISBN 0 415 94854 1.
