ABSTRACT
Subcultural participation has long been associated with deviance. Graffiti writing and skateboarding have long been understood to be deviant subcultures. In a little-known article called "Graffiti as Career and Ideology", Richard Lachmann utilizes Howard Becker's concept of the "deviant career" to discuss the time youth spend writing graffiti. The idea was that deviance could provide the possibility of career, and the community was soon subsumed by the enormous attraction of the Birmingham School's discovery of the symbolic politics in the spectacular styles of teddy boys, mods, and punks. Street skateboarders creatively interpret architectural forms as sites to perform tricks. For top-level skaters, skateboarding is something far more important than youthful deviance, as it provides an opportunity for a legitimate adult career. For subcultures like skating, the empirical reality is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, they have had a positive economic impact on the lives of many of their individual participants by providing them with career opportunities.
