A Gap between Sociological Studies of Youth - Essay Example

To what extent is there a gap between sociological and cultural studies of youth? Can these ever be bridged? Youth is a term used to describe the chronological period between childhood and adulthood in human beings. Included in this concept is the period of adolescence and the so-called ’teenage years’ and beyond, until regular employment, marriage (or stable partnership) and possible offspring, confer adult responsibilities and a different identity to youth. ’In a strictly legal sense, the term is typically applied to a person from the time of their early teens until a point between the age of 16 and 21, after which time the person is legally an adult’ (http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:8L28HUTgPuwJ:iyp.Oxfam.org/documents/Chapter%2520Global%2520Yc). The United Nations (UNESCO) officially‘… defines youth as people between the ages of 15 and 24 years inclusive’ (op. cit.). The popular view of youth as the period of rebelliousness is contrasted with childhood as one of acceptance of adult norms, and adulthood as the period of consolidation and conservatism. In Western societies it has been observed that increasingly, the years of childhood appear to shrink while the period of youth gets extended as the adoption of an adult identity becomes ever more delayed. Today young children are exposed to adult concerns through mass media and lose their childhood innocence much earlier than in previous epochs ‘There was now a sense that the end of childhood is happening quicker, and that the period of youth goes on longer‘(Report of the Workshop on Global Youth Media Culture -2004). The World Bank has concluded that on the whole, today’s youth (in industrially developed countries) as compared to their parents at a similar age, are: ‘…more likely …to be unemployed, ‘… more likely than their parents to be living at home, …more likely …to be in full time education or training, … less likely to be married’, and…’less likely to have (had) their first child’ (http://www.worldbank.org/devoutreach/spring02/article.asp.id=156). Human beings unlike other species in the animal kingdom do not merely live out their biological lifespan in a state of nature. Over millennia, they have built up civilizations with distinct cultures. Culture is all that which is transmitted from generation to generation in terms of language, norms, customs, practices, values and behaviours, which are essential to establish one‘s place in society as a contributing member. With scientific and technological advances in the West, resulting in the dominance of powerful multinational purveyors of popular culture such as Viacom, Disney, AOL/Time Warner and Hollywood studios, globalisation has tended to create the conditions for a global youth subculture. This has been severely criticised by some commentators. as being crassly commercial and manipulative. See ’Selling sex and corruption to your kids’ by David Kupelian of World Net Daily (Posted January 15, 2004). In speaking about America’s youth in the documentary ’Merchants of Cool’ David Rushkoff is reported as saying ’They want to be cool. They are impressionable, and they have the cash. They are corporate America’s $150 billion dream’ (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36598). A subculture is one where a distinct culture exists within the main culture often (or merely sometimes) at odds with the dominant or parent culture. However, mass cultural influences are not yet universally available across the globe. ‘(I)n 1998 the main consumers of cultural goods were the United States ($38.2 billion), Hong Kong SAR ($14.4 billion), Canada ($6 billion) and Australia ($3.1 billion)’, leaving the whole of Africa and Asia barely touched. (http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:8L28HUTgPuwJ:iyp.Oxfam.org/documents/Chapter%2520Global%2520Yc). Sociologists will have to sit up and take notice when Kupelian exposes the manner in which corporate financial might manufactures youthful ‘cool’. He gives a good example of how it is done. Rushkoff illustrates how the machine works by using the example of Sprite. What was once a struggling second string soft-drink company pulled off a brilliant marketing coup by underwriting major hip-hop music events and positioning itself as the cool soft drink for the vast MTV-generation market. Connecting the dots between Sprite, MTV, rap musicians and other cross-promotion participants, Rushkoff lays out the behind-the-scenes game plan: “Sprite rents out the Roseland Ballroom and pays kids 50 bucks a pop to fill it up and look cool. The rap artists who perform for this paid audience get a plug on MTV’s show, ’Direct Effects’ for which Sprite is a sponsor. MTV gobbles up the cheap programming, promoting the music of the record companies who advertise on their channel. Everybody’s happy.” (op. cit.). This is where the much vaunted nihilism of postmodernity within the ’discipline’ of cultural studies comes into its own, as against the traditional strait-laced theorising of the sociological paradigm, and the result is that the ‘gap‘ between the two approaches widens. An academic course advertised on the Internet on ’Sociology of Youth Subcultures’ (SOCI 3080) by the Sociology Department of the University of Georgia clearly identifies the two strands of approach to the study of youth pertinent to this essay. In studying the ’many strands of subcultural theory about youth during the 20th century’, this course refers to the sociological strand