Youth Subcultures: From Deviation to Fragmentation

Abstract

This theoretical text introduces the issue of youth subcultures and tries to define particular basic concepts that are essential for the study of this issue in context of social pedagogy and sociology. These terms include culture, dominant culture, subculture, counterculture, scene, etc. The article also deals with the basic definition of youth subcultures; it discusses this category on the basis of current debates and then introduces various sociological schools which have dealt with this issue for a long time. These are the Chicago school of sociology, Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the post-subculture approaches. Finally, it is noted that in the last two decades there has occurred a fragmentation of particular styles, which led to the gradual replacement of sociological term subculture.

Keywords

• youth subcultures
• sociological school
• Chicago School
• Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
• post-subcultural theory