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.

Bibliography

Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1983. “The Field of Cultural Production, Or: The Economic World Reversed.” Poetics 12(4–5): 311–356.

——. 1985. “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.” Theory and Society 14(6): 723–44.

Chaney, David. 2004. “Fragmented Culture and Subcultures.” Pp. 36–48 in After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by A. Bennett and K. Kahn-Harris. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Clarke, Gary. 2005. “Defending Ski-jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures [1981].” Pp. 169–174 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Clarke, John. 2006a. “The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community.” Pp. 80–83 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

—–. 2006b. “Style.” Pp. 147–161 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts. 2006. “Subcultures, Cultures and Class.” Pp. 3–59 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Cohen, Albert K. 2005. “A General Theory of Subcultures [1955].” Pp. 50–59 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Cohen, Phil. 2005. “Subcultural Conflict and Working-class Community [1972].” Pp. 86–93 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Cressey, Paul G. 2005. “The Life-cycle of the Taxi-dancer [1932].” Pp. 35–45 in in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Fine, Gary Alan and Sherryl Kleinman. 1979. “Rethinking Subculture: An Interactionist Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology 85(1): 1–20.

Frith, Simon. 1983. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock. London: Constable. Introduction & Chapters 8–11.

García Canclini, Nestor. 2001. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Trans. G. Yúdice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gordon, Milton M. 2005. “The Concept of the Sub-culture and its Application [1947].” Pp. 46–49 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. 1981. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” Pp. 227–240 in People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by R. Samuel. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Hall, Stuart, Chas Crichter, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge.

—–. 2006. “The Meaning of Mod.” Pp. 71–79 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Hetherington, Kevin. 1998. Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Introduction & Chapters 1–4.

Hodkinson, Paul. 2002. Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. New York: Berg.

Irwin, John. 1977. Scenes. Beverly Hills: Sage.

—–. 2005. “Notes on the Status of the Concept Subculture [1970].” Pp. 73–77 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York, Routledge.

Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Trans. D. Smith. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Marchart, Oliver. 2003. “Bridging the Micro-Macro Gap: Is There Such a Thing as a Post-subcultural Politics?” Pp. 83–97 in The Post-subcultures Reader, edited by D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl. New York: Berg.

McAdam, Doug. 1997. “Culture and Social Movements.” Pp. 473–487 in Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues, edited by S.M. Buechler and F.K. Cylke, Jr. Toronto: Mayfield.

McRobbie, Angela and Jennie Garber. 2006. “Girls and Subcultures.” Pp. 177–188 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Melucci, Alberto. 1997. “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements.” Pp. 259–274 in Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues, edited by S.M. Buechler and F.K. Cylke, Jr. Toronto: Mayfield.

Muggleton, David. 2000. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. New York: Berg.

Murdock, Graham and Robin McCron. 2006. “Consciousness of Class and Consciousness of Generation.” Pp. 162–176 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Park, Robert E. 2005. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment [1925].” Pp. 25–34 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Straw, Will. 2005. “Communities and Scenes in Popular Music [1991].” Pp. 469–478 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14(1): 49–90.

Willis, Paul E. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs. Aldershot, UK: Gower.

—–. 1978. Profane Culture. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

To speak of ‘consumer society’ rather than other, closely related terms (e.g., ‘advertising’ or ‘consumerism’) is to address the social and cultural transformations engendered by the metastasisation of the commodity form and its “promotional logic” (Wernick 1991) rather than the problems posed by particular kinds of ‘bad consumption.’ Zygmunt Bauman (2007) provides a clear formulation of this distinction:

If consumerist culture is the peculiar fashion in which the members of a society of consumers think of behaving or in which they behave ‘unreflexively’ […] then the society of consumers stands for the peculiar set of existential conditions under which the probability is high that most men and women will embrace the consumerist rather than any other culture, and that most of the time they will obey its precepts to the best of their ability. (P. 52)

A first group of references attempt to account for the emergence of such a society of consumers (Campbell 1987; Cross 2000; Ewen 2001; Frank 1997; Leiss, Kline, Jhally, and Botterill 2005; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982; Williams 1982). They are primarily historical in orientation; however, in describing the development of modern consumerism and explicating its differences from other social formations, these authors also provide an initial theoretical description of consumer society. As Grant McCracken (1988) suggests, the rhetoric of the consumer revolution is somewhat deceptive: though the aggregate transformations described by these historians have indeed changed capitalism in profound ways, it has been a ‘long revolution.’ Thus, rather than seeking a radical rupture, we must look to a number of historical periods in different societies to trace the genealogy of consumer society. Key moments include England in the 18th century (the industrial commodity, distribution and marketing apparatuses), France in the 19th century (the Arcades, department stores, and the consumerist gaze), and the United States in the 20th century (increasing mass-mediation of marketing communication, post-war affluence, and ‘hip consumerism’).

