Educating Mats: Encountering Finnish ‘lads’ and Paul Willis's Learning to Labour in Sweden

Introduction

What does wishing to become an ethnographer imply if a specific understanding of culture is put before sociology? And how is it supposed to happen if one is busy with, even occupied by, something seemingly different? My answer is an encounter with a book. Because I did not know at the time what I was later able to understand: that the book in question offered a theoretically informed ethnography in the form of a monograph. Perhaps in the area of something called cultural sociology. Even less did I know that production of culture, as search for meaning and autonomy in life, can be understood in such a way that it can explain reproduction of class in society. Provided, of course, that one understands the relational complexes of lived circumstances which required a certain theorizing that was in deep contact with, but not identical to, the self-understanding formulated by those being studied by the ethnographer. And, indeed, it was intriguingly a matter of culture.

Neither did I know that the book belonged to the emerging body of British youth culture research being done at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham at the beginning of the 1970s. At CCCS, as was stated by John Clark, Stuart Hall and others in Resistance through Rituals, ‘culture’ refers to ‘that level at which social groups develop distinct patterns of life, and give expressive form to their social and material life-experience’ (Clark et al., 1976: 10). Understanding culture thus includes what in this case the young create and how they create it. Such creations, it was added, have their own ‘maps of meaning’ (1976: 10) – maps that make what group members think and express comprehensible to the members themselves. Just as in the actual book I came to encounter at a specifically decisive time in my life.

The book in question is of course Learning to Labour from 1977. More than any other, this book would mark me as a student, teacher and researcher. It basically taught me to be what I became: a cultural sociologist with a deep interest in the cultural drama of the extraordinary ordinariness of everyday life. This is, then, ‘Educating Mats’, and my deeply interlaced purpose is threefold. I will exhibit how and why my encounter with Willis's book made me want to be a cultural sociologist and an ethnographer. In doing that I will at the same time demonstrate what cultural sociology can be, and use Learning to Labour and my encounter with it as an example of what such sociology can do. Not only with the phenomena under study but also with the becoming cultural sociologist and ethnographer himself. We need, though, to take into account that my first ineffaceable encounter with Willis's study took place more than 40 years ago.

In trying to fulfil these aims I let myself be drawn to what the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called application (1993: 307), since understanding inescapably amounts to understanding oneself. The quest for knowledge involves the inquirer, and the endeavour to understand is, thus, a self-including event. In addition, understanding always involves interpretation, because interpretation is how we can make our understanding of something accessible to ourselves and to others. ‘We have’, then, according to Gadamer, ‘the ability to open ourselves up to the superior claim the text makes and to respond to what it has to tell us’ (p. 311). And such an ‘application’ will generate new ‘lived experience’, which philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey construed as, ‘a distinctive and characteristic mode in which reality is there-for-me’ since I have ‘a reflexive awareness of it, because I possess it immediately as belonging to me in some sense’ (1985: 223). Using cultural sociology, we can understand this ‘reality’ in a way we usually do not in ordinary life. Since, as Alexander argues, its fundamental task ‘is to bring the unconscious cultural structures that regulate society into the light of mind’ (2003: 4).

What is fascinating here are that such enacting cultural structures are not unilaterally exercised from the outside. We often respond to them willingly, due to the fact that doing so feels right, and also when we try to think about it. Nevertheless, we cannot easily quite explain why. The answer is that symbolic structures are, as Alexander understands it, ‘not only external to actors but internal to them’ (2003: 4). Indeed, they have an ‘inside’ where they become deeply meaningful. Just as in my encounter with Learning to Labour.

How could I become a teacher?

In the fall term of 1977, I was employed as a non-qualified teacher in a secondary school. The setting was a small factory town in southern Sweden, dominated by a large Volvo factory. At the time, Olofström, which is the real name of the place, had just begun to decline from its historical peak of slightly more than 17,000 inhabitants. Volvo employed just over 5000 people (Trondman, 1999). The question ‘Who are you talking about?’ would receive the jocular answer ‘You know, the one in the blue boiler suit at Volvo!’

I had recently reached the age of 22. My pupils, who had just entered the 8th grade, were around 15. When they were small children, they had moved with their parents from northern Finland to southern Sweden. They came to Olofström because their parents could find work in the quickly growing automobile industry. However, their new life in Sweden was not without its problems. There were jobs, to be sure, but organizing basic living conditions such as housing and schools took time. But new apartment buildings would soon be ready in an area called Vilboken, which the locals immediately defamed as a segregated area that existed only to be avoided. It was said to be full of ‘dangerous’ Finnish youngsters, that is, as if fear and ignorance were the right way of understanding others in a community that was growing like mad.

