From classlessness to clubculture

Abstract

This article surveys the field of British youth cultural analysis since the development in the 1950s of a so-called specific identity and distinctive set of experiences for young people. It outlines the main trajectories of sociological research, from the early positing of a classless youth culture, via various investigations into delinquent solutions, through to the establishment within a cultural studies discipline of a ‘new wave of subcultural theory’in the 1970s. It also examines the challenges to this orthodoxy in an era of ‘new times’ and the recent return to sociology and ethnographic fieldwork. In so doing the article traces the main theoretical traditions from the initial influence of American subcultural theory, through symbolic interactionism and the reinvention of the problem-solving approach in the language of Marxism, to how the field has recently been reconstituted upon the terrain of ‘post-subcultural studies’. It concludes by critiquing some current calls for the replacement of the subculture concept and argues that, while reports of the death of subculture are greatly exaggerated, the continued use of this concept in future research is perhaps likely to emphasise certain CCCS connotations of group coherence, consistency and commitment in addition to the postmodern traits of flux, fluidity and hybridization that are seemingly constitutive of certain youth cultural forms and activities in the new millennium.