Missing Youth: Reflecting on Resistance through Rituals and the sociological study of working-class youth and youth culture since then

Introduction – and some biographical context

Resistance Through Rituals (RTR; Hall and Jefferson, 1976) is one of the most influential texts in the history of British youth sociology. ¹ It was central to the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in the 1970s, as others in this volume describe.

Roberts (2000) was not overdoing it when he described the work of the CCCS as being like ‘the crown jewels’ of British youth sociology (p. 10). Theoretical influence was profound and far-reaching; for a long period afterwards, foreign sociologists would often take the work of the CCCS in the 1970s as the British youth sociology. Like other young scholars back then, RTR was crucial reading for me as I progressed from undergraduate to doctoral studies in youth sociology in the 1980s. Later, with my first lecturing job (at Teesside University, from 1992), I had the luck to write and run what proved to be popular undergraduate modules in youth sociology. CCCS sub-cultural theory – via RTR – was the cornerstone of these and, in turn, these modules became the springboard for the UK’s first BA (Hons) Youth Studies degree (founded by Tracy Shildrick and me, see her paper in this volume).

Other contributors to this collection will do a better job than I possibly could of delineating the theoretical history, influences, origins, short-comings and contribution of RTR. For me, back then, it was a book that I found engaging, challenging – and exciting. The book has autobiographical meaning. It was published in 1976, when I was 14 and soon to be immersed in the politics and culture of Punk, ‘Rock Against Racism’ and ‘the Anti-Nazi League’. ² Later, at university, finding that you could study this sort of stuff was a revelation.

RTR is a book that I have read, re-read, taught, recommended, used, promoted and debated. I happily took up the offer to write something about it here; I have a well-thumbed, scrawled on copy sitting next to me as I do so. I have co-written papers (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2006) which – quite unfashionably at the time – explicitly defended RTR against the tide of post-modern, ‘post-subcultural’ criticism that came to the fore in the 1990s. So, I am a fan. But I have also been a critic. Mostly, my criticisms have been about what it didn’t do, what it seemed to ignore. A sense of the value of RTR, and of its absences, has spurred a lot of my own research, thinking and writing over the years.

In this short paper, I will: sketch out some key criticisms and apparent gaps in the work of the CCCS on youth sub-cultures; describe the key traditions of youth sociology in the UK since RTR, and locate my own research in relation to research on youth cultures and youth transitions; note the emergence of, and problems with, the post-modern turn to ‘post-subcultural studies’ in the 1990s; try to explain the abeyance of a concerted youth cultural sociology in Britain since then; and, finally, in conclusion, suggest that the theoretical mapping undertaken by the CCCS writers – beyond the tight focus on narrowly-defined, stylistically spectacular subcultures – still has great relevance for contemporary youth sociologists.

So, what’s missing?

As well as the accolades, criticisms of Resistance Through Rituals were not slow in coming. Only a few years after its publication sociologists were pointing to empirical gaps and methodological weaknesses (e.g. Waters, 1981). For research which seemed to stress the value of ethnographic understanding of sub-culture, where was the actual research with young people, where were their voices? Methodological details were sometimes hazy. The edited volume lacked the ‘thick description’ associated with some anthropological ethnography.

Theoretically, the emphasis was on the origins of sub-cultural styles. Thus, Cohen’s (1972) foundational paper dissects the emergence of Skinhead sub-culture in East London in the 1960s against the pressures facing working-class people in that place and time. The CCCS largely disregarded the later development, ‘career’ and meaning of sub-cultures post-genesis and geographically there was an overrepresentation of London as a/ the centre of sub-culture (Hebdige, 1979). Punk might mean something quite different to working-class youth in Stockport or South Shields, ³ at the time and later, compared with Malcolm McClaren’s King’s Road art and fashion scene in 1976 (MacDonald, 1988).