A few years ago, in a second-hand bookshop, I found a report from 1971 that turned out to be a goldmine. It is called The Youth Investigation and was written by sociologists Rune Persson, Anita Dahlgren, Rune Dahlgren and Cecilia Wedberg. They had been commissioned by The Swedish State Youth Council to investigate young people's leisure time, the purpose being to promote integration in Olofström. However, the investigation, which looked at young people aged 13 to 20, also included sections dealing with issues other than leisure. One of these issues concerned local young people's attitudes toward Finnish and other immigrant youth. According to the authors of the report, ‘All Swedish youth we have talked to were well aware of the fact that Olofström has, in a Swedish context, a uniquely large proportion of immigrants’ (1971: 200). ‘In general’, the authors went on to state, ‘the attitudes toward the immigrant youth are negative’ (p. 200). One prominent explanation was housing segregation. They are ‘separate groups’ and ‘different camps’, a local Swedish boy said. According to another boy, ‘It's wrong to crowd foreigners together in special places’. ‘Immigrant youth are noisier’, a third boy claimed, which he thought to be ‘a bit disturbing’ (p. 200). One Swedish girl described the Finnish youth as ‘hopeless’ and ‘the worst kind’, because they ‘drive like idiots’, they ‘draw knives’, they ‘fight’, and ‘they keep pigs and poultry in their apartments’ (p. 202). It is clear from these statements, the authors of the report concluded, ‘that the Swedish youth in Olofström often make negative comments about immigrants – making it even more difficult for immigrant youth to adapt. We regard these statements as reflections of very worrying tendencies’ (p. 202).

A few years after the publication of The Youth Investigation, my girlfriend and I moved to Vilboken, a move deeply informed by a seemingly personal structure of feeling. Indeed, we were among the young, prospective social climbers and the alternative middle class who were activated by a zeitgeist that made us feel that we wanted to live in segregated areas, not the least to make a contribution to de-segregation and new social relationships. As noted, enacting symbolic structures have an ‘inside’ where they become meaningful. It certainly happened now and then, we came to learn, that some drove like crazy, fought or drew a knife. On one occasion, a Swedish man threatened me with a knife. But we never saw an apartment with pigs or poultry in it. However, such rumours have a life of their own. One afternoon, a man crashed into the door to our apartment so forcefully that it came off its hinges and fell into the hallway. The man fell, fast asleep, on top of the door. It had been the man's intention to open the door to the apartment opposite us, where someone lived with whom he was very angry. When we called the municipal housing company to fix the door, we were told that we couldn't put the blame on someone else. They knew very well how ‘the likes of us’ could be. When the company later was told that we were school employees, we were immediately offered an apartment in a neighbourhood better suited to ‘the likes of us.’

However, we chose to stay in Vilboken, made many new friends and learned for life. For example, how relatively few people with great problems can come to represent an entire neighbourhood. But also that these few may in fact cause very real problems, both for themselves and for others – primarily others in the neighbourhood. We also learned that some children live under miserable conditions, also as a consequence of who they were expected to be. We thus got to experience what I later learned to know as ‘double consciousness’, a concept made theoretically explicit by the African-American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. This refers to being forced to ‘look at one self through the eyes of the other’ and ‘measuring one's soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ (1989: 5). What does it feel like, Du Bois asked, to be a problem?

The school did not know how to organize, teach or treat the increasing number of newly arrived Finnish children, who did not know Swedish. Initially, in accordance with a severe assimilation logic, the children were placed in Swedish-language classes. Leave your Finnish language behind, and we will make you Swedish. There was hope that they would learn Swedish quickly and integrate. The problem was, however, that the Finnish children did not understand what the Swedish teacher was saying. Moreover, the Swedish teacher did not understand what the Finnish children had to say. Consequently, the children's level of achievement tended to lag behind. This helped me understand, at an early stage, that school achievement cannot be reduced to living conditions outside the school, and that children do not want to fail.

More recently, social psychologist and cognitivist Carol Dweck has helped me understand ‘that people develop beliefs that organize their world and give meaning to their experiences’ (2000: xi). She calls these convictions ‘meaning systems’ (p. xi). And early in life children develop different meaning systems, or using another of Dweck's terms, ‘self-theories’ (p. xi), which have marked consequences for how they view and develop their capacity to learn at school. These theories, in turn, can generate patterns of mastery or helplessness. Some children develop a self-theory that says they learn easily, giving them a positive outlook on learning. They want to learn new things and demonstrate their endurance in the face of difficulties. They are activated by a pattern of mastery because they know they can learn, especially if they keep working at it. They believe they have the necessary cognitive capacity. This belief has been activated by a self-theory that increasingly confirms that this is the case. Other children develop a self-theory that says they are the kind who find it hard to learn. Based on this self-understanding, they find it more logical to resist learning, because they are the kind who cannot do it. And why fail? It is better, in this case, to avoid learning altogether and stick to something one can already do, since it is sad and painful to be exposed to daily failures at school (Trondman et al., 2014). And thus, their schoolwork lags behind, rendering them increasingly helpless.

Considering the above, what we can say is that Dweck has put culture – in terms of meaning systems like self-theories – before learning. She has shown her understanding of the importance of how children perceive their own capacity to learn. And my Finnish ‘lads’ – who were children of parents with a low education and pupils in a school that had weak opportunity structures for them – had clearly developed a pattern of helplessness at an early stage. On the other hand, they showed considerable mastery of the art of coming to school to make sure that teaching would not necessarily result in learning. Indeed, they had learned something.

