Subculture

Normality or Criminality

From its earliest usage, the concept of subculture has been associated with deviance and criminality, because the so-called deviant was assumed to be part of a subculture, which showed opposition to the dominant order. One sociological theory that has played a major role in understanding the social condition of deviance in society has been anomie. It was a concept that one of the founding figures of sociology, Émile Durkheim, first outlined in his study of suicide. While anomie gives an account of how we experience hopelessness, it is also concerned with normlessness in society. This means that as a concept, it is focused on explaining social action at the level of the individual and, at the same time, seeking to understand how a person's actions can be explained by the social structure. In contemporary society, young people are searching for meaning, and anomie is a measurement of the degree to which social solidarity or disintegration is experienced in communities. The Chicago school approach fought to understand the deviant within his or her social context rather than adopt a pathological understanding of deviance derived from biology. The early sociologists and criminologists at the University of Chicago looked at collective rituals within urban settings and put forward ways to empirically examine [Page 708]how individuals and groups construct and negotiate social and cultural meaning. As a result, subcultural deviance was explained as a form of behavior within the wider context of social normality.

During the early to mid-20th century, two dominant sociological approaches of social thought were the behavioralist and the functionalist paradigms. Both approaches defined subculture as a negative attribute that promoted delinquency and caused problems for order and consensus in society. Both the American and British theories of subculture located the cause of deviance in biology and psychology. In Britain, the eugenics movement saw the term subculture as a means to describe sets of young people defined as subnormal. This understanding was established through the Mental Deficiency Committee (the Wood Committee) in 1929. Policymakers and academics were heavily influenced by the hereditarian interpretation of the eugenics movement and saw subculture as a sign of mental deficiency or social evil. Working-class young people who became part of a subculture were described in depersonalized language as delinquents who were “shiftless” and “subnormal.” In Britain, after the Second World War, this evolutionary theory of the delinquent subculture metamorphosed into a psychoanalytical theory of inadequate socialization. Here, psychoanalysis was the driving force behind this view of subculture as a sign of young people's inability to integrate into society, which accelerated their movement into a deviant subculture. Participation within a subculture was identified as a sign of an “affectionless personality,” which was defined in social class terms of originating from a deprived culture suffering from psychological problems.

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