Youth Culture Flashcards
Hall et al.
Policing the Crisis
What did Hall et al’s Policing the Crisis study entail?
- Studied street crime among young black males in London in the 1970s
- The government and the media were promoting racism and demonising young black men to distract attention from political problems and a poorly performing economy.
- young black men were using deviance as a way of protesting the violence and racism they were facing. In the process, they were being labelled as criminal
Stuart Hall et al. Evaluation
- Hall et al. have brought ethnicity and racism into the discussion of crime and deviance, something that was largely absent in sociological theory before.
Phil Cohen
Resistance theory
Skinheads
What did Cohen and other Marxists at the CCCS think about youth cultures?
They believed youth style was changing as a result of the particular economic conditions each generation of working-class youths faced. In order to try and prove this theory, Phil Cohen carried out a semiotic analysis of the skinheads.
What’s semiotics ?
Semiotics refers to the study of signs – symbols that communicate something. Cultural studies analysts began to decode the meaning behind choice of clothes, music and slang language used.
What did Phil Cohen’s (1972) semiotic analysis of the skinheads find?
- The skinheads wore an exaggerated version of traditional working- class male clothes.
- This reassertion of working-class values was a response to a number of factors linked to the decline in white working-class inner-city communities.
- They were racist towards poorer Asians, particularly those from Pakistan, whom the white working-class perceived as taking their jobs and destroying their communities.
• Much of the activity of the skinheads was an attempt to reclaim territory, which they played out through football hooliganism
Phil Cohen Evaluation
The semiotic analysis used by the CCCS and Phil Cohen is a subjective way of analysing the skinhead’s behaviour. The skinheads never articulated that they were resisting capitalism, so concluding that their style was an attempt to do so is just Marxists letting their own person bias influence their findings.
Hall and Jefferson
Resistance through style
Teddy Boys
Hegemony
suggests that the ruling class control our dominant values in society and set the status quo. This is because the ruling class control the mass media and what we are taught in school.
What did Hall and Jefferson believe?
working-class young people (particularly those who had done poorly at school) formed the weakest point in the ruling class’s control of society, as unlike adults they were not tied into capitalist society through jobs and family commitments.
What did Hall and Jefferson 1976 research on the Teddy Boys find?
The rise of the Teddy Boys in the 50s coincided with the expansion of employment and the general rise in affluence as a result of the major resurgence of industry after WW2.
• The Teddy Boys were however excluded from this rise in affluence after losing out in both education and employment.
• They wore Edwardian style jackets, suede shoes, bootlace ties. These items were analysed by Hall and Jefferson.
• The jackets and shoes were a subversion of the Edwardian Dandy style which had become popular with the upper middle class. Their use by the working-class Teddy Boys showed contempt for the class system by usurping the clothing style of their supposed ‘social superiors’.
Hall and Jefferson Evaluation
- The CCCS only focus on the extreme subcultures and the majority of young people who are fairly conformist are overlooked in their studies of youth culture.
- Feminists have criticised the CCCS for having a malestream bias. This meant they were male researchers and only looked into youth cultures from a male point of view. This is probably a fair criticism considering the youth cultures they studied were white, working-class males.
Hebdige
Resistance Theory
Punk
What does bricolage mean?
a process of ‘bricolage’ (the reuse of ordinary objects in a different way to create challenging new meanings) occurred in Punk subculture. Punk emerged in the 1970s as a response to the dominance of the media, fashion and music industries.
