Subculture

As the prefix implies, sub cultures are significant and distinctive negotiations located within wider cultures. These correspond with the particular positions, ambiguities and specific contradictions faced by certain social groups within wider social and historical structures. The term and its supporting theory have developed almost exclusively in the study and explanation of youth, notably with regard to deviance. Here it has served to displace earlier ideas of a unified and separate ‘youth culture’ corresponding to all young people (for example, Eisenstadt, Parsons) by attempting to synthesize both age and social class as determinants of the differing subcultural identities and activities of young people. In this way the concept hinges on several important assumptions. First, that western societies are characterized principally by their division into social classes, based on inequalities of powerand wealth, and their consequent relations of dominance and subordination. Second, that these unequal and conflicting divisions and relations are realized and articulated in the form of class cultures, themselves sets of complex cultural responses to particular social class positions. Third, within these class cultures (often referred to in this context as ‘parent cultures’) youth negotiate and advance ‘their own’ distinctive and especially symbolic subcultural responses to the problems posed not only by age or generational status, subordination and control, but also by class position and inequality, particularly as they are experienced and combined in the spheres of education, work and leisure. As Clarke argue: Sub-cultures, then, must first be related to the ‘parent cultures’ of which they are a sub set. But sub-cultures must also be analysed in terms of their relation to the dominant culture – the overall disposition of cultural power in the society as a whole.

Within this framework, subcultural analysis has generated and continues to propose an important way of deconstructing and understanding the appearance, behaviour and significance of differing youth groups in the postwar UK.

Specific studies have concentrated predominantly on working-class youth subcultural groups, emphasizing the ways in which their often ‘spectacular’ appearances (their styles of fashion and dress, for example) and their ‘spectacular’ activities (especially those defined as deviant and threatening) represent meaningful forms of specific subcultural response and resistance, through specialized subcultural identities and rituals. Subcultures thus function to win, or at least contest, ‘cultural space’ for their members; in so doing they also generate and confirm important modes of both collective and individual identity and orientationtowards the dominant valuesof the wider social and cultural order.

Briefly, there are two particular problems. First, the tendency for subcultures to be interpreted as significant only in terms of resistance. This, for example, has produced an unbalanced concentration on those subcultural activities and styles that could be construed as offering resistance, or radical opposition, as opposed to conformity, acceptance or incorporation. Second, subcultural accounts of youth have displayed an even more glaring imbalance with regard to gender divisions.