One of the strongest and most obvious criticisms came from feminist scholars such as McRobbie and Garber (1976, writing in RTR itself). Girls and young women were largely ‘invisible’ in these studies (Marshall and Borrill, 1984); at most, sub-culture theory presented them in supporting roles to the heroic, resistant males centre stage. Their critique postulated that girls and young women may have less public, privatised ‘bedroom cultures’ (rather than public, street-based sub-cultures); a theme later explored empirically by Lincoln (2012). ⁴ This ‘gang of lads’ model of youth culture research was seen as – and probably was – the dominant one in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Willis’ (1977) Learning to Labour, for all its theoretical importance, should have been sub-titled ‘how working-class boys get working-class jobs’. Indeed, 10 years later, Griffin’s (1985) Typical Girls (borrowing from the title of the 1979 album by female punk band ‘The Slits’) was an explicit attempt to rectify this imbalance by focusing on the ‘school to work’ experiences of working-class girls in the English midlands.

For me, however, the most glaring absence from the pages of RTR was that of the mass of working-class young people. Growing up in the Northwest of England in the 1970s and ‘80s, it seemed to me that the majority of young people, even of working-class young people, even of working-class young men, went nowhere near membership of the sort of spectacular subcultures described by the CCCS (e.g. Teds, Skins, Mods, Hippies, Rudies). Sub-culture, as pictured in RTR, seemed to be very much a minority pursuit. This, of course, was acknowledged by Clarke et al. (1976) in the pages of RTR: ‘the great majority of working-class youth never enters a tight or coherent sub-culture at all’ (p. 1 6).

But if the majority of working-class young people did not adopt the styles and rituals of ‘the sub-culturalists’ this is potentially not just an empirical weakness but a theoretical one too. If, for instance, we can explain the emergence of Skinhead in terms of the coming together at a particular time and place of powerful class and generational pressures why then did not all young working-class men in this locality become Skins? How do we explain its minority status? There are suggestions of an explanation in the pages of RTR but I am not sure they are completely successful (and I return to this in the conclusion). As I was struggling with these questions in the early stages of my PhD, I came across Gary Clarke’s then recently published Defending Ski-Jumpers (1982). Its odd title needs a word of explanation. Clarke is referring to a particular style of acrylic jumper or tank-top sweater, depicting ski or snow scenes or, as often, large star motifs, that were popular amongst working-class young men in the early to mid-1970s (and often worn with high-waister ‘loon’ pants, white socks and loafer shoes). These were very popular at the time; these were ‘mass fashion’. Gary Clarke’s point was that there was all this working-class youth culture going on ‘out there’, but with no mention from the CCCS sub-culturalists.

As Clarke suggested, there was, then, a whiff of theoretical elitism in the CCCS sub-cultures project. It implicitly framed the majority outside of sub-cultures as uninteresting because they appeared to be ‘conformist’ and absorbed into the bland fashions of mass consumerism rather than ritually resisting the status quo. In my view, Clarke’s paper remains one of the most insightful critiques of the CCCS. It is particularly fascinating because it was written from within the CCCS, featuring as number 72 in the famous Working Paper series.

Clarke’s intervention came at an important moment. The early 1980s were tough times for young people in the UK. In the early years of the then new Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, youth unemployment was spiralling. It rose more in 1980 than it had the previous ten years put together. The youth labour market virtually collapsed, replaced by a range of ‘special measures’ so-called training schemes, from YOP, through YTS and onwards, under a multitude of acronyms. Clarke (1982) asked what is:

. . .the value of decoding the stylistic appearances of particular tribes during a period in which young adults are the prime victims of a state policy of manufactured unemployment. . . the time has come to turn our aways from the stylistic art of a few (p. 1).

The shift to studying youth transitions

Much youth sociology in the UK did just that. Instead of questions of sub-cultural style and identity, researchers became focused upon young people’s ‘school to work’ careers – their encounters with unemployment, jobs and training schemes (Banks et al., 1992). More broadly, ‘youth transitions to adulthood’ became the dominant field of study. This was a key moment in the history of British post-war youth sociology where ‘two traditions of youth research’ crystalised and split apart (Coles, 1986; MacDonald et al., 1993). The typical (but faulty) depiction of this split is that one was most interested in theory and issues of sub-culture and identity (with ethnography often to the fore) and one was more about transitions from ‘school to work’, with social policy concerns and, often, quantitative surveying more prominent (see MacDonald et al., 2001). UK national research programmes about youth and young people during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (Wallace, 1999) – such as the ESRC’s Young People and Society programme, the 16-19 Initiative and the Youth, Citizenship and Social Change programme and to a lesser extent, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Young People programme – were largely centred on investigations of youth transitions. They gave material impetus to the careers of a generation of youth sociologists in the UK (me included). Studies of youth sub-culture became marginal to the mainstream of UK youth sociology at least as far as well-funded research was concerned.

