1 The concept of youth

RETHINKING YOUTH
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH

Y oung people in the developed world have been the subjects of

an enormous amount of research over the last 40 years. In
general, this research assumes that young people constitute a separate
and significant category of people: as non-adults. A central and
recurring theme in the studies is the problematic nature of being a
young person and the even more problematic nature of becoming
adult. Much of the literature about youth has inherited assumptions
from developmental psychology about universal stages of develop-
ment, identity formation, normative behaviour and the relationship
between social and physical maturation. Yet very little work has been
done to clarify the theoretical basis of this categorisation based on
age.
From time to time this point has been made by youth researchers.
In 1968, Allen argued that the concept of youth needed to be
reassessed. She pointed out that, ‘it is not the relations between ages
that creates change or stability in society, but change in society which
explains relations between different ages’ (1968, p. 321). Twenty
years later, Jones took up the challenge, pointing out that the
sociology of youth was yet to develop a conceptual framework for
understanding both the transitions young people pass through as
they become adult and the different experiences of young people
from different social groups. She argued that it is ‘misleading to
emphasise the qualities or otherwise of “Youth” per se, since the
young are neither a homogeneous group nor a static one’ (1988, p.
707). Her conclusion was that youth is most usefully conceptualised
as an age-related process. This means that the focus on youth is not

8
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 9

on the inherent characteristics of young people themselves, but on

the construction of youth through social processes (such as schooling,
families or the labour market). Young people engage with these
institutions in specific ways, in relation to historical circumstances.
There is a growing awareness amongst contemporary youth
researchers that focusing on youth as a process throws into question
the very use of the universal term ‘youth’. For example, recently
Liebau and Chisholm (1993) have suggested that ‘European youth’
do not exist. Their point is that as nationally framed cultures and
economies follow their own courses, young people in the different
countries and regions that make up Europe negotiate very different
circumstances from each other. They are shaped by both the material,
‘objective’ aspects of the cultures and societies in which they grow
up; and by the ways in which they subjectively interpret their
circumstances (Liebau & Chisholm 1993, p. 5). Also focusing on
young people in European countries, Wallace and Kovacheva (1995)
point out that the experience of youth is being ‘de-structured’,
because the significant transitions in life are less and less age related.
They argue that transitions are no longer associated with any age
or with each other. Education, for example, has become gradually
dissociated from work, and leaving home is not necessarily a tran-
sition stage linked with marriage.
This chapter discusses the use and usefulness of the concept of
‘youth’. The first section discusses the ways in which young people
have been conceptualised, examining common assumptions about
what growing up means. The second section offers a perspective on
the concept of youth as a social process. It concludes that it is
important to study young people because they are embarking on a
process involving transitions in many dimensions of life, towards
becoming adult and establishing a livelihood. Yet, increasingly, the
meaning of adulthood and how it is achieved, marked, acknowledged
and maintained is ambiguous. The period of youth is significant
because it is the threshold to adulthood, and it is problematic largely
because adult status itself is problematic. The third section explores
popular conceptions of youth, focusing on the representations of
youth in the media as discourses about youth.

GROWING UP: THE RELEVANCE OF AGE

AND THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH

One of the most significant issues which confronts the area of youth
research is the apparent symmetry between biological and social
processes. Age is a concept which is assumed to refer to a biological
reality. However, the meaning and the experience of age, and of the
10 RETHINKING YOUTH

process of ageing, is subject to historical and cultural processes.

