Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young

Politics & Social Sciences

Paul E. Willis

Social Sciences

Open University Press

This book which has now established itself as a classic study of working class boys describes how Paul Willis followed a group of 'lads' as they passed through the last two years of school and into work. The book explains that for 'the lads' it is their own culture which blocks teaching and prevents the realisation of liberal education aims. This culture exposes some of the contradictions within these formal aims and actually supplies the operational criteria by which a future in wage labour is judged. Paul Willis explores how their own culture can guide working class lads on to the shop floor.  This is an uncompromising book which has provoked considerable discussion and controversy in educational circles throughout the world - it has been translated into Finnish, German, French, Swedish, Japanese and Spanish.

Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs

Avebury

Learning to Labour

Sociology

Ashgate Publishing, Limited

Common Culture: Symbolic Work At Play In The Everyday Cultures Of The Young

'High culture' and art are often categories of exclusion more than of inclusion, with little appeal to young people and little connection with their lives. To many, art is something special or heightened, displayed in galleries but not part of the everyday lives of 'normal' people. Yet there is, Paul Willis insists, a vibrant symbolic life and creativity in everyday activity and expression. People repeatedly attempt to communicate something about their actual of potential cultural significance. According to Wills, 'the genie of common culture is out of the bottle - let out by commercial carelessness. Not stuffing it back in, but seeing which wishes may be granted should be the stuff of our imagination. This living common culture is the focus of this provocative and uplifting book. Looking at the everyday culture of youth, Willis reveals the extraordinary symbolic creativity of the ways in which people use, humanize, decorate and invest with meaning their life spaces and social practices - through their choice of clothes, television, music, fashion, the rituals of romance, styles of banter, and friendships. Far from being trivial, the pursuit of cultural expression in everyday life is crucial in an era of modernization and a crisis of values to the creation and sustenance of individual and group identities, revealing that for youth, 'there is work, even desperate work, in their play.'

Westview Press

Moving Culture: An Enquiry into the Cultural Activities of Young People

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

C Gulbenkian Foundn

Hamātaun No Yarōdomo

Makoto, Kumazawa

Jun Yamada

Unknown

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Books by Paul E. Willis