ABSTRACT
In France and Germany, for example, for different reasons, the advent of crises of unemployment was less apparent in the 1980s, but in both societies unemployment among young people began to attain the status of a fundamental national crisis by the mid-1990s. Since the late 1970s, all Western societies have been experiencing the impact of the transformation of 'Fordist' systems for the organization of production and employment, regulated by systems for the welfare and support of individual citizens. Different processes of change and adaptation of 'national labour markets' were apparent in other societies. In 1994 a report from the Department of Health and Social Security concluded that 32 per cent of children in England and Wales under the age of sixteen were living below the poverty line. Many commentators in the field of cultural studies have pointed to the limits of a modernist subcultural theory in making sense of the contemporary condition of youth.
