Youth Culture

Youth culture is a concept that refers to the collective cultural practices of young people who may use elements of consumption as a means of establishing an identity in contrast with, and perhaps in opposition to, the mainstream. Given that the academic significance of consumption arguably lies in its role as a key arena within which elements of social change are negotiated through the everyday, it follows that youth culture constitutes an important element of contemporary consumption studies. Consumption arguably plays more of a key role in constructing who or what a young person is than for perhaps any other social group. However, there is considerable debate as to whether the notion of youth culture is still pertinent in a world in which young people are apparently free to pick and choose their identities from the vast options made available to them by a pluralistic and stylistically diverse consumer culture.

The Emergence of Youth Culture and the Role of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

Young people's experience of consumption through youth culture is the product of a long history. The relationship between young people and consumption first came under the microscope in the post–World War II years when young people were perceived to be at the sharp end of an emerging consumer culture. From this point of view, Bill Osgerby describes the “teenager” as a sort of ideological terrain “upon which a particular definition of post-war change was constructed” (1998, 37). Osgerby goes on to argue that it was not until the 1950s and 1960s, notably in the United States, that young people's consumption habits began to take place in public arenas and a commercial youth market emerged, not least in the context of popular music. Subcultural movements such as the mods in Great Britain reflected the upwardly mobile nature of working-class lifestyles. For Osgerby, the mods were seen as the epitome of classless consumerism and yet at the same time they were reviled as the bête noire of the affluent society, not least given moral panics regarding mod “invasions” of seaside towns, which affronted the moral majority.

It was during the 1970s in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, Great Britain, that the broader significance of youth culture first came directly under the sociological microscope. Basing its conception of young people on what it is to be deviant, the followers of the Birmingham school argued that young people establish who they are through a process of labeling. The Birmingham school adherents were interested in the ways in which young people expressed themselves in opposition to a culture in which their voice was rarely heard. Authors such as Dick Hebdige therefore argued that young people express their resistance to authority visually through style as “a symbolic violation of the social order” (1979, 19). At this stage, the changing role of fashion was a particular concern of many authors [Page 1548]interested in the apparently spectacular nature of youth culture. Hebdige argued that resistant subcultural styles would eventually be exploited by fashion and music industries, which would strip such styles of any subversive meaning and repackage them for the consumption of the broader public. The CCCS's deviancy-based conception of young people claimed that the latent function of subcultures was to somehow magically resolve, at least in an imaginary fashion, the unresolved paradoxes of the parent culture, suggests Stanley Cohen. The legacy of this work was undoubtedly significant, but it is doubtful whether the subtleties of contemporary youth cultures can be adequately catered for within a Marxist framework. This, and perhaps the fact that young people themselves appeared to be less and less likely to define themselves through the sorts of all-encompassing framework that the notion of “subculture” implied, meant that the study of youth culture struggled for direction in the 1990s. Arguably, the recognition that consumption played a key role in young people's lifestyles and in managing their relationship with the parent culture, and that such a relationship could just as equally support the status quo as symbolically challenge it, was key, as it strengthened a position that saw consumption as an end in itself rather than simply a means to some kind of class-based ends.

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