developed by the ’early empirical work from the Chicago School’ contrasted with ‘the Cultural Studies approach from the CCCS, or Birmingham School‘ (http://webct.uga.edu). The following is how the readily available Internet source Wikipedia introduces the Chicago School of Sociology. In sociology …Chicago School (sometimes described as the Ecological School) refers to the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_%28sociology%29). The Chicago school began by using a scientific, positivist paradigm and developed sociological theories such as the Differential Association Theory and the Social Disorganisation Theory to account for subcultures. One of its better known published research was on juvenile delinquency later appearing in book form as ‘Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang’ (Cohen Albert K. 1955), described as one of ‘the classics of American sociology’ (http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/youth subcultures.html). The gang was seen to be the product of a clash between middle-class inspired schooling against the working class background and values evident in the homes of some of the youth. From the beginning, ‘…the city of Chicago (was) the object of their study’ and the researchers developed ‘zone maps which (for the first time) demonstrated that the major (social) problems were clustered in the city centre’ (op. cit.). Later theoretical orientations included varieties of functionalism (e.g. Parsons, Merton and Radcliffe-Brown). For example, Merton developed theories of deviance ’derived from Durkheim’s idea of anomie’ influential in the early studies of non-conforming youth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28sociology%29 ). It is worth mentioning at this point a landmark piece of work, an ethnographic study of the Jewish ghetto in Chicago, entitled ‘The Ghetto’ by Louis Wirth (1928). Another ground-breaking work was by Cressey (1932) who ‘studied the dance hall and commercialised entertainment services’ (op. cit. ). It is fair to say that much of the research and ethnographic work of the Chicago School at the time was qualitative and carried out by participant observation. For example, Cressey (1932) deals with dance halls springing across various localities in Chicago where men could dance with women provided by the establishment for a small fee shared by the women and the dance hall. This was America during the time of Prohibition, and Cressey reveals the systematic subversion of established rules by a young, ethnically varied, and relatively moneyed group with a first-hand, well-observed account based on a high degree of ‘immersion‘ in the culture of the group. Although much of the work of the Chicago School has been in this tradition, it has been enriched by feminist critiques and to a lesser extent and more controversially by postmodernism. Sociology and especially its many sub-fields are by their very nature, cross-disciplinary. This would therefore be an appropriate point of departure to look at the other strand for the study of subcultures, based at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which developed a greater affinity with postmodernism.. The CCCS was founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964 and said to have been ’the birthplace of distinctive and pioneering interdisciplinary approaches to the study of class, culture and communication’. His ‘pathbreaking 1957 study, The Uses of Literacy, focused on the social impact on post-World War II everyday life of nascent consumer culture, restructured gender relations, and the changing shape of households‘ (http://my web.tiscali.co.uk/culturalstudies/history.htm). One well observed and telling difference between traditional sociology and the new field of cultural studies is encapsulated in the comment that ’…an emerging field grew between the porous boundaries of the humanities and the fortified walls of the social sciences’ (Paul Gilroy, op. cit.) The following is the Wikipedia introduction to ’Cultural Studies’ which gives a succinct description of the wide range of concerns falling within its remit. Cultural studies is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of scholars. It combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturalstudies). At the beginning the Centre was influenced by Marxist (New Left) theory ascribed to the Frankfurt School, but later turned to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian sociologist, for inspiration, who theorised on how capitalists ‘penetrate the everyday culture of working people. .. Thus the key rubric for Gramsci, and for cultural studies is that of cultural hegemony’ (op. cit.). The concept of ‘hegemony was of central importance to the development of British cultural studies [particularly the CCCS]’ (op. cit.). This opened up the field to the notion of ’agency’ where instead of scholars treating groups of people as units of research ‘(e.g. the working class, primitives, colonized peoples, women)’ (op. cit.), individuals engaged in everyday activities (such as watching television or using a mobile telephone) became a valid field for exploration. That it is not in the control of producers of cultural artefacts to dictate the meaning of a product ’…is best exemplified by the book ’Doing Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman’ (Paul du Gay et al.) , which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them’ (op. cit). Again, this is an instance of cultural studies moving away from the traditional sociological stance