The Youth Investigation also had something to say about the young people's school experiences in Olofström. ‘It is widely held that the senior level of the compulsory school does not work’, Persson and his colleagues wrote, and continued: ‘It is much too sloppy, according to many, and the pupils learn nothing’ (1971: 51). ‘It seems as if you are free to do whatever you want in the compulsory school’ (p. 52), a local Swedish girl stated. According to another girl with the same background, ‘The grades reflected your behaviour more than your level of achievement’ (p. 52). Yet another girl claimed that the senior level in Olofström was ‘cruel’ because ‘the teachers there looked down on you’ (p. 52). ‘From the point of view of the youth’, The Youth Investigation concluded, ‘the upper level of the compulsory school does not seem to work properly; hardly anyone has anything decidedly positive to say about the time they spent there’ (p. 53).

During the employment interview that got me the job as a teacher, I reminded the principal that I lacked formal qualifications. He set my mind at rest, saying I should not worry too much about that fact, because the boys whom I was to teach needed all kinds of help, now that they were about to enter the eighth grade. An overall view, he added, is important too. Therefore, it would be good if I had my own lessons with the boys and went with them to their other lessons, ensuring that the instruction worked there as well. But mainly, we would be in a room designated for observational and special instruction, ‘the Obs’ in popular parlance, which was located in a wing hallway on the second floor. Thus, I had become an ‘Obs teacher for immigrants’.

My educational credentials were nothing to boast about. I had relatively mediocre grades from a prestigious municipal school that had just ceased to be the state grammar school in my hometown of Kalmar. Because I played ice hockey, I wanted to become a physical education instructor. My grades, though, were far from sufficient. As an alternative, I was admitted to a recreation leader-training program at Jämshög Folk High School, located outside of the Municipality of Olofström, where I had been on the reserve list. It was after I had graduated from the recreation leader program that I obtained my unqualified teacher job with the ‘lads’ – about whom I knew nothing and was told nothing beforehand. For example, I was not told that, after less than a school year, most of the school's teachers did not want to see these boys in their classrooms. Consequently, the principal had to set his hopes on me: a relatively mediocre senior high school student, newly born recreation leader and ice hockey player. Perhaps I would be able to handle, or rather tackle, them somehow. But at that point summer was around the corner and the beginning of fall semester was still far away.

My first encounter with the ‘lads’

I will never forget the first time I met the Finnish ‘lads’. That morning it was my task to ensure that they behaved themselves during a chemistry lesson. When I opened the classroom door, the regular chemistry teacher was already in place, thank heavens. Some of the ‘lads’ ran through the laboratory room on the second floor, opened a window and stepped out onto the small roof over the smoking area to have a cigarette. Two other ‘lads’ lit up burners intended to heat substances that were to be poured into test tubes for experiments. For these two ‘lads’, the burners became part of a dangerous game of burning swords. Long before the movie Star Wars came out. Just the thought of what could happen while they were fencing made them scream out loud.

Some other ‘lads’ took seats at the very back of the room. While sitting there, they hung their capped heads and their straggling towheaded hair over the backrests of chairs turned backwards. A tall, slim ‘lad’ yawned in a demonstrative manner in the middle of the mess, worming his way into the fume cupboard, which was otherwise meant for nasty-smelling chemistry experiments. He soon seemed to be asleep. While I, during the first half hour of my first lesson as a teacher, tried to make the ‘lads’, for whom I was now responsible, sit down and listen. Valdemar – a very low-profile but knowledgeable chemistry teacher – taught according to the textbook and the week's plan. ‘That's all I can do’, he told me afterwards, dejectedly. If I had known about The Youth Investigation at the time, I would have understood what the interviewed pupils in Olofström had to say about the school. Because, as the educational scientist David K. Cohen (2011) claims: transforming teaching into learning requires the pupil's acquiescence. Today, teaching Finnish children, at least in Finland, is seen in a completely different light, in that Finnish students are among those who obtain the highest scores on international measures of knowledge and achievement (Sahlberg, 2012; Walker, 2017).

If Statistics Sweden had carried out an investigation, both the Finnish ‘lads’ and I would have been classified as having the same socioeconomic background. On our respective fathers’ sides, we would have been children of low-educated workers. When I grew up my father was an unemployed warehouseman, with no income, and hence my mother was the sole breadwinner. But during my own school years, I never witnessed anything resembling the rowdiness and noise my Finnish ‘lads’ were capable of. Foremost so, I think, due to the fact that I did not grow up in an industrial town, had some middle-class friends and went to school in a time when a teacher's authority was a given fact (Trondman, 2018). My mum was also a strong supporter of school and teachers. Thus, my class culture was not of the working class of the ‘lads’. For sure, Willis's ‘lads’ would have seen me as a complete ‘ear’ole’.

