Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society International Encyclopedia of the Social SciencesA Dictionary of Sociology Further reading


Youth Culture

Youth Culture




Youth Culture before the Modern Period



were given the task of organizing festivals, which again allowed a significant realm of freedom both in planning and in presentation. European charivariesinformal, rowdy evening parades in which cuckolded husbands, scolding wives, or other offenders of community standards were mocked or sanctioned (sometimes physically)were initiated and lead by village youths with the tacit approval of (and sometimes participation from) local adults. There is also some evidence that youth cultures may have formed in institutions such as monasteries and academies, where large numbers of young people were separated from most other adults for purposes of extended training and instruction. For instance, aspects of a youth culture are evident in the reports


Youth Cultures in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries


particularly for orphans, youths of marrying age, and runaways. Cities offered employment for wages for young people and a more or less open marketplace in necessities and leisure to people of any age. What many criminologists now recognize as youth gangs had appeared in major European cities as early as the Middle Ages; they appeared in New York City before the mid-nineteenth century, along with non-violent working-class youth cultures centered around volunteer fire departments. As these examples indicate, a distinction between a cultural realm created for youth and monitored by adults on the one hand (an "approved" youth culture), and a cultural realm sustained primarily by young people themselves on the other (a "rogue" youth culture) is useful, although it must be recognized that the boundary separating the two is fluid and permeable.


These developments began to coalesce to form a new understanding of the "place" of young people in leading industrial societies after the mid-nineteenth century. A period of public education was made mandatory for young people in many parts of Europe and the United States; increasingly, schooling became an expected and routine part of the life course. At roughly the same time, the field of medicine and the emerging discipline of psychology began to differentiate the stages of the human life course more precisely, determining a "normal" standard for biological and social development based on chronological age. The influx of migrants and immigrants to industrializing cities relieved some of the demand for the labor of young people, pushing young people to assume new roles outside the workplace. As concerns for the integration of immigrant children became a public issue, the schools took up this task as well. In 1904 American psychologist G. Stanley Hall attempted to synthesize and codify the contradictory biological, psychological, and social understandings of youth that had emerged during the nineteenth century in a two-volume work entitled Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. This work laid a "scientific" basis for the collective socialization of the young in large institutions, justifying the social segregation of young people by age. With progressive shift in the identity of young people from workers to students in the late nineteenth century, the process for the creation of mass youth cultures was in place.



Youth Cultures, 19001940



Youth Cultures, 19401970

Although the commercialization of youth as a consumer market did not end with the 1920s, college youth's role as the avant-garde of consumerism diminished significantly during the Depression. That role was passed on to another group of consumers, high school students, during the early 1940s, when the word teenager came into common usage among marketers. This trend coincided with America's entrance into World War II. During the war, youth cultures in high schools became a national social problem, initiated through a series of moral panics about their sexual activities (especially between high school girls and GIs), delinquency, and the influence of mass popular culture, particularly comic books, films, and rock-androll music. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the existence of a mass youth culture itself was widely recognized, although mostly ridiculed. Youth cultures adopting unusual and spectacular clothing and hair styles appeared in the United States (the Beats) and Great Britain (the Teds). Fears of urban youth gangs and their potential influence on the less-threatening teenager initiated some of the first studies of youth culture. Besides the expansion of popular culture and the commonality of high school, the automobile had a dramatic effect on youth culture, particularly in the United States. The car not only provided a means for suburban and rural youth to travel to central cities, but it also created a kind of portable "private space" that enhanced other customs, including courtship, sex, drinking, and listening to the radio.


While youthful drug use and sexual experimentation had been cause for hysteria among adults for at least fifty years, these practices became much more widespread during this period. Drug use was associated with rock music and visual culture (films, posters, and art of all sorts), both their consumption by youth and their production by popular musicians and artists. "Hippies" (including high-school students) took hallucinogenics and smoked marijuana in public. Drug use, like drinking rituals, became an expected part of youth, although the majority of young people did not participate. Sexual experimentation appears to have been rising steadily throughout the century, but the public emphasis on "free love" and recreational sex broke new boundaries, particularly after the development of oral contraceptives.

