ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that placing the emphasis instead on youth as a social process offers the opportunity to understand how different social groups of young people face the struggle to reconstruct and define their identities against the more powerful definitions and constructions of other groups, including journalists, politicians, teachers and youth workers. Analysis of youth subcultures explores the ways in which young people attempt to resolve contradictions of their age and situation, often producing distinctive perspectives and behaviour. Conventional youth studies all too often frames the process of growing up in terms of a movement from 'dependency' to 'independence'. Cutting across this variation, however, are significant social processes which are affecting more and more people, young and old alike. Youth and education policies which deny the relevance of class, gender and ethnic relations as relations of power in effect risk contributing to the production of unequal relations. The.