Although each person’s life span can be measured ‘objectively’ by
the passing of time, cultural understandings about life stages give the
process of growing up, and of ageing, its social meaning. Specific
social and political processes provide the frame within which cultural
meanings are developed. Both youth and childhood have had and
continue to have different meanings depending on young people’s
social, cultural and political circumstances.
Research on young people’s lives in non-Western countries
exposes the ideal of the happy, safe childhood and period of youth
as myths, ‘built around the social preoccupations and priorities of
the capitalist countries of Europe and the United States’ (Boyden
1990, p. 184). As a stark contrast to the Western ideal, she poses
the trafficking and sexual exploitation of children in Thailand and
the Philippines, the crimes perpetrated on young people in Argentina
under the military regime and the repression and detention of young
people in South Africa under apartheid. More importantly, Boyden
also refers to ethnographic research which reveals that children and
young people are expected to work for an income in some societies
(for example, in Bangalore, India), not just for economic reasons,
but also because it is believed that they should engage with adult
life as early as possible.
When a global perspective is taken, the socially constructed nature
of ‘youth’ becomes more apparent. For a large proportion of the
world’s young people, the idea of ‘youth’ as a universal stage of
development was and remains an inappropriate concept. In 1986,
the International Year of Youth, it was estimated by the International
Labour Organisation that globally:
there are some 50 million children under the age of 15 who are at
work. Nearly 98 per cent of all these child labourers are found in
developing countries. The striking increase in the urban youth popul-
ations of less developed regions has created the phenomenon of the
‘street children’ who live and work on the streets, doing anything
that will earn them and their families that little extra which enables
them to survive . . . If ‘youth’ is understood as constituting the
period between the end of childhood, on the one hand, and entry
into the world of work on the other, then it is manifest that youth
does not exist in the situations outlined above (United Nations 1986,
p. 8).
Although the experience of youth varies widely, and may not exist
at all for some, the concept of youth is important in enabling us to
understand some of the complexities of social change and the
intersections between institutions and personal biography. We argue
that it is most usefully seen as a relational concept, which refers
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 11

to the social processes whereby age is socially constructed, insti-

tutionalised and controlled in historically and culturally specific
ways.
It may be useful here to refer to earlier conceptual debates over
the concept of gender, because there are similarities. In the 1960s
and 1970s, the idea of sex roles was especially powerful in drawing
attention to inequalities between men and women. The concept of
sex roles provided a framework in which both men and women were
seen to become limited by socially constructed categories, or roles.
Although this concept offered a useful descriptive model, and was a
significant basis for educational strategies to address gender inequal-
ity (Connell 1987), it had serious drawbacks. The static and
categorical concept of sex roles, in which masculinity and femininity
were seen as simply discrete, if socially constructed, categories failed
to give any grasp of the relationship between masculinities and
femininities. Ultimately, the sex roles framework was replaced by a
more sophisticated understanding of gender as a relational concept,
which placed power at the centre. Gender as a relational concept
draws attention to the ways in which masculinity and femininity are
constructed in relation to each other. They are not simply ‘different’
categories and they cannot be understood independently of each
other. Davies, for example, describes how the boys in her study
worked hard to maintain a dualism between ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ by
denigrating, devaluing and constantly drawing attention to ‘feminine’
behaviour. These boys provide an example of the way in which ‘being
masculine’ involves maintaining a hierarchy in which being male has
the greater value (Davies 1993, p. 107). There are several useful
discussions of this conceptual issue; for example, Franzway and Lowe
(1978), Connell (1987) and Edwards (1983) have provided extensive
analyses of the limitations of a categorical approach to gender
relations.
Youth is a relational concept because it exists and has meaning
largely in relation to the concept of adulthood. The concept of youth,
as idealised and institutionalised (for example in education systems
and welfare organisations in industrialised countries) supposes even-
tual arrival at the status of adulthood. If youth is a state of
‘becoming’, adulthood is the ‘arrival’ (see table 2.1) At the same
time, youth is also ‘not adult’, a deficit of the adult state. This
dimension of the concept of youth is evident in the positioning of
young people as requiring guidance and expert attention (from
professionals) to ensure that the process of becoming adult is con-
ducted correctly.
Understanding youth as a relational concept brings power re-
lations to the forefront. For the purposes of our analysis, this is an
important dimension in understanding the experiences that different
12 RETHINKING YOUTH