Nevertheless, I began to feel for the ‘lads’, who had become my ‘lads’ – an expression that I realized I had begun to use more and more frequently. But what should I do to win them over – to be, rightly so, a teacher? I should, for sure, create some order and peace so that they in a focused way could listen to me the teacher and study. Yes, indeed, I was a young teacher with what the schooled Marxist probably would call a full-fledged ‘bourgeois gaze’. I had put my faith in the possibilities of social mobility, not in the revolutionary avant-garde. Even though a few years previously, during a drunken high school graduation celebration, I had promised myself never to open a ‘goddamn book’ again in my life. But the recently completed recreation leader program had set me in motion. I had actually begun to read books voluntarily. Indeed, novels, poetry, and non-fiction. Obviously I put culture before my own becoming so that culture could act upon me – that is, educating Mats, as I was doing and am still trying to do.

An evening course in pedagogy

During the first school year in which I became a teacher for my Finnish ‘lads’, I began an evening course in pedagogy at Lund University. I wanted to learn how to make them accept teaching that becomes learning. Everyone who grew up in a working-class family did not have to become a worker. That's what I thought anyway, because socially uneven recruitment into higher education was a well-known concept at the time, and something that should be fought. Education should be for all. Today, I would understand the motivational forces behind what I was thinking and doing in terms of what the cultural sociologist Isaac Ariel Reed calls ‘landscapes of meaning’ (2011). Deep down, I wished the same for my own insecure but educationally eager ‘self.’ Because ‘the currents that run through our affairs’, as Alexander put it, ‘ wash over us, cleanse us, and push us head over heals into some unknown place’ (2005: 37). And, hence, everything cannot be reduced to the socioeconomic position of parents, or ‘class interests and control’ (p. 46) Thus, Alexander asked himself, reflexively observing his own (at the time) radical life course in the US of the late 1960s, ‘Was culture not more autonomous? Did it not have symbolic processes that exerted their own, specifically cultural effect?’ (p. 46, my emphasis).

My Finnish ‘lads’, I soon learned, had their own hopes, their own enacting ‘landscape of meaning’ (Reed, 2011). They wanted to, they said, ‘just quit school’ and ‘start working’, and they had not read the governmental Youth Investigation. ‘Those who quit after compulsory school,’ it summarized, ‘often regret, already after one or two years, that they did not have a different attitude previously’ (1971: 53). But at the time my ‘lads’ were in the 8th grade, they wanted to escape school for what they thought of as an approaching and a more attractive future. They wanted jobs – real jobs at the Volvo factory, which meant physical work, because a real man works with his body. Achieves something. So that what you have done can be seen. Everything else, they thought, was a little silly. Like being an office employee, who obediently shuffles papers, or a language teacher who knows that some words are called verbs. How could people like that handle a ‘true’ and, thus, ‘real’ world? It was also a question of quickly earning one's own money, with which one could buy things, like a motorbike, a fishing rod, or an electric guitar. As they understood it, this would allow them to do what they wanted.

For my own part, I could do nothing but stick to the idea that working-class children are not predestined to be factory workers. The school must at least, I heard myself say, provide prerequisites for life choices that extend beyond conditions outside school, without making these children feel alienated in the education system. The school should also be for ‘them,’ for ‘us.’ It was my pedagogical desire to be a teacher who could even help children of uneducated parents to regard themselves as subjects who were destined for higher education. To make this possible, I thought, it is not only necessary to teach in an intelligible way, but also to understand the lads’ world as seen from their horizon. I frequently failed in this ambition, particularly during my first semester. This was because, without having established a solid relationship with them, I didn't stand a chance. It was as if they had made up their minds that no teacher would stand a chance, since schooling was not for people like them, and the school should know exactly that.

But, despite everything, my Finnish ‘lads’ came to like me after all, though they thought I was kind of ‘wishy-washy.’ They almost felt sorry for me, because they couldn't help me out of my situation. Why, they often wondered, didn't I give up my project with them and get a life of my own? A better life! A better job! It still happens that we talk about this, after almost four decades. What were we doing, actually? Who did we become? Still today, I cannot think about the school system without pondering what the sociologist Robert K. Merton once referred to as ‘opportunity structures’ (1996). A school must be conceived of and practised as organized opportunities that offer resources, occasions and events that increase pupils’ chances of achieving specific outcomes.

There was one event that clearly bewildered my girlfriend and me. One evening, we had invited the ‘lads’ to our home in Vilboken for coffee and sandwiches. They were meticulously well mannered. They greeted us politely and voluntarily took off their Shell and BP caps. They hung their jackets neatly on the hat rack in the hall. They were even unsure whether it was appropriate to sit on our couch, because the snuffboxes in their back pockets might leave marks on the fabric. Naturally, caps and jackets were not what primarily concerned me in my work with these ‘lads’, but their behaviour was nevertheless encouraging and inspiring. It was amazing that a situation such as this one, with trusting relationships that were coming into being, could so radically change the lads’ behaviour – ‘lads’ who were otherwise judged too readily based on their background, housing area and school behaviour. I had never seen this well-behaved side of them at school, and yet it was quite clear that they knew what they were doing. They even enjoyed behaving in this way. They were not necessarily the Finnish ‘lads’ that prejudiced others expected them to be. This brings to mind what the cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote in his outline of self-analysis: ‘I must also try to evoke the space of possibilities as it then appeared to me’, that is, that which ‘tended to produce the element of inner conviction and inspired attachment’ (2007: 4).

