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--Djjr (talk) 18:17, 28 October 2011 (UTC) Anything? Suggest a look at Sociological Abstracts under electronic resources at Mills library. For example, there's this piece: "An Interview with Paul Willis: Commodification, Resistance and Reproduction," by Sassatelli, Roberta; Santoro, Marco in the European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 265-289, May 2009

Paul Willis
Paul Willis is a leading British cultural theorist, and well known as a major contemporary figure in sociology and cultural studies. Paul Willis' Work is widely read in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and education, his work emphasizing consumer culture, socialization, music,and popular culture.

"Outline"
-Basic background -Famous Works -Critics of Willis' works

Basic Background
Paul Willis’s work has focused on mainly, but not exclusively, on the ethnographic study of lived cultural forms in a wide variety of contexts. From highly structured to weakly structured ones, Willis examines how practices of `informal cultural production` help to produce and construct cultural worlds `from below`.

--- Trained in literary criticism at Cambridge, Paul Willis received his PhD in 1972 from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University where he remained as Senior Research Fellow until 1981. During the 1980`s Willis served as youth policy adviser to Wolverhampton Borough Council in the English Midlands. There he produced The Youth Review (published by the Council and Ashgate) which formed the basis for youth policy in that city and for the formation of the democratically elected Youth Council, both still functioning. During the 1990`s he served first as Head of the Division of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies and then as a member of the Professoriate at the University of Wolverhampton. In 2000 Willis co-founded the Sage Journal, Ethnography. In 2003 Willis was hired as a Head Professor of social and cultural ethnography at Keele University. Most recently, Paul Willis is a Professor at Princeton University, as well as editor and founder of the international journal Ethnography, based at Princeton. He has published widely on work, culture, education, and method. Among his many works are “Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs” and “The Ethnographic Imagination”. At Princeton he teaches seminars for juniors and seniors in research methods, the sociology of work, as well as the required course for concentrators, “Claims and Evidence in Sociology.”

Famous Works
Paul Willis is best known for his rich ethnographic studies of working-class youth culture. Willis is a prominent member of the celebrated Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and is the joint founding editor of the journal Ethnography. His most famous works include "Learning To Labour", "Profane Culture", and "The Ethnographic Imagination." Willis' studies thrived off of distinct fieldwork experiences with everyday people. In 'Learning to Labour', Willis conducted an in-depth ethnography of a set of working class 'lads' in a town in the West Midlands referred to as 'Hammertown'. Published in 1977, Learning To Labor portrays the enduring relelvance of class in its cognitive and sumbolic dimensions. In his book, he conducts a series of interviews and observations within a school, with the aim of discovering why 'working class kids get working class jobs'. Willis stresses that sturctural conditions constrain symbolic work to rigid boundaries, more specifically the ever-shifting, unrelenting structure of 'class'. Willis states that symbolic resistance is short-lived, but still, it may be favored, as well as undermined, by structural conditions which may include public policies. (Sassatelli & Santoro Interview)

Books
•	Learning to Labour - in New times, (ed with Nadine Dolby & Greg Dimitriadis). New York: Routledge, forthcoming •	The Ethnographic Imagination ,. Cambridge: Polity, 2000 •	jointly edited with M Castells et al,  Neuvas Perspectivas Criticas en Educacion. Barcelona: Paidós Educador, 1994 •	(with S Jones, J Canaan and G Hurd) Common Culture. Milton Keynes: Open University, Press 1990, reprinted 1994 & 1996. •	Moving Culture. London: Gulbenkian Foundation, 1990. •	(with A Bekenn, T Ellis and D Whitt) The Youth Review. Aldershot: Gower, 1988 •	(with A Bekenn, T Ellis and D Whitt) The Social Condition of Young People in Wolverhampton in 1984. Wolverhampton: Wolverhampton Borough Council, 1985. •	Profane Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 •	Learning to Labour. Aldershot: Gower, 1977, reprinted 1978, 79, 80,81,88,94,98, 2001

"Crtitics of Willis' Work"
Joan McFarland argues in the British Journal of Sociology that in many of Willis' works, such as Learning to Labor, he is only coming from a male standpoint. She states that while it is important to highlighting unemployment as a major form of inequality, as many of his works portray, his male orientation has the effect of marginalizing and misrepresenting the interests of women. She also suggests that Willis' recommendations are somewhat anachronistic, and also too class orientated. While class should be a central analysis of unemployment, its important to stress that gender and race are also central issues when discussing this topic.