Table 1.1 Notions of youth and adult

Youth Adult

Not adult/adolescent Adult/grown up

Becoming Arrived
Presocial self that will emerge under Identity is fixed
the right conditions
Powerless & vulnerable Powerful & strong
Less responsible Responsible
Dependent Independent
Ignorant Knowledgeable
Risky behaviours Considered behaviour
Rebellious Conformist
Reliant Autonomous

groups of young people have of growing up. The popular image of

young people presenting a ‘threat’ to law and order represents young
people as more powerful than they really are. Although young people
have ‘rights’ as young citizens, these are relatively easily denied, and
they have very little say in the institutions in which they have the
most at stake, such as education.
Another similarity between the conceptualisation of gender as
relations of power (through the constructions of masculinities and
femininities) and age (through the constructions of youth and adult-
hood) is that both involve interpretations of physical or biological
‘realities’. The challenge, in rethinking youth, is to maintain a balance
between recognising the importance of physical and psychological
changes which occur in young people’s lives and recognising the
extent to which these are constructed by social institutions and
negotiated by individuals. Importantly, it is also necessary to under-
stand the extent to which categorical conceptions of youth have been
central to denying young people their rights by creating frameworks
within which adults can judge some young people as ‘normal’ and
others as in need of intervention.
We would characterise approaches to youth which are based
primarily on age groupings as categorical. The concept of adolescence
epitomises this approach, because it assumes the existence of essential
characteristics in young people because of their age, focusing on the
assumed link between physical growth and social identity. For exam-
ple, adolescence is assumed to involve a number of developmental
tasks which must be completed appropriately or the young person
will not develop into a fully mature adult. In chapter three we discuss
the concept of adolescence in more detail.
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 13

One of the limitations of taking a categorical approach to the

study of youth is the ahistorical and static nature of this approach.
The assumption that age is the central feature characterising young
people gives insufficient weight to difference, process and change. A
categorical approach tends to rest on the assumption that the simi-
larities amongst the age category are more significant than the
differences, taking masculine, white, middle class experience as the
norm. It offers little grasp of the ways in which the experience of
growing up is a process, negotiated by young people as well as being
imposed on them.
A categorical approach also ignores the significant role of insti-
tutions and of changing economic and political circumstances and
their impact on youth. The result is the tendency to present the
attitudes, behaviours and styles of particular groups as normative
and to underestimate diversity amongst young people. Furthermore,
this approach takes little or no account of the relations between
young people and adults (for example, in communities where there
is high unemployment, in rural communities during recession, within
elite families or in urban Aboriginal communities). It also tends to
ignore the relations between groups of young people. Schooling, for
example, structures competition between groups of young people in
classrooms, as young people learn their ‘place’ in the hierarchy of
performance. Relations between groups of young people are also
structured through schooling systems. The privatisation of education
also carries the message that some schools (and by implication, their
students) are ‘better’ than others. In some states of Australia, where
a large private education sector is well established, young people in
private schools learn quite explicitly that they are an elite (see for
example, Davies 1993; Kenway 1990).
In addition, a static approach to the study of youth as a category
overlooks the continuities linking past, present and future. This
shortcoming has the potential to be addressed in contemporary
research that takes a ‘life course’ approach to studying issues such
as transition from school to work. Kruger (1993) for example,
demonstrates that a focus on youth alone may obscure significant
continuities between generations of women, by looking at life stages
in isolation from one another. A further dimension of the links
between past, present and future is the positioning of youth (and
childhood) as a reference point for future ‘real’ life. Youth is seen
as a separate ‘stage’ of life because the time of youth is about
preparation for future (real) life—adulthood. Although this dimen-
sion would seem to contradict the static nature of approaches to the
study of youth, when used uncritically it reinforces the idea that
young people are marginal members of society, awaiting their full
participation when they reach adulthood.
14 RETHINKING YOUTH

The tendency to emphasise the qualities of ‘youth’ per se has been

especially strong within the tradition of developmental psychology,
which has influenced conceptions of youth which are used more
broadly. Because we take up this issue in detail in chapter three on
youth development, we shall confine our discussion here to issues
covered in recent and current approaches to the study of youth.

