Paul Willis’s work has focused mainly, but not exclusively, on the ethnographic study of lived cultural forms in a wide variety of contexts.
[2] Trained in literary criticism at Cambridge,[2] 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.
Willis is a prominent member of the celebrated Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and is the joint founding editor of the journal Ethnography.
Published in 1975, Learning To Labour has become a standard in the field of sociology and portrays the enduring relevance of class in its cognitive and symbolic dimensions.
"[9] 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 highlight 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.
In a 2003 interview, Willis states "I see Learning to Labour — and my more recent work — as studies of forms of cultural production of meaning in everyday life.
In this respect, I always feel pushed into a sociological straight-jacket when people take the outcomes of my work in terms of resistance or anomie, because my point is the general production of meanings within a context.