It must be stressed that the separation of these two traditions are broad-trends and general tendencies which can be over-exaggerated. The framing is useful to understand trends in youth sociology, but the work of some scholars spanned these supposedly separate fields, and, in other cases, it would be hard to pin down a study as falling on one or other side of this ‘divide’. Was Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977) a study of working-class youth sub-culture or a study of transitions from school to work? In addition, there have been multiple attempts to overcome the perceived divide between studies of sub-culture and studies of transition (e.g. Furlong et al., 2011; Geldens et al., 2011; Woodman and Bennett, 2015), with just one example being through analysis of the ways that young people create ‘DIY careers’ from their music-making and (sub)cultural production practices (see the Special Issue of Cultural Sociology, edited by Bennett, 2018).

My own research biography has incorporated an attempt to bring together youth transitions and youth culture research (and to involve and theorise more of the mass of working-class young people left out of subcultural studies). Reflecting this intention, I have co-authored papers that have been both ‘in defence of studies of youth transition’ (MacDonald et al., 2001) and ‘in defence of subculture’ (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2006). In researching the lives of young working-class people in the Northeast of England, my stance has been that youth transitions are an outcome of unequal and changing opportunity structures (e.g. resulting from the deindustrialisation and impoverishment of working-class communities) and of the identities, choices, cultures and outlooks of young people.

One example – a paper called ‘Street Corner Society: Leisure Careers, Youth (Sub)culture and Social Exclusion’ (MacDonald and Shildrick, 2007) – borrowed its title directly from Whyte’s (1943/1981) Chicago School study and some of its inspiration from one of the less cited chapters in RTR, Corrigan’s (1976) ‘Doing Nothing’. We were interested in the under-researched, under-theorised but widespread ‘street corner society’ of contemporary, urban working-class youth culture on the social housing estates of the UK. ‘Hanging around’ and ‘doing nothing’, in large, apparently aimless mixed-sex groups – inciting moral panics about disorder and spurring the state to introduce Anti-Social Behaviour Orders – became a prime focus for media, commentators, politicians and legislators in the 1990s and 2000s (e.g. Behr, 2005; Lusher, 2005; Page, 2000). Criminologists engaged (e.g. Loader, 1996) but youth culture sociologists largely did not. Writing our article thirty years later, ‘Doing Nothing’ (Corrigan, 1976) remained one of the few and one of the best bits of thinking on which to hang our own emergent analysis of these forms of ‘street corner society’; a sort of ‘loose’ youth (sub)culture that seemed not to fit with the stylishly spectacular, ‘tighter’ forms of sub-culture at the centre of RTR (as I flesh out later). For Corrigan (1976: 103), though, this form of association represented the ‘largest and most complex youth subculture’. We agreed. We argued that these very widespread forms of street-based, working-class youth culture incorporated within them ‘leisure careers’ – the free-time associations, allegiances, and activities of young people as they progress through the youth phase – and that these leisure careers could intertwine with other aspects of youth transition, such as drug-using and criminal careers, in shaping not just individual biographies but broader patterns of social exclusion and inclusion (MacDonald and Marsh, 2005).

A second wave of youth cultural studies: ‘scenes’, ‘neo-tribes’ and ‘post-subculture’

Youth transitions studies remained ascendant in the ‘90s and 2000s in the UK. There was, however, an important resurgence of academic interest in youth culture in the early 1990s, following the arrival of Acid House and Rave Culture. This ‘second wave’ (Roberts, 2005) of British youth culture research came to be known as ‘post-subcultural studies’ (Muggleton and Weinzierl, 2003; see Bennett, 2000, 2005; Miles, 2000; Muggleton, 2000, 2005; Redhead, 1993, 1997; Thornton, 1995).