I now remember a General English lesson in which teaching became learning. The ‘lads’ agreed to do a close analysis of the lyrics to a song by the rock group Supertramp. This was an effort on my part to be a bit pedagogically progressive by sidestepping the textbook. I was trying to meet them in their own world. The name of the song, suitably enough, was ‘School’, from the album Crime of the Century (1974). The first lines read: I can see you in the morning/when you go to school/Don't forget your books/you know you got to learn the golden rule/Teacher tells you stop your play/and get on with your work/and be like Johnny-too-good/Well don't you know/he never shirks – he's coming along. The ‘lads’, with my help, translated word for word, one line at a time. The goal was not only to understand every word and line, but also what the song was really about. Because, according to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, that I of course did know about then, translation includes two endeavours: first, to translate, in a strict sense, a message from one language into another; and second, in a broader sense, to interpret something and create a ‘meaningful whole’ (2006: 11). Thus, translating entails ‘the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one's own welcoming house’ (p. 10). In this Ricoeur found a ‘happiness’ he called ‘linguistic hospitality’ (p. 10).

While working ourselves through the Supertramp lyrics my ‘För att förstå inte bara ord för ord och mening för mening/itt arbete med pojkarna. e uppträtt som de mest de hade velat var’ ‘lads’ said that the text was largely about the school's attempts to bring up ‘quite difficult pupils’ who ‘offer very noisy resistance’. Just like they were themselves. Once aware of this, they laughed with an equal measure of amusement and embarrassment. They also felt a bit deceived. After all, we had completed a lesson at school. Indeed, they were disciplined but not, I think, punished. When we reached the final lines of the song, I realized that they understood what I was really aiming at: Maybe I am mistaken expecting you to fight/Or maybe I am just crazy/I don't know wrong from right/But while I am still living/I’ve just got this to say/It's always up to you/if you want to be that/want to see that/want to see it that way – you're coming along.

I remember that we had a good time doing this. We found each other in a way. Translated each other for each other. To be sure, I was slightly ashamed of how the song ended, on more of an individualistic note. It did not perfectly fit the spirit of the times, and that somehow disturbed me deep down. But the ‘lads’ realized that they could understand, and not only General English. They also realized that what I really wanted was for them to keep up with their studies. Many years later, I would write a text entitled Den solidariska underordningens logik [The logic of loyal subordination] (Trondman, 1999). How could I use my constantly growing ‘relational capital,’ a term that I came to develop later on (see also Trondman, 2004; 2018), to win them over for studies as well, so that we – my ‘lads’ and I – would not be subordinated in our own ‘gated community’, as a ‘we’ against ‘the school’; we the jointly helpless; we who reproduce social class and masculinity.

Looking back, I am indeed pleased about one thing. All of my ‘lads’, except one who never came to school, received their final grades, and almost all of them went on to high school for vocational training. After high school, most of them began working at the local Volvo plant. Some are still workers. One has a white-collar job. One is a teacher. One is an entrepreneur. One is a hopeless alcoholic. One committed suicide. It is shocking to see how different life can turn out in the end, even when sociological indicators such as socioeconomic background, education level and schooling seem to be the same.

The other night I read a text entitled ‘What These Children Are Like’ by the African-American writer and essayist Ralph Ellison. The text is based on a lecture Ellison gave about African-American boys who offered such resistance to school that they were unable to cope with it. It was 1963. The best teachers, Ellison claimed, are those ‘who can convey to them an awareness that they do indeed come from somewhere, some place of human value, and that what they’ve learned there does count in the larger society’ (1995: 70). The worst thing a teacher can do is to treat pupils and their life contexts as if they were ‘completely emasculated of potentiality’ (p. 70). When this happened, the boys Ellison wrote about became, as he states it, ‘living critics of their environment, of our society, and of our educational system. And they are quite savage critics of some of their teachers’ (p. 74). Yes, indeed, do I know that by application, lived experiences and cultural sociology.

But now it was fall semester, 1977. Both proud and nervous, I was on my way to my first course at a university – a course in pedagogy. I had begun my quest for the key to the promised land of social mobility. Lund University, the Ox-or-the-bridge of Sweden, must certainly have something to offer. But I was definitely nervous. What if I didn't have the capacity to grasp it? For sure, my self-theory was a bit shaky.

Course literature

One of the required books in pedagogy was written by a certain Paul Willis. That book, as the reader understands, was Learning to Labour. On the cover of my edition is a black-and-white photograph of some younger teenage boys. They do indeed look like they think they own the world – at least their own world: where they are standing, on top of what looks like a container overfull of unsorted garbage. That picture awoke in me a strange feeling of acquaintance, because the boys in the picture reminded me of my Finnish ‘lads’. Again, some of the memories haunt me. Memories of how they took me to a garbage dump to kill big rats, using saloon rifles and a chemistry kit from a mail-order firm. Of how they took me to a railroad track to see who would stay longest on the track when the train was coming. Of how they drove mopeds down a hillside in Vilboken, drunk on Finnish home-brew with their caps pulled down over their eyes. The winner was the one who didn't end up in the ditch. The losers had to drink more and drive again. Finally, only the most intoxicated participant remained. But we also went fishing, listened to music, and went to Lund to see concerts with their favourite bands Thin Lizzy and Status Quo. We started a rock band, Snedsteg (Sidestep), which worked with a theatre group of mine, Leva Livet (Live Life).