of privileging the producer of cultural artefacts as against the consumer. It emphasises the fact that ‘… the way consumers consume a product gives meaning to an item’ (op. cit.). Indeed, it is the ‘everyday meanings and practices’ that ‘have become the main focus of cultural studies’ (op. cit.). However, some caution is called for when, as we have already seen, ‘the cynical and soulless marketing of corruption to the “MTV generation” by Viacom, Disney, AOL/Time Warner and other companies’, is calculated to violate the authenticity of ‘meanings and practices’ of everyday life (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36599). Another facet of the gap between sociological studies of youth in contrast to cultural studies is the ever growing ‘inclination towards extreme individuality’ of the postmodern generation. ’…youth culture shows itself to be pre-eminent in trumpeting the supremacy of the individual - divorced not just from the divine, but from family, lineage, community and nation’ (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=3923). Sociologists and anthropologists in the past were able to point to rites of passage in tribal societies as marking the entry of the young person to the adult world. Traditional rites of passage such as christening or baptism, bar mitzvah, confirmation, graduation, engagement and marriage have lost their central importance in modern life which has become less about preserving and magnifying the cultural heritage of our predecessors and now centres on individual expression. Nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in the trend towards writing one’s marriage vows, as if the ceremony …is seen as an expression of the couple’s personality rather than an opportunity for them to join a sacred institution (Ross Farrelly op.cit.).. Much of the criticism of culture studies in contrast to sociological studies of youth, centres on the former being impressionistic with little or no attempt at research based on theory, or any attempt at formulating theory. Rupa Huq quoting Edgar and Sedgwick (1999) defines theory as ’… a schema of explanation according to which a diversity of phenomena are accorded a significance’ (http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Reviews/rev7.htm). However, postmodernism disavows any ‘grand narratives’ or meta-narratives as being valid in explaining today’s cultural phenomena. Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favours “mini-narratives”, stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern “mini-narratives” are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability (http://www.Colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html). In terms of the subculture of youth, the fragmentation and contingent nature of their current daily experience is unlikely to yield theories that are generally applicable. The world of youth appears to be self-sufficient and self-contained and not amenable to formal analysis using traditional sociological theories. …modern electronic media allow children and youth to live in a socially isolated, individualised world which is entirely a creation of youth culture itself. Modern music, video games, chat rooms and text messaging are not connecting the recipient with the accrued wisdom and understanding of the nation’s cultural heritage. They are means of transmitting youth culture from one participant to another (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=3923). Even though most media products are mass produced and available globally, peer groups are always local and they tend to have different characteristics in different cultures and societies. ’Technology allows youth to live continuously in a cultural environment of their choosing … Personal music devices allow youth to live the entire day not connecting with others but hemmed in by a wall of artificial sound’ (op. cit.). Our analysis so far appears to suggest that increasingly it is the cultural studies paradigm which is more appropriate to the study of youth culture from the inside through participant observation and immersion, although the insights this would elicit may not necessarily be widely generalised as is usually expected from a sociological study. For example, Tara Brabazon writing about the youthful dancing craze known as the ’rave’ says: ’There is no correct position from which to write about music. There remains a political need to place in prose what is inferred with the feet. The cultural studies paradigm offers potential through its ability to move between scholarly and journalistic writing modalities’ (http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-25192705_ITM). In the Canadian Journal of Sociology Online March-April 2007 in an article headed ‘The Sociology of Youth Subcultures‘, Alan O’Connor of Trent University critiques two recent books by two Canadian sociologists. Brian Wilson (2006) writes about ’Youth and Rave’ while Robert T. Wood writes on ‘Straightedge Youth’. O’Connor takes a different view from Brabazon when he says that: It should be possible to do sociology about an underground punk rock scene or all-night dance parties, just as it is possible to do research on ‘serious’ topics such (as) child poverty … when we turn to a research topic like raves in Toronto it should be situated in terms of … professional knowledge. How do social class, patterns of migrations, changes in attitudes to sexual diversity play themselves out in the field of the all-night dance party? Or straightedge youth in Oakville, Ontario. Who