David Muggleton, one of the main proponents, is right to say that these should not be thought of as a ‘unified body of work’ (2005: 214) but they all tended to share a rejection of CCCS sub-cultural theory (Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2004). For Muggleton (2005: 214), these were explicitly ‘post CCCS studies’. The music-based cultures (e.g. Bennett, 2000; Stahl, 2003), dance scenes (e.g. Malbon, 1999; Thornton, 1995), and/ or stylistic groups (e.g. Muggleton, 2000) studied under the ‘post-subculture’ umbrella were, according to these authors, decidedly not class-based phenomena. Unlike those youth cultures identified by the CCCS, these were said to be more fleeting and about individual lifestyle and consumption choices. Young people were said to approach styles ‘like tins of soup on a supermarket shelf’ (Polhemus, 1994: 143).

Some of these writers took more account of issues of social structure than others but the defining approach was one that stressed post-modernity and the fragmented and individualised ways in which young people construct their identities. Night clubbers were said to be eager for a ‘slice of the postmodern experience’ (Redhead, 1997: 95) and have ‘multiple identifications’ (Shields, 1992: 16) rather than having the sort of solid, lasting, singular affinity said to typify being a Mod or a Skin or a Punk. Indeed, some critics argued that it was ever thus; the CCCS got it wrong and ‘their’ older subcultures also lacked the sort of coherent, fixed, resistant character ascribed to them.

At that moment this re-emergence of youth culture research was exciting for youth sociologists (like me) who were not only interested in getting to grips with youth transitions to adulthood. The critique offered by the post-subculturalists raised important questions about the methodological and empirical soundness of the CCCS approach. Ultimately, though, post-subcultural studies were a disappointment (Blackman, 2005). Ironically, they repeated one of the most serious theoretical and empirical flaws of the CCCS in their wholesale focus on ‘the few’ – those members of ‘stylistic, particular neo-tribes’ (to paraphrase Clarke, 1982) – at the expense of researching the cultural lives of the majority of young people outside of the hedonistic club cultures (see Jensen, 2018 for further critical discussion).

A second problem was their lack of empirical interest in social class. The floating, un-rooted, classlessness of ‘neo-tribes’ was asserted rather than demonstrated. Rarely if ever in these studies are readers told much about the wider, non-nightlife lives of participants – their employment, housing, family, educational contexts and transitions, for instance. Acid House, Rave and Club Culture appeared to be one big, open party and it is almost as if class was wished away as a possible influence (or barrier). We don’t have reliable evidence but those few studies of dance culture that asked the question tended to find that most participants were predominantly middle-class (e.g. Forsyth, 1997; Measham et al., 2001).

My focus in this article is upon the UK sociology of youth but there is an important parallel and development to these sorts of debate in contemporary British cultural criminology, including in the pages of Crime, Media, Culture. There is not the space here to provide more than a nod to this line of work, but an excellent starting point is the expert analysis and critique offered by Martin (2009) in his discussion of how contemporary criminological theory engages with questions of subculture, identity and deviance vis-à-vis the ‘Chav phenomenon’ (and more widely). Much of what he argues chimes with much that I have argued here and previously. One of the benefits of his essay, however, is that he points to the theoretical parallels between sociological studies of ‘post-subculture’ and ‘neo-tribes’ and similarly celebratory treatments of youthful ‘transgressions’ and deviance in cultural criminological studies. Martin adds a corrective and points us towards a ‘critical cultural criminology’ that would better recognise the classed limits to ‘postmodern’ choice for young people and the continuing power of social structural determinants in shaping their leisure and working lives and their engagements with offending and the criminal justice system.

The sociology of youth culture in abeyance

The spike in interest in ‘post sub-cultural studies’ in the 1990s was relatively short-lived but, sadly, represents the last concerted attempt of British youth sociologists to engage with questions of youth culture, sub-culture and style. That is not to say there have been no studies whatsoever; some are mentioned below. These tend, though, to have been singular efforts rather than the sort of collective theoretical bodies of work that marked out the work of the CCCS and, later, the post-subculturalists. ⁵

The content of the 2024 Journal of Youth Studies international conference (University of Ulster, September 2024) gives a clue to this current state of play in the academy. ⁶ JYS is one of the most popular and successful international scholarly journals in critical youth studies. At the Ulster conference, across 3 days, there were around 200 presentations from researchers based in over 20 countries. Amongst the numerous papers about youth transitions, or social exclusion and ‘NEET’ or youth work, or social media practices, or youth activism and politics, or young workers and the labour market, or youth mobility, or the lives of rural youth, it would be hard to find more than a handful that were directly about youth culture or youth sub-culture in the sense conveyed by the CCCS (or their later critics). This seems noteworthy.