The theatre group consisted mostly of quite boisterous middle-class girls who, among other things, set up a play about young people's lives in the wake of labour immigration. We received the culture award from the municipality. Aftonbladet (a national evening newspaper) wrote in glowing terms about our lively participation in a theatre festival in Karlstad, and we got a grant from a Finnish-Swedish cultural fund. Clearly, I wanted the ‘lads’ to see themselves – in the life they lived, in the plays we put on, so that the plays would offer new ideas about the lives they could live. So that culture could be put before the conditions they experienced in and outside school. Once I got really angry with them: ‘If you’d been willing to learn as much about the Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson and about language as you already know about Thin Lizzy or spinning reels, fishing-rods, lures and tuned-up mopeds,’ I shouted, ‘you’d have excellent grades.’ They laughed – because they thought, or pretended, that things like authors and verbs never could and never would stick in their heads. ‘If you can learn the names of all Thin Lizzy's albums, then you can learn that Harry Martinson, who came from this municipality, wrote Nässlorna blommar (Flowering nettle) (1935) and Vägen ut (The way out) (1936)’, I answered, I thought quite wisely, in my frustration.

They understood, but offered strong resistance. I, at least, did not deprive them of their potentiality, to use Ellison's term. My Finnish ‘lads’ understood that. But I was the one who would get caught up in the social mobility movement, not them. Five years later, I began my postgraduate studies in sociology. My first anthology publication was titled ‘Den panerade grytlappen: Om manlig motkultur, keativitet, humor och självbedrägeri’ [The coated oven mitten: On masculine counter-culture, creativity, humour and self-deception] (1991). Of course, I had to do my own Learning to Labour in which I particularly emphasized the cognitive component in the lads school-counter culture, that is, how they through their constant troublemaking in the face of schooling symbolized their own cleverness. In other words, to prove themselves smarter than the teachers, without having the teachers understand that. Consequently, the ‘lads’ I studied coated an oven mitten, yes, they did it with eggs and breadcrumbs, to make the teacher in home economics believe it was a Wiener schnitzel, and, indeed, in this, at least in a moment of truth, they were successful. Of course, they got the lowest of grades while they thought they had proven themselves smarter than the teacher and the rest, who could not get the hidden logic of the ‘lads’, but to do what they were told to do, no, never. And so, after two years of vocational education also these ‘lads’ let themselves become workers at a local plant in their ‘Hammertown’.

Finally, I wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled ‘Bilden av en klassresa’ [A picture of class travel] (1994), a study in which I tried to understand so that I could explain social mobility and experiences and outcomes of being a student with working-class origins at university. On the book's cover, there is a photograph of a number of ‘lads’ standing on top of a hill, looking as if they owned the world. I took the picture myself with my first camera when I was 11.

Willis's lads: A research method and question

Some parts of Willis's book were much easier to understand than others. I did understand the descriptions of the group of English working-class lads that he had studied, even if reading the English text was a clear, but with time surmountable, obstacle. Dictionaries were available and I learned to appreciate them. There were also, of course, local accents, which were harder to get.

Willis's ‘lads’ lived in an industrial town, which he called ‘Hammertown’. It was outside Birmingham, UK, at the epicentre of modern industrialism. Most of the parents worked in large factories. The ‘lads’ wanted to quit school and begin working there too, and become like their fathers. The ‘lads’ wanted cash, and jobs were easy to come by. And to work in a factory was indeed what most people did at that time.

Just like my Finnish ‘lads’, the ‘Hammertown’ ‘lads’ used most of their school time to make sure that teaching did not become learning. They just did not seem to bother. There was essentially nothing that those English ‘lads’ did at their school in ‘Hammertown’ that my Finnish ‘lads’ did not do as well in Olofström. Indeed, they were, when they decided to, the masters of chaos and order. They even looked like my ‘lads’: middle-length hair, denim jackets, shirts with big collars, bell-bottom jeans and platform shoes. As noted, in Olofström, gas station caps were the thing as well. In addition, denim jackets should be decorated with the names of favourite bands and motorcycles.

