Paul Willis (cultural theorist)

Paul E. Willis ( born 1950 in Wolverhampton ) is a British cultural sociologist and anthropologist. He was professor of ethnography at Keele University and at Princeton University since 2010.

Willis studied at Birmingham University, worked at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University and 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 Labour: how working class kids get working class jobs" ) presented view of resistance are conventionally - proletarian young boys against a middle class - dominated known learning culture, with its central school institution. Since "Learning Labour ", the author is regarded as one of the leading theoreticians of the current British Cultural Studies.

Later, Paul E. Willis published as cultural ethnographer among other things both for deviant subculture of motorcyclists gangs and pop music as well as a theorist to the general development of popular culture in the UK.

In his studies and researches Willis combines conventional ethnographic - empirical approaches as approaches to ethnography smaller everyday and life worlds (in the sense of Gottlieb Schnapper -Arndt ) with theoretical issues and perspectives in the reflexive social science sense ( double hermeneutics ).

In German the previous three books by Paul E. Willis appeared: " fun in the resistance " (1979), " ' Profane Culture' " (1981) and " youth style" (1991). The first was in 2013 under the title fun on Resistance: Learning to Labour issued in a revised edition once again on German.

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• " In contrast to the German sociology of education are there in the Anglo-Saxon scene also interesting theoretical controversies and something like a paradigm shift. Since the early 70s we speak in Anglo-Saxon by a New Sociology of Education, referring critique of the positivist and functionalist sociology of education. This criticism had built on Marxism and critical theory and has but simultaneously advocates as an essential element for the inclusion of qualitative research methods. She has thus expanding both the theoretical repertoire as well as the methodological repertoire. Examples of these New Sociology of Education is still exciting and worth reading study by Paul Willis ' Learning to Labour'. In German under the somewhat misleading title of " fun in the resistance " appeared. He describes the strategies of male working class youth, in opposition to the middle class oriented culture of the school (hence the German title fun at the resistor ) to develop their future identity as a worker or as a member of the working class. I see the way, in the way in which Willis describes the reproduction of the ( male ) working class through practical action in school, an early example of what is traded under the Trade Mark Antony Giddens later as " duality of structure and action." " ( Michael Sertl: ÖFEB newsletter, 1.2002, pp. 8 )