ABSTRACT
The nexus between youth cultural forms and inequality has generated some of the most important ongoing debates in the sociology of youth. The highly influential approach to youth subcultures that developed during the 1970s and 1980s at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was oriented to exploring the reproduction of class among working-class males. Bennett points out that poverty, marginalisation and inequality are very real, with profound consequences for lives, but are not as rigidly defined or experienced' as critics of post-sub cultural youth research suggest. The concepts of subculture and post-subculture are central to the work of interpreting the relationship between young people and society. The antagonist response that has emerged in post-sub cultural debates in youth studies fits with a general tendency within the sociology of youth to over-simplify the relationship between social change and inequality.