SOCIAL PROCESS

There are many ways in which growing up in the 1990s in the

industrialised world is fundamentally different from in the 1950s. It
is important to ask what are the circumstances under which partic-
ular groups of young people make the transitions to adulthood?
Although the concept of youth as a subject of research was associated
with social conditions prevailing in developed countries following the
Second World War (Frith 1986), it is argued that youth as a period
of transition into adulthood has a much longer history. Indeed, a
focus on youth has a history extending back much further, depending
on how youth is defined. For example, during the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth century, working class youth were reg-
ularly portrayed as a public problem, and besides regular media
coverage, were the subject of sustained academic and government
study (Finch 1993).
Mitterauer (1993) further argues that it is too simplistic to
assume, because of linguistic evidence alone, that the period of youth
did not exist in Europe prior to the seventeenth century. His study
explores the possible bases for categorising youth, clearly demarcat-
ing between childhood and adulthood. He explores the historical
validity of five ‘transitions in status’: leaving school, finding employ-
ment, leaving home, setting up home and marriage. Mitterauer
concludes that youth, as a period of transition to adulthood is not
usefully categorised in this way, because the timing of these aspects
of transition, their meaning and their order of occurrence differ for
young men and young women, and from one region to another,
reflecting urban–rural differences as well as regional economic dif-
ferences.
Our analysis of traditional thresholds of youth has shown that many
of them were applicable only to young men. This was particularly
true of thresholds which had their historical roots in the granting of
arms. Like these traditional thresholds, the concepts of youth which
are based on them are primarily male in orientation. Male and
female youth were so different that until the end of the nineteenth
century the concepts relating to the age-group were entirely gender-
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 15

specific. Only then did a sexually inclusive collective concept of

youth emerge. But even so, the turning points of the biography of
youth continued to be very different for the two sexes (Mitterauer
1993 p. 87).

Youth, as a period of transition to adulthood, has meaning only

in relation to the specific circumstances of social, political and
economic conditions. Once this is understood, it is possible to bring
social conditions to the foreground and examine the significant
differences between groups of young people as they engage with the
processes which will take them closer to adult life. Inevitably, viewing
youth as a social process raises questions about the meaning of ‘adult’
status. For the concept of youth to have meaning its end point—
adulthood—also has to have a clear meaning.
Historically, there have been periods when, for some groups of
young people, the social processes were far more clear cut than they
are today. For example, becoming adult for middle class male
Australians in the 1960s was largely a process of getting a job, a
car, establishing a career, getting married and buying a home. For
this group, as for white middle class men in most developed countries
at this time, youth and adulthood were relatively clearly demarcated
by accepted patterns of consumption and production. The concept
of youth as a distinct category, within a finite time span, fits the
experiences of this historical group most closely.
Even during this time, however, the patterns of growing up on
which the concept is based were not universally experienced. The
transitions to adulthood for women were very different from their
male counterparts’. Women’s patterns of employment did not match
men’s. They were much more likely to remain dependent on a
partner, or on the government if they were the recipients of income
security. Women in the paid workforce were largely ignored by trade
unions and by government policy (Probert 1989). It was only in the
latter half of the 1960s that Australian women, upon marriage, were
not required to resign their permanent positions as teachers. Their
participation in the workforce, although increasing, revealed that
women were limited to employment in a few sectors of the labour
market compared with men, and they were not represented in the
higher paid, senior positions of their occupations.
These examples illustrate that the concept of youth involves a
tension between the social significance of age, which gives young
people a common social status which is different from adulthood,
and the social significance of other social divisions, which differen-
tiate young people from each other. Table 2.2 draws attention to
this point, in terms of the contradiction between homogeneity and
heterogeneity in the concept of youth.
16 RETHINKING YOUTH

