Youth Studies and the Problem of Structure and Agency: Foucault vs Marx, Tait vs Sercombe, Beck vs Bourdieu, Woodman vs Threadgold vs Roberts

In this chapter, the author wants to revisit the debate, begun in the pages of Youth Studies Australia that was the impetus for the collection Youth Subcultures: Theory, History and the Australian Experience. That debate, between Gordon Tait and Howard Sercombe, was at one level about the usefulness or otherwise of the work of Karl Marx and/or Michel Foucault for the practice of youth studies. Woodman then provided a review of the ways in which both the concept of choice biography and, more broadly, the work of Beck had been used and critiqued in youth studies in the last 10 to 15 years. The debate between Gordon Tait and Howard Sercombe emerged as a consequence of the publication of an article by Tait that sought to introduce Foucault's discussions about knowledge, regimes of truth and government into the domain of youth studies.