ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how post-modernist theories help us to develop the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) analysis in order to make sense of the fragmented social world inhabited by young people in the 1990s. The cultural impact of post-modernity has become the basis of a whole school of social theory. Culturally, post-modernism stresses the ephemeral in preference to the fixed and absolute. The chapter outlines the subcultural theory developed by the Birmingham CCCS in the 1970s. Order to make sense of contemporary British youth subcultures it will be useful adapt the analysis of the Birmingham CCCS in the context of debates about post-modernist society. The two major studies of mainstream youth subcultures are those of P. Willis and P. Corrigan. Both studies are concerned with the transition from school to work among urban lower working class adolescent boys.
