Youth Subcultures: Reactive
There are a range of examples (both British and American) we can briefly examine in this section, mainly to get a flavour of the various explanations that have been put forward for the development of (reactive) youth subcultures.
In terms of American studies, for example, writers such as Albert Cohen ("Delinquent Boys") have used the concept of status deprivation as a means of explaining the development of reactive youth subcultures in the 1950's. Cloward and Ohlin ("Delinquency and Opportunity", 1961), on the other hand - while still focusing on the reactive nature of youth subculture production - use the concept of opportunity structures as a means of explaining how and why such subcultures develop.
In terms of specifically British studies, writers such as David Hargreaves ("Social Relations in a Secondary School", 1967) argued that the failure of the education system to provide integrating mechanisms for working class children resulted in the development of deviant subcultural responses.
In a more modern (1979) study Paul Willis ("Learning to Labour: How working class kids get working class jobs") argued that the creation of deviant subcultures amongst working class boys was not simply a response to such things as status denial, as many previous studies had, implicitly and explicitly argued. Rather, Willis saw subcultural development in more structural terms.
As you might expect, a number of questions are raised by such studies, mainly relating to the idea that youth sub-cultures are a male, working class, phenomenon.