There are various possible explanations for this abeyance of youth culture research. A central claim of the post-subculturalists was that even if they once possessed a depth of meaning and value for their young members, sub-cultures no longer did or could. Their appeal had fizzled out in an increasingly consumerist and individualised society where class identities were fuzzier and other sources of division and difference (e.g. to do with sexuality) were more to the fore than previously. The sociology of youth subculture went quiet because there were no more subcultures anymore.

A second answer relates to the institutional context for British youth sociology. From the 1980s to the early 2000s there were four major national programmes of funded research on young people (three from the SSRC/ESRC and one from the JRF, as mentioned earlier). None were very strongly interested in questions of youth sub-culture, but they did allow some space, energy and motivation for youth research and theoretical critique per se. National funding support has dried up and doing sociological youth research – of whatever flavour – has become much less easy for young, or older, researchers in the last three decades. This is particularly depressing given the multiple, intersecting crises facing young adults in the UK in respect of stalled social mobility, widespread labour market precarity, increasing poverty, the impossibility of the housing market, worsening mental health and so on (Moore et al., 2021).

Nevertheless, as hinted at above, there have been some fascinating instances of youth cultural research and analysis in the past 30 years in the UK. Often such studies tip their hat to the intellectual lineage of the CCCS sub-culture tradition, but rarely do they focus on the tightly defined, substantive, lasting, stylistic sub-cultures of the sort discussed by the CCCS.

For instance, Hamilton (2012), interested in social policy questions about families and poverty in Northern Ireland, researched how mothers attempted to stave off the stigma of poverty through the purchase and ‘conspicuous consumption’ of designer sports gear for their teenage children. Whilst this carried localised cultural capital and helped towards social inclusion in the immediate neighbourhood, these styles were ones that were negatively labelled and were associated with a so-called ‘Chav’ underclass culture by wider society and thus carried the risk of further exclusion and marginalisation. Not dissimilarly, in a nice study that blended concepts from youth culture research and youth transitions research, Archer et al. (2007) studied inequalities in educational experiences and post-school transitions. They found that the stylistic cultural identifications practised by working-class pupils in their sample became part of a process of class differentiation and deciding against higher education or, as their title put it, ‘University’s not for Me – I’m a Nike Person’. Gunter (2016) drew upon his ethnographic work with Black young people in East London to theorise the styles, norms, identities and practices of ‘Road Culture’. His is an approach that has strong echoes of subcultural analysis in the style of the CCCS in that he strenuously rejects populist media portrayals of this (as to do with criminogenic, gang culture), seeks to understand the positive feelings of attachment that come from Road Culture and locates this cultural phenomena within a structural, class-based analysis of changing and unequal opportunities facing young people in these localities.

Conclusions

There have been few books in youth sociology in Britain that have been as influential as Resistance Through Rituals. It remains one of the first books that I recommend to new students of youth. Its influence lasts because of the theoretical ambition of the CCCS scholars; to integrate analysis of the changing post-war British economy, culture and society and the role of the state and of the media, and the impact of divisions of class, ‘race’, gender, generation and place, in the making of working-class youth culture. This theoretical ambition has not been matched, in my opinion, by any group of youth researchers in the intervening period. In comparison, the later ‘post-subcultural studies’ seem ephemeral and insubstantial, like the youth scenes they described. So, new scholars in youth sociology still look to RTR as a starting point and springboard, even if the parade of post-war subcultures that were its subject matter have fizzled out.