What Willis did as a researcher was referred to as ethnography: being with people where they lived, understood and made their lives within a framework of limiting and enabling circumstances and relations. Circumstances and relations they tried to control by finding expressions of human dignity, regardless of the location: at home, in the factory, in public or at school. Nearly a quarter of a century later, Paul Willis and I co-authored an article about the ethnographic method. We called it ‘Manifesto for Ethnography’ (2000). In it we claimed that, when ethnographic analyses are at their best – when theory makes us see empirical data in a new light and when empirical data challenge theory in a new way, such that both processes interact in a kind of dialectic of double surprise – then analytic points emerge, which at best have an aha effect on the researcher and the reader (Willis and Trondman, 2000: 12–14; Trondman, 2017). ‘Wow’, the researcher or reader then thinks, ‘I didn't realize before that one could see things this way, but I do now.’ In this way, both parties can understand and be challenged by each other's respective horizons. Because the ethnographer learns from his/her encounters with the field, and the field learns from those who challenge their lives using cultural analysis. Both parties, then, are given a chance to not remain the same, provided they somehow interact after the analysis.

This was, of course, the aha effect that happened to me while I as a non-qualified teacher for Finnish ‘lads’ in Olofström was struggling to take in Learning to Labour. That is to understand how and why Willis's ‘lads’ and my Finnish ‘lads’ were letting themselves be wage earners, while I, just as willingly, was learning to be a class traveller. Looking back now, it was unmistakably the case, at the time, that I saw the ‘lads’ more clearly than I saw myself. There are, as noted, ways of seeing and, of course, ways of not seeing. Indeed, my Finnish ‘lads’ did see me better than they saw themselves.

Why, then, does Willis give us his multifaceted ethnographic renderings? Well, because his study is motivated by an intriguing research question. He wanted to understand why boys of working-class fathers themselves become workers. He was then in search of an answer that could not be found in a table showing a correlation between the fathers’ class affiliation and the sons’ class destination. ‘The difficult thing to explain about how working class kids get working class jobs is why they let themselves’, Willis stated in the opening paragraph of his book (1977: 1). The question of ‘why’ thus requires a ‘how-answers’, which includes the boys’ forms of self-understanding, feelings and actions, in their own societal structural context of meaning. And thus we get to know the informal group, its members and their ways of understanding and handling both school and life outside the school.

Willis begins his analysis by stating that the essence of the group's doings is their ‘entrenched general and personalized opposition to “authority”’ (1977: 11). This is a matter of challenging the school's order and expectations and, not least, of having a good laugh – a laugh that reveals the teachers’ inability to control them, and thus to bring them up. Moreover, it reveals the teachers’ inability to transform teaching into learning. This group-based cultural talent amounts to what Willis calls a counter-school culture (p. 11).

While reading the book, I constantly asked myself: How could this Paul Willis describe a group of ‘lads’ outside Birmingham in England and, at the same time, be describing the Finnish ‘lads’ in my observational clinic in the industrial small town of Olofström in Sweden? When reading about Joey or Spansky, two central characters in his book, I immediately knew their Finnish names in Olofström. They were, clearly, Veli-Matti and Juha. Where Joey said that school could never make him laugh, Juha said ironically that he could always ‘come up with some fun stuff that other couldn't’. At school, in contrast, teachers always came up with ‘boring stuff’. Where Spansky said that being away from school was tedious, because then he couldn't have a good time, Veli-Matti said slyly ‘beg your pardon, but today I’m gonna make things pleasant around here’. And then, the marauding and garish chaos was on.

Indeed, Willis's ‘lads’ in ‘Hammertown’ and my Finnish ‘lads’ in Olofström had quite a lot in common. They were brought up to be wage earners because they let themselves. How could that be understood in a way that it could be explained?

The basic logic of Willis's analysis

The answer to Willis's question was in his bold analysis, because he was not fully content with describing what the ‘lads’ could think, say and do – or, rather, how they understood their own situation. When their lives became symbolic expressions intended to assure the local community, the school and themselves of whom they were. It was also the case that Willis permitted himself to understand and explain the lads’ actions in partly different terms than the lads’ own. At the same time, he needed their self-understanding to be able to formulate his own interpretative explanation. As a reader I was thus offered a great account of what theoretically informed descriptions in ethnography were about on a more comprehensive, societal level. This account helped me see things in a new way that had previously not been possible for me, that is, in a theorizing language. Because Willis regarded the lads’ school-counter culture as a production of culture, understood as a struggle for cultural autonomy, or at least an anti-school autonomy, that the school was not able to curb. As Willis wrote, when a ‘counter-school culture is fully developed its members have become adept at managing the formal system’ (1977: 27), which then cannot get the members to go along with anything that the school – as a phenomenon – is supposed to be about.

Thus, the lads’ counter-school culture when seen as a struggle for cultural autonomy can be understood as having explanatory power. This is because their production of culture provided the ‘lads’ with a meaning structure that allowed them to resist the school's teaching and attempts at regulation, and, especially, I would argue with a lot of class insults, to do so in such a way that the school could not deal with them vis-à-vis schooling cultural autonomy. And thus, Willis's research question was answered when he realized that understanding this production and workings of the school-counter culture provided the vital core of the explanation of the reproduction of social class. Thus, it is this ‘cultural making’ that constitutes the meaning system which enables the ‘lads’ to resist education and instead take the same job (or class position) as their fathers on the labour market (or in the class structure). In this way, the table showing the correlation between class background and class destination is met with a theoretically and empirically informed ‘how-answers’ that explains why working-class boys let themselves willingly get working-class jobs. This is, then, the basic logic underlying the answer to the question of why the ‘lads’ themselves go along with becoming workers. Thus, we have also learned that it is by putting culture, i.e. cultural production as a struggle for cultural autonomy, before a sociological understanding of class reproduction that the ‘how-answers’ becomes a ‘why-answers’. By creating a counter-school culture, the ‘lads’ explain themselves to themselves by telling others who they are, so that they may matter to themselves and others. That is how I came to see my Finnish ‘lads’ in the light of a cultural sociological consciousness.