Youth Cultures since 1970


Three trends developed in youth cultures formed after the 1970s. First, as marketers moved more definitively to segment pre-adolescents as a separate market, a mass "kid" culture has begun to emerge. Because of the limits on this group's mobility and autonomy, new analytical tools are needed for investigations. However, it is important to note that this group is segmented from adult and adolescent culture at an early age, often within the context of institutions such as day care and school, and the preconditions necessary for many aspects of youth culture to emerge are in place. At the very least, the shared experience of consumer goods (toys, foods, movies, radio stations, clothing), adult authority in socializing institutions, and common activities (skateboarding, scooters) strengthen the cultural connections between young people at an earlier age while further distancing them from the experiences of their parents and older siblings. Youth culture has gotten younger. At the same time, youth culture has taken on new meanings and gotten older: In particular, there is strong evidence that some people are continuing their youth culture affiliations into adulthood, so that youth cultures become "lifestyles." This raises some interesting questions. What are we to make of a forty-year-old punk? A sixty-year-old hippie? Finally, new communication and media technologies, particularly the Internet, create spaces for new youth cultures to emerge. Teenage computer hackers and phone "phreaks" had already appeared during the 1980s, but the Internet allows for a much more expanded notion of cyber-cultures detached from everyday off-line identities. The Internet, like "lovers' lane," is a more or less unpatrolled wilderness that has allowed new cultural affiliations (e.g., net Goths) to be formed.

See also: Adolescence and Youth; Bobby Soxers; Campus Revolts in the 1960s; Charivari; Drugs; Flappers; Teen Drinking; Teen Magazines; Victory Girls; Youth Activism.


Amit-Talai, Vered, and Helena Wulff, eds. 1995. Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. London: Routledge.

Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard, eds. 1998. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: New York University Press.

Brake, Michael. 1985. Comparative Youth Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Fass, Paula S. 1977. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gelder, Ken, and Sarah Thornton, eds. 1997. The Subcultures Reader. London: Routledge.

Inness, Sherrie, ed. 1998. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls' Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Kett, Joseph. 1977. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present. New York: Basic Books.

Levi, Giovanni, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds. 1997. A History of Young People in the West, Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Joe Austin

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AUSTIN, JOE. "Youth Culture." Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 25 Jul. 2016 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

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Youth Culture

Youth Culture


The term youth culture is used generally in reference to the ways adolescents set themselves apart from the adult culture. Although age-based cultural differences have existed since the beginnings of recorded history, it was only in the 1950s, after the crystallization of teenagers as distinct social personae with their own music, lifestyles, fads, and characteristic slang, that the concept of a youth culture as separate from adult culture materialized in North American and European society. Before then anyone reaching the age of puberty was expected to conform to the norms of the larger adult culture.

The emergence of an autonomous youth culture was heralded in fictional form by the American novelist J. D. Salinger (1919) in his still popular and controversial novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951. Salinger provided the first portrait of the new teenage personaa portrait that was shortly thereafter enshrined in all kinds of media (magazines, songs, television programs, and movies), taking on a social life of its own. Since the mid1950s youth culture has evolved independently and primarily through lifestyle designations associated primarily with youth-generated musical trends and styles (rock and roll, disco, punk, and rap). This is why cultural historians tend to characterize the evolving forms of youth culture with terms such as the hippie era, the disco era, the punk era, and the hip-hop era. Each era is in fact marked by its own pattern of symbolism, ritual, slang, and overall lifestyle (clothing and body decorations) derived from attendant musical styles.

