ABSTRACT
The early deviant subcultural studies – and indeed the work of the Birmingham School – tended to suggest that young people had limited choices, if any, between the subculture available at a particular time and in that geographical location, and a life of conventionality. This more contemporary – or postmodernist – interpretation of youth subcultures enables us to recognise that individuals, and different groups of young people, not all members of the traditional working-class but in existence concurrently at the same historical moment, have had very different experiences of the radical economic change that has engulfed British society since the late 1970s. These very different groups have developed their own subcultural solutions for coping with this transformation and this postmodernist argument is revisited later in this book.