are these youth? To answer these questions is to do sociology. (http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/youth subcultures.html). O’Connor’s major gripe is that the two authors have failed as sociologists because of a journalistic and superficial approach to their task. ‘Postmodernism appears to encourage the idea that truth is an illusion and all that is possible is to describe multiple perspectives. So Wood describes multiple perspectives on straightedge by different participants. Wilson describes the different experiences of participants at Toronto raves‘(op. cit.). His recommendation is for increased funding for future researchers to do more painstaking and thorough work within the sociology paradigm. However, Brabazon’s possible response to the above may be discerned from her throwaway line that ‘(A) graft between history and cultural studies provides the tools and means for the texts of everyday life to be interpreted and made available for future historians to ignore, incorporate or critique’ (op. cit.). Here we have in essence the differences (gap) between the sociological and cultural studies of youth although as we have seen, even the present day sociologists appear to have accepted the postmodernist stance more natural to the cultural studies researchers. Before concluding this essay it is necessary to note that the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was ‘dramatically’ closed down in 2002. The Department ’had received a “very bad” 3a mark in a Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Contemporary_Cultural_Studies). Whatever the politics of this event, it is a blow to the future development of cultural studies in Britain. However, cultural studies are alive and well in almost all other developed countries of the world. This is evidenced by the two works from the U.S. cited below which is within the cultural studies tradition, and appear to have made an impact on academia, going by their success as good reads. The first is by Patricia Hersch entitled A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence (1999). Hersch spent three years immersing herself in the life of eight youths in Reston, Virginia. ‘The study covers events from the seventh to the 12th grades (1992 - 95)’.They were supposed to be ordinary kids, ’a group balanced for race, gender and ethnicity, yet their flirtations with promiscuity, drugs, and suicidal behavior could and did turn some lives tragic’. According to Hersch, the 1990’s generation is a ‘tribe apart’ from their parent’s 1960s generation. http://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Apart-American-Adolescence-Ballantine/dp/034543594X/ref-sr_1_102-1437894-2839314? Having being left to their own devices by a preoccupied, self-involved, and ’hands-off’ generation of parents, adolescents have had to figure out their own system of ethics, morals, and values and rely on each other for advice on such profound topics as abuse, dysfunctional parents, and sex …’ http://ww.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0801027322/ref=s9_asin_image_1-1966_g1/102-14?37894-2839314?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIXX Chap Clark is equally fly-on-the wall but a trifle more academic with recommendations for correcting the malaise he finds among the youth he studied. His book is entitled Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers (2004). He only spent six months at a California public school but discovered that the youngsters had been ’subjected to at least a decade of adult driven agendas… According to Chap Clark, today’s teens have created their own world to serve as a shield against uncaring adults’ (op. cit.) From our analysis above, it can be fairly confidently asserted that both the sociological and cultural studies strands appear to converge in the way they approach the study of youth today, under the influence of postmodernism. However, the field is very complex and it would be foolish to maintain that total congruence is possible or even desirable as a future prospect. (>3000 words) References Brabazon, T, (2002) http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-25192705_ITM Clark, C. (2004) Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Cohen, A.K. (1955) Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press Cressey, P.G. (1932) The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercial Recreation and City Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. du Gay P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., and Negus, K.. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Culture Media and Identities Vol.1 London: Sage Publications. Farrelly, R. (2005) http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=3923 Gilroy, P. (2002) http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/culturalstudies/history.htm Hersch, P. (1999) A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence. Ballantine Publishing Group. Hoggart, R. (1957) The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Huq, R. (2001) http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Reviews/rev7.htm O’Connor, A. (2007) ’The Sociology of Youth Subcultures’. The Canadian Journal of Sociology Online. March - April 2007. http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/youthsubcultures.html (April 2007) Report of the Workshop on Global Youth Media Culture; Division for Social Policy and Development, United Nations DESA New York, 28 - 29 April 2004. Wirth, L. 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