Youth Culture

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Our staff of freelance writers includes over 120 experts proficient in Youth Culture, therefore you can rest assured that your assignment will be handled by only top rated specialists. Order your Youth Culture paper at affordable prices with livepaperhelp.com! The 60's and 70's saw the rise of youth culture. Youth culture can be seen as a particular pattern of beliefs, values, symbols and activities that a group of young people are seen to share.

Along with the rise of youth culture came the theories developed on it. The theories developed in the 60's were mainly functionalism. Functionalists believe that society or a social structure is like a biological structure and that all social institutions function for the survival of society. As social structures change by becoming more complex, social institutions change by becoming more specialised. Functionalists, therefore, believe youth culture has a social function; they see it as young people solving there shared social problems.

The Marxist theories on youth culture came in the 170's. Marxists believe that society operates mainly through class conflict and that each class pursues its own interests and brings it into conflict with other classes. The Marxist influenced Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) used these ideas to explain youth culture. They argued that youth culture was the result of youths fighting against a capitalist society. In this essay I will look at the theories developed on youth culture in the 60's and 70's and assess whether they can be related to the youth culture of today. The theories I will explore are Abrams ideas on youth culture and consumerism, Eisenstadts functionalist theory and the Marxist theories of the CCCS, Cohen and Hebdidge.

Mark Abram's book "The Teenage Consumer," was the first influential sociological study of youth culture. Abrams was a market researcher and his book was an empirical survey of a new consumer group that had emerged in the 150's. This new consumer group that was emerging was referred to as youth culture and was predominantly made up of working class males. Abrams suggested that youth culture was developing in the 50's because of the affluence of the decade. Young people had large disposable incomes and they were spending it on leisure goods and activities such as coffee and milk bars, fashion clothes and hair styles, cosmetics, Rock and Roll records, films and magazines, scooters and motor bikes, dancing and dance halls. Their spending habits were an expression of their lack of responsibilities and dependants. Abrams argued that although this youth spending revealed a distinct leisure group, it didn't reflect any sort of a rebellion. He said that teenagers were still embedded in the key institutions of home, school and work and their central values remained those of their parents and work mates.

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The definition of youth as a consumer group had two consequences, firstly, it was interpreted as a form of mass culture. At the time, people saw mass culture as a culture where people were manipulated as consumers by big businesses. Also, Abrams theory on youth culture only initially referred to "working class peer group solidarity." He didn't take into account the middle class youth.

In Eisenstadt's 156 book "From Generation to Generation," he uses a functionalist approach to explain youth culture. He believes that in all societies children have to be "socialised" before they can attain full adult status. They have to be taught their societies moral code, its common sense, rules, behaviour etc. They need to be given the skills and knowledge necessary to perform their adult roles. Youth doesn't exist in primitive societies as there isn't really a transition from childhood to adulthood, whereas in modern industrial society there is a clear, structural gap between the family children are brought up in and the economic and social system in which they must eventually take their place.

Functionalists like Eisenstadt explain social institutions in terms of social problems and cultural solutions. The youth "problem" lies in young peoples marginal status, youth culture eases the resulting anxieties and uncertainties. His argument is that in meeting young peoples needs, youth culture has the general function of smoothing the transition from child to adult. He believes that the most important function for its members was emotional and providing young people with a set of relationships, (peer groups.) The most important point for Eisenstadt is not that some young people become deviants but that even the most deviant of youths become normal adults. He saw youth culture not as a political rebellion but as an essential problem solving social function.

Eisenstadts argument is a general argument. It refers to the transition that faces all young people in industrial society but not all young people are the same. He didn't take into account that growing up middle class is different to growing up working class and that growing up male is different to growing up female. Also, he was explaining youth culture in a time of relative affluence and optimism, growing up was not particularly problematic in the 150's.

In the 170's the strongly Marxist influenced CCCS related class to youth subcultures. They argued that youth styles were a reflection of the economic system and its related class relations. They claimed that youth subcultures attract mainly working class males as it was them who were affected most by the problems of growing up in a capitalist society.

In 17, Phil Cohen used semiotics to decode the Mod and Skinhead youth subcultures of the working class community in London's East End. At that time the community was in decline as the traditional industries and small businesses were destroyed by economic change and traditional communities were being broken up by rehousing, redevlopment and the influx of immigrants. The Mods and Skinheads came about as a result of the young Eastenders seeking new identities for themselves due to the changes in their communities. Cohen interpreted the Skinhead subculture as an attempt to recover the working class community that was in decline. He saw the skinheads appearance as an exaggerated version of the traditional working men's clothes. He also saw their aggressive behaviour and racist attitudes as an exaggerated version of traditional working men's values. The Mods reflected the upward aspirations of a more affluent section of the working class. They sought to copy the middle class and aspired to a glamorous lifestyle. Cohen saw this as a rejection of traditional working class culture.

In 176 Hall and Jefferson of the CCCS saw working class youth subcultures as a resistance of ruling class hegemony. They also said that working class youth experience the contradictions of capitalism more acutely than the middle class as they are more likely to experience school as a waste of time. Many of them will end up in dead end, low paid jobs with little satisfaction. It is at the transition from child to adult that working class youths experience most acutely their structural position at the bottom of the pile in the capitalist system. Its at this time that resistance is possible as they aren't tied down by responsibilities. Hall and Jefferson say that even though working class youth subcultures symbolise a form of resistance, it does little to change the structural position of the young people involve. They describe youth subcultures as a resistance through rituals. The CCCS suggests that although it doesn't solve anything, it does give the appearance of a solution, they say that being part of a youth subculture may ease the alienation felt by many young people and provides a chance to kick back at society without actually changing anything.

In 17 Dick Hebdidge argued that there was a tendency for these authentic youth subcultures to become incorporated i.e. the punk subculture represented a conscious rejection of high street fashion yet within months of the emergence of punk, high street shops were selling mass produced fashions based on punk styles. Punk was transformed and tamed from a form of rebellion to another form of fashion. Hebdidge argues that this process of incorporation represents the way in which capitalism makes safe youth subcultures.

One of the major criticisms of the CCCS is that it reads meaning into the appearance and behaviour of young people that they may not see themselves. Also, most of the research was focused on working class youth subcultures and ignores the subcultures formed by the middle class's during the 60's and 70's. Their work also seems to only be concerned with the exotic and rebellious youth and doesn't consider "ordinary youth." Most young people don't join subcultural groups or only adopt the styles because they are in fashion rather than as an act of political rebellion.

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