Table 1.2 Universal and particular elements in the conception of youth

Universal Particular

Age status Social status, e.g., class, gender,

ethnicity, ‘race’, geographical location
Global youth culture Cultural formation, e.g., youth
subcultures
Compulsory schooling Unequal provision, opportunities and
outcomes
Legal prescriptions based on age, e.g., State regulation according to social
status offences status, e.g., indigenous young people
and police
Adolescent development Diverse life experiences and cultural
norms for growing up
Youth as deficient Youth as having multiple dimensions

While young people do have a common status and to some extent

common experiences (for example, schooling) because of their age,
there are many ‘forces’ which work against this. For example,
researchers are now beginning to provide evidence that the experi-
ences of older people in the labour market and in the home have a
strong impact on the visions young people have of their own futures.
This means that gender divisions and inequalities continue to have
a powerful impact on the way in which young men and women
approach the decisions which will affect their futures. Despite nearly
20 years of equal opportunity reform in Australian schooling, for
example, young women continue to make decisions about their future
lives in terms of very different priorities from young men. Young
women accept that it is possible for women to challenge the occu-
pational boundaries of the gender-segmented labour market, but
many are reluctant to do so, because they envisage their futures as
adults in terms of balancing paid and unpaid labour and public and
private responsibilities (Ashenden & Associates 1992).
Researchers in Canada, the Netherlands and Germany have found
the same trends occurring with regard to young women’s approaches
to adult life (Looker 1993; du Bois-Reymond et al. 1994; Kruger
1993). Young women, even though they might be aware of the
potential opportunities that education offers them to achieve ‘equal-
ity’ with their male peers, continue to make decisions about their
futures based on what they perceive to be the reality, that is,
inequality. These aspects of the transitions to adulthood are taken
up in more detail in chapter five.
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 17

In Australia, young Aboriginal people of both sexes in the 1960s

also anticipated a very different transition to adulthood from their
white counterparts’. Even in the 1980s, the relevance of the term
‘adolescence’ for young Aboriginal people was contested.
McConnochie (1982) argues that the category of youth, as employed
by many non-indigenous researchers, is inappropriate to characterise
the social experience of growing up for young Aboriginal people.
McConnochie’s reservation about the use of the term ‘adolescence’
stemmed from his perception that it implied that there were ‘internal
psychological traits’ which could be used to explain behaviour. By
contrast he pointed to the nature of the social conditions affecting
many young Aboriginal people. Traditional Aboriginal cultures care-
fully prescribed the process of becoming an adult, leaving relatively
little room for speculation. However, fundamental social change to
the traditional life of Aboriginal peoples meant that both achieving
adult status and the meaning of adulthood have become increasingly
ambiguous and uncertain.
The idea that youth only has meaning in relation to specific
circumstances is also supported by a consideration of class relations.
One of the key conditions that young people have had to face during
the 1980s and 1990s is the failure of the economies of most Western
societies to provide employment that sustains the establishment of a
legitimate livelihood for significant proportions of young people. The
struggle to establish a livelihood, historically the special burden of
working class communities, continues to be central (Wilson & Wyn
1987). In the 1990s, it is clear from the experience of New Zealand
that economic growth can continue to produce jobs and improve the
standard of living of a proportion of the population, while at the
same time the conditions and life chances of a large proportion of
the society can actually deteriorate (Kelsey 1995). Young people who
fail to find employment that is stable enough and well paid enough
to establish a legitimate livelihood have major difficulties now and
in later life. These young people become marginal to our society not
because of their youth, but because of the operation of economic
and political processes. There is increasing evidence that activities
across multiple economies (see table 2.2) is the only way young
people can gain access to a livelihood that is sustaining, if not
legitimate.
On a global scale, social and economic changes which affect
remote, small-scale and large urban communities alike have a signif-
icant impact on the meaning and experience of ‘growing up’.
Although the impact of these changes is far reaching, it does not
mean that the outcomes for young people are all the same. As this
discussion has begun to point out, the social processes which affect
the experience of growing up serve to differentiate groups of young
18 RETHINKING YOUTH

people from each other, sharpening and reinforcing deeper social

divisions rather than breaking them down. This discussion of social
process has attempted to outline some of the issues that processes
of social change raise for a conceptualisation of youth. Subsequent
chapters take up issues raised here in more substance.