The study of youth culture in the social and human sciences has become a major academic enterprise since the 1960s. Three major cultural theories have come forth relating specifically to youth, as separate from the psychology of adolescence. One of these posits that any youth trend is perceived initially by the adult culture as subversive or transgressive, constituting a sign of impending apocalyptic danger or threatening societal values, but which gradually dissipates and blends into the larger cultural mainstream. Known as moral panic theory, the concept was proposed by Stanley Cohen (1972) in his insightful study of mods and rockers in the mid-1960s. An early twenty-first century crystallization of moral panic surfaced as a result of the trend of many youths to network socially on the Internet at sites such as MySpace and Friendster.

Another main theory is that youth culture has become the default form of all North American and European culture, spreading throughout the social landscape independently of age. As the social critic Thomas Frank (1997) has skillfully argued, youth has become a social and economic commodity since the 1960s. Because youth sells, trends in the adolescent world quickly become the cultural norm, dictating look, taste in music, and fashion.

A third major theory of youth culture is that it constitutes a form of carnivalesque theater in which the sacred, perceived to be anything authoritative, rigid, or serious, is profaned or mocked simply for the sake of it. This theory has been inspired by the work of the social critic Mikhael Bakhtin (1986). It would explain why, for example, emerging youth forms of culture seem to fly in the face of the adult official sacred world while at the same time not posing any serious subversive political challenge to it.

SEE ALSO Culture; Street Culture


Bakhtin, Mikhael M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee.

Danesi, Marcel. 2003. My Son Is an Alien: A Cultural Portrait of Todays Youth. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Danesi, Marcel. 2006. Perspectives on Youth Culture. Boston: Pearson Education.

Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



Marcel Danesi

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youth culture

youth culture Strictly speaking a subculture, the subject of an influential debate between (mainly) functionalist writers and their critics. Youth cultures are explained either by factors in the experience of adolescence, or by the manipulation of young people's spending and leisure, through advertising and other mass media. The functional separation of home, school, and work supposedly makes teenagers increasingly distinct from adults, more self-aware, and subject to peer-group rather than parental and other adult influences. But the relative affluence of teenagers in the decades after the Second World War, especially if they were in work, also encouraged the growth of a large and profitable market for goods and services specifically directed at young consumers. This has promoted the growth of distinctive youth fashions and styles in clothes, music, and leisure, many of them originating in the United States.

For some writers the cultural clash across generations has displaced social class as the primary form of conflict in modern industrialism. Yet class itself figures importantly in shaping the content of different youth cultures. Research in the United States distinguished the so-called college cultures of (mainly) middle-class youth from the rough or corner cultures of their working-class counterparts. The former were thought to manage the gap between conformist attitudes to achievement and the otherness of adolescent school life—of which the school itself is often the centre. Corner cultures, in contrast, were viewed as a response to working-class academic failure; centred around the neighbourhood gang rather than the school; and as reflecting a search for alternative, even deviant, status, identity, or rewards. In Britain, however, youth culture was almost exclusively identified with male working-class youth and the moral panic about its style and aggressiveness. Neo-Marxist studies saw this as a symbolic protest against, for example, the dissolution of the traditional working-class neighbourhood community, and mass control over what were once predominantly working-class forms of leisure (such as soccer). Much of this literature is reviewed in Mike Brake , The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures (1980)

Developments both in sociology and society itself, notably during the 1980s, greatly modified the terms of the debate. Feminist writers pointed to the invisibility of girls in the mainstream literature on youth and have researched gender variations in youth culture. The experiences of youth among ethnic minorities have also received more attention. But, above all, the period since the mid-1970s has seen the demise of the notion of the independent teenage consumer and rebel. The focus of research has switched instead to the youth labour-market, and the dependence of young people on the household, as a result of growing unemployment and the vulnerability of youth to flexible employment. See also Coleman, James S.

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GORDON MARSHALL. "youth culture." A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 25 Jul. 2016 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

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GORDON MARSHALL. "youth culture." A Dictionary of Sociology. 1998. Retrieved July 25, 2016 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-youthculture.html

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