The main point that I’ve tried to make is that there was a serious gap at the heart of RTR; most-working-class young people did not orient towards those sort of youth sub-cultures. This opens the CCCS approach to allegations of cultural elitism. The majority – including the wearers of ‘Ski-jumpers’ in the 1970s, or the street corner socialisers in places like Teesside in the 1990s and 2000s – are deemed uninteresting, by implication ideologically incorporated and excluded from sub-cultural analysis.

Perhaps, more precisely, they have been excluded from CCCS sub-cultural analysis as it became to be seen and understood. Because RTR – through Corrigan’s (1976) short essay on ‘Doing Nothing’ as ‘the largest. . . youth subculture’ (p. 103) – does allow for a different sort of understanding of sub-culture. And the introduction to RTR (Clarke et al., 1976: 14) talks of more ‘loosely bounded and defined’ and ‘unlabelled’ forms of working-class sub-culture (that mesh closely with what I’ve described from our Teesside Studies). By contrast, then, the tightly-defined, named and labelled, stylishly spectacular groups – the Teds, Punks and Skins – might be the minority form of CCCS sub-culture but the one that has attracted most academic attention.

To finish, and in praise of RTR, I quote the following passage from it:

We can distinguish broadly between three aspects: structures, cultures and biographies . . .By structures we mean the set of socially organised positions and experiences of class in relation to the major institutions and structures. These positions generate a set of common relations and experiences from which meaningful actions – individual and collective – are constructed. Cultures are the range of socially organised and patterned responses to the social and material conditions. Though cultures form, for each group, a set of traditions – lines of action inherited from the past – they must be collectively constructed anew in each generation. Finally, biographies are the ‘careers’ of particular individuals through these structures and cultures – the means by which individual identities and life-histories are constructed out of collective experiences. Biographies recognise the element of individuation in the paths which individual lives take through collective structures and cultures, but they must not be conceived as either wholly individual or free-floating. Biographies cut paths in and through the determined spaces of structures and cultures in which individuals are located (Clarke et al., 1976: 57).

This paragraph, to me, provides a very useful backdrop or even ‘quasi-manifesto’ for contemporary youth sociology. Its concerns seem as relevant now as 50 years ago, regardless of the twists and turns in theoretical fashion or the empirical changes in young people’s life-worlds in the intervening period. It is broad and non-dogmatic enough to allow for a wide range of types or forms of youth study. Yet it is clear about some of the underlying ‘facts’ to which we must attend, specifically the material conditions and relations of class. Rightly, it emphasises youth research that seeks to understand and focus on the structural conditions that shape and constrain young people’s lives. Consequently, ‘biographies’ or’ youth cultures’ should not be seen as ‘wholly individual or free floating’ – a prescient dig at coming, post-modern perceptions of so-called ‘post-subculture’. The reference to ‘the major institutions and structures’ that shape young people’s ‘experience of class’ chimes well with the current trend in critical youth studies to better grapple with ‘a global political economy perspective’ (e.g. Sukarieh and Tannock, 2016). ⁷

In foregrounding structures (and the material conditions of class) as the first ‘aspect’ to be considered, the CCCS writers, as we know, equally allow for what they call the ‘aspect’ of youth cultures. These are posed as ‘the range’ of youthful responses to inherited conditions (i.e. there is not a singular response). ‘Structure’ and ‘culture’ are combined (and this, of course, is a route towards combining the ‘two traditions’ of youth culture research and youth transitions research). Its focus on youth cultural responses forming up ‘anew in each generation’ is in tune with the strong, current scholarly interest in youth studies in the significance of ‘social generations’ (e.g. Woodman, 2020). Finally, the place given by the CCCS writers to biographies, as the third ‘aspect’ to be considered, foregrounds the age-old conundrum of structure and agency, recognising the theoretical value in exploring how human difference and agency still have a role in shaping young people’s lives and outcomes even when growing up under shared social, cultural and material conditions (an ever-present question for our Teesside Studies; see for instance MacDonald, 2006). In other words, then, examples of the most significant and recent theoretical debates in critical youth studies – about agency and structure in youth transitions, about the role of political economy or the significance of social generations, for instance – ‘hook into’ the framework offered here by the CCCS. It is a paragraph that – 50 years on – still makes me think about, and makes me excited about, the theoretical challenges and possibilities of youth sociology.