The lived context of Willis's basic logic

But this, I also thought I understood, was not the end of Willis's analysis. He also found it necessary to try to understand what he chose to call the relational complex (1977: 1–2). He felt that the lads’ production of culture must also be understood in relation to their conditions outside and inside school. Or better: in the relation between these life and school conditions as experienced and understood by the ‘lads’. This was followed by an analysis of the local, male working-class culture, and its views on jobs, masculinity and education – on the fact that a ‘real’ job for men is physical, not intellectual – on how a theoretical education produces helpless men who cannot cope with ‘real’ work. The father of one of the ‘lads’ told a classical, popular urban legend. It was about a highly educated man who ordered a book that arrived in a case he could not open. The logic is that if you can open a case, you won't see the value of reading a book. And if you see that value, you cannot get the book out of the case. Consequently, neither fathers nor their sons want to be ingratiating, servile types who are successful in school. That would amount to abandoning the local male working-class culture. And Joey, Spansky and the others wanted to be like their fathers, eventually. This, naturally, does not facilitate the school's task of ensuring that teaching becomes learning. Because learning, in this case, is synonymous with not becoming like the fathers they want to emulate. Thus, not learning through formal schooling may be precisely what is required for working-class ‘lads’ to go along with becoming workers.

However, as I see it, Willis also provides an upsetting image of the lads’ school conditions – of how the school's teachers viewed and treated them. They were not thought to have any cognitive capacity and were not met with understanding, let alone acknowledgement. The lads’ image of their cognitive ability, despite their cleverness and creativity in terms of avoiding schooling, was also that it was low. Consequently, the desire to become a worker interacts with what Dweck understands as self-theories of an inability to learn – theories that are based on a pattern of helplessness rather than mastery (2000). In addition, the boys were insulted both symbolically and physically. Teachers laughed at their inability to write in front of other pupils. The principal beat them with a stick. We do not see a trace of what Ellison is hoping for in ‘What These Children Are Like’. That very counter-school culture, then, that resists education is, I think, not a rejection of education per see, but rather a resistance to a particular lived form of schooling.

My analytical reading, finally, may also reveal the double attribution of the relational complex that the ‘lads’ are exposed to. They will not be seen as real men if they, when at home, submit to seriously pursuing their studies. Further, it is difficult to become a pupil with the cognitive capacity for schoolwork when the teachers have made up their minds that one lacks that capacity. Instead, their background and supposed lack of capacity are the subject of ridicule, often in the form of class-based insults. Thus, in the lives of Willis's ‘lads’, we see revealed what Ellison considered the worst that can happen: not regarding the boys’ lives as valuable and depriving them of all their potentiality. And, what is more, insulting them. Consequently, it is not surprising that, there is ‘in the working class area’, as Willis puts it, ‘a huge reservoir of class feeling to be drawn upon once the trust has been decisively withdrawn from the school’ (1977: 73). An understanding of this double attribution, as a heavy-load determination, of related life and school conditions completes Willis's analysis of a counter-school culture that reproduces class.

This, for sure, is how I came to see my Finnish ‘lads’ and their life and school conditions in the local community and school in a small Swedish factory town. They, too, had developed a fully blossomed and matured counter-school culture, which I was completely unaware of, but stepped right into during the fall semester of 1977. It was indeed a lesson in the hermeneutical sense, a lived experience and an application, that was as analytically effective as it was emotional-structurally affective. That is how I came to want to be, and became, a cultural sociologist doing ethnography, and so under conditions that took time to understand from a cultural sociological perspective. Because when Willis helped me see my Finnish ‘lads’, I did not quite see myself – in the currents of the time. Indeed, ‘a way of seeing’, as literary critic Kenneth Burke once stated, ‘is also a way of not seeing’ (1935: 70). But what I saw, and learned, for sure, to recall Alexander, ‘washed over me, cleansed me and pushed me head over heals into some unknown place’ (2005: 37).

Coda: The tower and the grief

There is a nearly poetic sentence in Willis's book that has remained in my head since the very first time I read it: ‘For a specific period in their lives “the lads” believe they dwell in towers where grief can never come’ (1977: 107). This grief, of course, still exists, and is being reproduced in various forms today, and does, to me, not seem to hold any tendency to poetic justice. Indeed, at this double 40th anniversary I truly miss the living relationship with my Finnish ‘lads’. At the very same time, though, I became like ‘an old son’ to a certain author of that profanely ‘bookish’ but sacred book. Indeed, somehow, for good and bad, I managed to open the box and read the book.