Youth Culture and Identity

Youth Culture and Identity

Troubles of Youth

19th November 2007

Lecture Outline

•  Trends in Leisure Activities

•  Academic approaches to Culture and Subculture

–  Culture, Subculture and Structure

–  Culture, Subculture and Meaning

•  Contemporary Concerns

Key Questions

•  What does ‘culture’ mean’?

•  Has leisure, consumption and lifestyle replaced employment, pay and social class?

•  What is the relationship between culture and structure?

•  Is culture the arena for conflict, or a mechanism for social control?

Contemporary Trends

•  Greater importance of free time

•  Some blurring of class and gender divisions

•  Mainstreaming of leisure activities

•  Delayed transitions to adulthood reflected in high propensity to spend (esp. on leisure)

Rojek (1985) Capitalism and Leisure Theory

•  Privatization

•  Individuation

•  Commercialization

•  Pacification

Attitudes to Subculture

•  Condemnatory

•  Products of Social Change

•  Resistance to Adult / Mainstream authority

•  Mechanism for constructing identity

•  A product of media and cultural industries

(Sub)cultural Studies

2 distinct strands of work

•  Structural Cultural Studies

•  How subcultures emerge, and how individuals respond to certain needs/ desires by associating with them

•  Semiotic Cultural Studies

•  An analysis of the meanings givven to particular choices of subcultural imagery and ‘symbolic objects’

Relationship between Class and Culture

•  Culture reflects Class

–  Abrams: consumption key to culture, but particularly working class male patterns

–  Wilmott: localised culture still class based

•  age acts to mediate, not replace class

•  Culture replaces Class

–  Marcuse: struggle over control of creativity

–  Roszak: unification of youth

Albert Cohen: “Delinquent Boys:The culture of the gang”

•  Subculture evolved in working class response to strain, and a rejection of ‘middle-class values’

•  Education paramount:

–  Make children aware of social status

–  Key to the constraint of opportunities

•  Goal: status, not necessarily monetary success

•  An attempt to understand non-economic deviance

•  Gangs were a particular form of subcultural adaptation, characterised by:-

•  non-utilitarianism malice

•  negativism hedonism

•  versatility group loyalty

Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin

•  Focussed on the range that adaptations to strain could take, incorporating differential association

–  Criminal Gangs

–  Conflict Gangs

–  Retreatist Gangs

•  Echoing Merton’s focus on monetary success

David Downes: a British Perspective

•  In Britain, social class is central to understanding subcultural adaptation

•  Working class youth had a “realistically low” level of aspiration / fatalism

•  Delinquency as a ‘fact’ of life, but not a ‘way’ of life

Downes and Subculture in Britain

•  Key cause of delinquency: boredom and the importance of leisure

•  little opportunity for excitement (akin to strain)

•  leisure became the location for excitement and expression of

- toughness, daring, panache

•  Links between leisure and delinquency

–  proceeds of crime funding leisure

–  delinquency is itself exciting

–  delinquency is a by-product of certain forms of excitement

Marxist analysis of sub-culture / counter-culture

•  Phil Cohen

•  Economic Decline ->

–  family tensions

–  fragmented community

–  economic insecurity

•  Mods: socially mobile white-collar worker

•  Skinheads: emphasising masculinity of hard manual labour

•  Meaning reflecting structural constraints

Semiotic Cultural Studies

•  Dick Hebdige

–  “homology”: “a structural 'resonance' between the different elements making up a socio-cultural whole”

–  Aim (of academics): to understand the meaning of subculture in terms of the meanings given to them

–  Aim (of subcultures): to express opposition in stylistic form: to deliberately cause ‘moral outrage’, and to participate in the struggle for ‘control of meaning’

Contemporary Picture

•  Diversification

•  Individualization

•  Mainstreaming

•  Marginalization

•  Criminalization of Cultural Forms

–  1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act

–  Hoodies

•  Risk seeking

Subcultural Risk Seeking

•  A reaction against a contemporary manifestation of social control?

•  Drug-taking; binge drinking; some sexual practices; joy-riding

•  Some “traditional” criminal activity (see Wright et al 2005)

•  Suggestion that risk-seeking is the primary aim of much youthful deviance: “risk strain”?

Criticisms of subcultural theory

•  Tendency to overpoliticize (romanticize?) youth action and style

•  Relativist: no consideration of impact of crime, or others’ “meaning”

•  Focus on the spectacular, not the mundane, which is much more conformist

•  Focus on class and style, rather than gender

•  Presents an image of internal consistency of subcultures, rather than the link to the commercial

•  Concentration of the radical rather than the conservative

References

•  Cohen, A (1955) Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang

•  Rojek, C (1985) Capitalism and Leisure Theory

•  Abrams, M (1959) The Teenage Consumer

•  Wilmott, P (1966) Adolescent Boys of East London

•  Marcuse, H (1972) Essay on Liberation

•  Roszak, T (1971) The Making of a Counter-culture

•  Cloward, R & Ohlin, L (1961) Delinquency and Opportunity

•  Downes, D (1966) The Delinquent Solution

•  Hebdige, D (1979) Resistance: The Meaning of Style