Youth culture, subculture and the importance of neighbourhood

Abstract

Investigations into youth culture are marginal to the field of youth studies. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham published studies of the post-war youth subcultures, such as the teddy boys and the punks, in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Hall and Jefferson, 1976). From the 1980s onwards, however, the main concerns for youth studies were the transitions that young people made into the labour market.Transitions research continues to dominate, although the advent of the rave and dance cultures of the late 1980s prompted a partial return to investigations of youth culture. In direct contrast to the influential theories of the CCCS, many recent accounts of youth culture have moved away from structural and class-based accounts of young people’s experiences and have produced studies that stress the ‘tribal’ (Bennett, 1999, 2000), ‘individualized’ (Miles, 2000) and distinctly ‘postsubcultural’ (Muggleton, 2000) nature of the contemporary youth cultural experience. Recently, however, questions have been raised as to how far these theoretical insights are useful across youth cultural identities and experiences (Hollands, 2002; Nayak, 2003; Pilkington and Johnson, 2003). This article adds to this slowly growing literature. By drawing upon data collected for a PhD, it is suggested that structural factors, such as neighbourhood residence, can be influential in shaping the cultural identities and experiences of some groups of young people.