Men Behaving Badly or Attempting to Fit In? Laddism and its Impact on Learning and Teaching in HE

Bovill, Helen; Waller, Richard

Abstract

Anti-social, anti-intellectual 'laddish' behaviour and its impact on students and the teaching and learning environment
has long been a topic of study in school settings (e.g. Connolly, 1997; Delamont, 2000; Francis, 1999), but until
relatively recently was effectively an unexplored phenomenon in higher education.
Recent studies examining this include Phipps and Young (2013), Jackson et al. (2015), and Jackson and Sundaram
(2015), and the issue has come to the fore with media coverage too, with elements of sexism in the 'laddish' behaviour
being highlighted in universities. A report from the NUS (2014) on sexuality which surveyed 4,000 students across 80
HE institutions also identified homophobia as being part of 'lad culture', with it being targeted toward both male and
female students identifying with or as LGBT.
This paper presents early findings from an ongoing project looking into the impact of 'laddish' behaviour on both male
and female undergraduates. Data is gathered from single sex male or female focus groups from courses where the
gender mix is either skewed to males, to females, or is roughly in parity. Follow up one-to-one interviews occurred with
selected focus group participants to enable the issues to be explored in greater depth with individuals with strong
feelings or significant experience of the key issues.
In terms of the theoretical framing of the research, it draws more upon Connell's hegemonic masculinity model (e.g.
Connell 1995, 2000) than the alternative 'inclusive masculinity thesis' of the likes of Anderson (2009) and McCormack
(2014).

Citation

Bovill, H., & Waller, R. Men Behaving Badly or Attempting to Fit In? Laddism and its Impact on Learning and Teaching in HE.

• Conference Name: British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2017
• Conference Location: University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
• Start Date: Apr 4, 2017
• End Date: Apr 6, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jul 22, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 3, 2020
• ISBN: 978-0-904569-49-0
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1640338