The keyword ‘individual’ refers to a second group of texts that is concerned with explaining consumer behaviour (Baudrillard 1981, 1996; Campbell 1987; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Fiske 1989; McCracken 1988; Miller 1997, 1998). These authors are largely from anthropological and cultural studies backgrounds, and much of their work is based on ethnographic accounts of everyday consumption (Jean Baudrillard is the notable exception). Their attempts to make consumption decisions rational and explicable serve to reveal the complexity of the consumer subjectivities that prevail under the conditions of contemporary capitalism. They tend to privilege the experiences of individual consumers over and against the totality of the society in which they live and often stress the pleasure and the possibilities for the exercise of agency that can be derived from the acquisition and consumption of commodities. The key questions, then, relate to how consumers appropriate the commodities furnished by capitalism and use them to produce meaning in their everyday lives.

A third group of sources deals with the organization of consuming subjects into different kinds of groups and audiences by the rationalizing apparatuses of capital and the culture industry—a process that I have described using the keyword ‘mass.’ This group largely comprises scholars from radical or Marxist traditions (Adorno 1991; Bauman 2007; Bourdieu 1984; Horkheimer and Adorno 2001; Marcuse 1991; Wernick 1991) but is also inclusive of liberal critiques of mass culture (Galbraith 1958; Holt 2000, 2002; Simmel 1957; Veblen 1953). Speaking in very general terms, these writers are concerned with the effects that the commodification of culture—embodied, for example, in the structures of modern marketing—has on the human subjects who are produced as consuming masses. Here, consumerism is a tool of class privilege that distorts people’s true needs and desires and serves to reinforce capitalist relations of domination. Also included within this group are a smaller set of sources describing recent developments in niche marketing (Turow 1997) and the development of the lifestyle concept (Veal 1993), which represents the increasing rationalization of the process of demand-creation.

Perhaps the major theoretical challenge in approaching this subject is the large gulf that stands between the ‘consumer studies’ literature, with its focus on the emancipatory potential of individual consumption, and the ‘mass society’ literature, with its critique of the repressive functions of consumerism. The former tends to dismiss the latter as elitist and pessimistic for its normative judgements on consumption and its recourse to spectres of false consciousness and ideological manipulation. For its part, the mass culture critique might suggest that more celebratory studies have mistaken the subjective experiences of pleasure derived from individual acts of consumption for the objective conditions of constraint or oppression that are imposed by consumer society—a fact which is self-evident once the entire system of consumerism is considered as a whole. Yet some form of rapprochement between the two camps is necessary to make sense of the deeply contradictory phenomenon that is modern consumerism.

Bibliography

Adorno, Teodor W. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge. Chapters 2–4, 8.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press.

—–. 1996. The System of Objects. London: Verso.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Consuming Life. Malden, MA: Polity.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Campbell, Colin. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Cross, G. 2000. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press. Chapters 1, 4, 7.

Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood. 1979. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Allen Lane.

Ewen, Stuart. 2001. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books.

Fiske, John. 1989. Reading the Popular. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Chapters 1–2.

Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Galbraith, John K. 1958. The Affluent Society. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press.

Holt, Douglas B. 2000. “Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?” Pp. 212–252 in The Consumer Society Reader, edited by J.B. Schor and D.B. Holt. New York: New Press.

—–. 2002. “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research 29(1): 70–90.

Horkheimer, Max and Teodor W. Adorno. 2001. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Pp. 71–101 in Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, edited by M.G. Durham and D.M. Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, and Jacqueline Botterill. 2005. Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Introduction and Chapters 1, 2, 7.

McCracken, Grant. 1988. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb. 1982. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. London: Europa Publications.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1991. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press.

Miller, Daniel. 1997. Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Berg.

—-. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Simmel, Georg. 1957. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62(6): 541–558.

Turow, Joseph. 1997. Breaking up America: Advertisers and the New Media World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Veal, A.J. 1993. “The Concept of Lifestyle: A Review.” Leisure Studies 12(4): 233–252.

Veblen, Thorstein. 1953. Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: The New American Library.

Wernick, Andrew. 1991. Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression. London: Sage. Chapters 1–2, 5, 8.

Williams, Rosalind. 1982. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkely: University of California Press.