Title

Class & Subcultures: A Version of Cohen’s Model

Description

Post-war redevelopment and rehousing led to a depopulation of the area, and the break-up of the traditional neighbourhood: this was compounded by speculative development and by a new influx of immigrant labour, producing a further drift of the local work force. The most immediate impact was on the kinship structure—the fragmentation of the traditional ‘extended family’ and its partial replacement by the more nucleated ‘families of marriage’.
[…] the working class teenager experienced these shifts and fragmentations in direct, material, social, economic and cultural forms. But they also experienced, and attempted to ‘resolve’ them on the ideological plane. And it is primarily to this attempted ‘ideological solution’ that he attributes both the rise of, and the differentiation between, the different working class ‘youth sub-cultures’ of the period.
The latent function of subculture is this—to express and resolve, albeit “magically”, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture. The succession of subcultures which this parent culture generated can thus all be considered as so many variations on a central theme—the contradiction at an ideological level, between traditional working class puritanism, and the new ideology of consumption: at an economic level between a part of the socially mobile elite, or a part of the new lumpen.
Mods, parkers, skinheads, crombies, all represent in their different ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in the parent culture, and to combine these with elements selected from other class fractions, symbolising one or other of the options confronting it.
(Cohen, 1972:23)

Designer

Hall, Stuart.

Date

2003

Source

"Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain"

Bibliographic Citation

Hall, S. 2003. "Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain." Routledge. Page 34.

is depiction of attribute

English Rectangle

is composed of

English Hexagon

has attribute

English Solid Line

use feature

English Brace

depict things of type

English Sequence or Process

English Typological or Classification