If, as Raymond Williams suggested, a culture is a “whole way of life,” then it follows that a subculture is a partial way of life. That is, subcultural participation implies a set of value orientations and practices that are neither coterminous with the entirety of a given population nor exhaustive of any one individual’s activities and identity positions. When considered in isolation, such participation may seem a trivial thing, but subcultures—or niche audiences, taste cultures, consumer lifestyles, and “neo-tribes”—and the kind of sociality that they embody make increasingly powerful claims on people’s allegiance at the same time as traditional categories of ascribed identity and status (class, ethnicity, gender, religion, &c.) appear to be loosening their grip on them. The concept of subculture is needed to theorize adequately the uneven circulation of meaning in contemporary societies. Furthermore, it is particularly well suited to the analysis of culture at the meso-social level, below macro-social structures but above and beyond the individual actor in micro-social contexts.
This examination area is intended to review three major strands of subculture theory — the Marxian model of the Birmingham School, subsequent post-subcultures frameworks, and American interactionist approaches — and also to explore other analytical traditions in a variety of fields that may provide fruitful avenues for comparison and synthesis.
The study of subcultures was one of the foundational strands of British Cultural Studies as formulated at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under Stuart Hall’s directorship. Through its research on working-class youth lifestyles, the CCCS subcultures working group produced a Marxian sociology of culture that has not only achieved canonical status but also continues to set the agenda for contemporary scholars working in this area. Representative readings are drawn from both programmatic CCCS subcultural studies (J. Clarke 2006a, 2006b; Clarke et al. 2006; Hall et al. 1981; Hebdige 1979, 2006; Willis 1977, 1978) and their interlocutors (G. Clarke 2005; P. Cohen 2005; Frith 1983; McRobbie and Garber, 2006; Murdock and McCron 2006). The Birmingham School’s innovation was its attempt to analyse (sub)cultural expressions in terms of power and class-based experience through semiotic ‘readings’ of particular youth lifestyles. At the same time, the Birmingham model is an incomplete work, and even its most substantial and provocative statements point toward further research more than they resolve the questions that they have raised.
The 1990s and early 2000s saw another fruitful period of research and theorization on subcultures—again, largely in Britain. This set of approaches (Chaney 2004; Hetherington 1998; Hodkinson, 2002; Maffesoli 1996; Marchart 2003; Muggleton 2000; Straw 2005; Thornton 1995) has subsequently been termed ‘post-subculture’ theory. The prefix both signals an attempt to overcome perceived inadequacies in the CCCS model and alludes to an increasing engagement with postmodernism. The idea of the postmodern not only challenged the theoretical and epistemological foundations of earlier research but also seemed to signify an important change in the object of study, as fluid, consumerist lifestyles were seen increasingly to displace the relatively stable, class-based cultures of the immediate post-war period. These shifts in identity and social solidarity (and the study of the same) may be further contextualized by Nestor García Canclini’s (2001) analyses of cultural life in Latin American cities under conditions of multiculturalism and globalization. While postmodernism led to a useful reconsideration of received wisdom, it has also had a tendency to move the study of subcultures more and more into specialist sub-disciplines such as youth, leisure, and popular music studies. In this way, subculture theory’s broader implications for the analysis of society and culture have been largely obscured.
This obscuring may be partially compensated for by a re-evaluation of an older tradition in subcultural research within American interactionist sociology, particularly the urban sociology of the Chicago School. These scholars (Becker 1963; A.K. Cohen 2005; Cressey 2005; Fine and Kleinman 1979; Gordon 2005; Park 2005) were primarily concerned with immigrant and deviant subcultures in American cities, only later (Irwin 1977, 2005) coming to be associated with the kinds of leisure lifestyles that have so preoccupied British researchers. Their focus on action and communication in relatively localized subcultural contexts is a necessary corrective for the tendency towards abstraction present in British (post)subcultural research. Furthermore, the frequently less spectacular and more quotidian nature of the subcultures studied by these American researchers help to de-essentialize some of the definitions of subculture (and participation therein) advanced by British theorists.
Finally, I want to indicate other fields and bodies of research that may enrich our understanding of contemporary subcultures. In ‘culturalist’ strands of New Social Movement theory (McAdam 1997; Melucci 1997), fandom studies (Jenkins 1992), the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology (1983, 1985), and Michael Warner’s (2002) discussion of the “publics” and “counterpublics” constituted by discourse, we encounter phenomena that are reminiscent of subcultures and structured in similar ways but have, for various reasons, rarely been analysed in subcultural terms. These analyses call into question many of the assumptions of traditional thought in subculture theory and provide ways of theorizing some of its blind spots.
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