POPULAR CONCEPTIONS

Our discussion of the concept of youth would be incomplete without

a consideration of the contribution of popular conceptions. The idea
that youth constitutes a significant and distinct category is inevitably
reinforced by popular media. Indeed, the analysis of media repre-
sentations of young people occupies a distinct place within youth
research. It is widely argued that in the 1950s, as patterns of
consumption and production changed to give groups of working class
young men greater leisure time and more buying power, the popular
media (mainly newspapers) were involved in the presentation of
particular constructions of young people (mostly young working class
men). The term ‘youth’ became widely used in the 1950s in
industrialised countries, as the experience of growing up responded
to changing economic and political processes.
Frith (1986) argues that the term ‘youth’ was initially most
frequently used in research on young men from working class
backgrounds, mainly in the United States and in Britain. Relatively
high rates of employment gave this group unprecedented disposable
income, enabling them to use their leisure time in new ways, and
giving them both a visibility and a form of power (Stratton 1993).
Youth became a ‘new category’ of person, distinctive, usually male,
and a potential threat to the stability of society. Although the sense
of threat implied physical threat, there was also a sense in which
young people were seen to symbolise change to moral and cultural
values as well. This sense of threat was described by Cohen (1972)
as precipitating ‘moral panics’ about the violent or disruptive behav-
iour of youth.
Historical analyses of the popular representations of young people
in Australia before the 1950s, however, suggest that it is important
to recognise the continuity of popular discourses about youth. In
contrast to the historical evidence of considerable diversity in young
people’s lives, several themes in popular conceptions of youth have
dominated. Bessant (1993) has summed up these themes in a recent
discussion of the ‘cultures’ of young Australians in the years between
1900 and 1950. She discusses the dual popular representations of
young people: as threat and inherently bad; and at the same time as
the focus of hope and optimism and intrinsically good but vulnerable.
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 19

This discourse rested, Bessant argues, on the assumption that young

people were naturally rather animalistic and uncontrollable, but that
if tamed by social conventions they could be respectable. The
assumption of this dual representation (of which the more negative
image was dominant), provided an ongoing legitimation for state
intervention, control and protection. As many researchers have
pointed out, the youth who were represented in this way were almost
exclusively male. These discourses also both drew on and fed the
newly developing psychological theories which assumed that young
people needed to pass through a series of developmental stages in
which they defied the conventions of society and experienced a time
of storm and stress, emerging from this process having ‘found
themselves’.
Subsequent analyses of later post-1950s popular conceptions of
youth in the media reveal a continuity with these early discourses.
Newspaper articles on youth are inevitably about young working
class men (and often, especially indigenous and ethnic minority
youth) who are seen as a threat to the assumed values of a ‘majority’,
because of their style of dress, their violent behaviour, their drug-
taking behaviour, or because of their attitudes towards employment,
schooling or political processes. Stratton’s (1993) analysis of the
media treatment of young people in the 1950s, for example, argues
that the derogatory portrayal of young people as ‘bodgies and
widgies’ was a dominant theme. As the analyses of these media
representations point out, it is seldom revealed that the young people
who are represented in this way constitute a small proportion of the
young population.
In addition to being portrayed as a threat, youth are represented
in the media as both symbols and victims of modern society. In her
analysis of girlhood in the 1950s, Johnson explores this theme,
arguing that the concept of youth provided the imagery for it as a
a time of uncertainty, which although threatening because of its
potential to disrupt, would be prescribed by the biological processes
of growing up, leading naturally to a stage of greater stability and
certainty in adulthood (Johnson 1993, p. 36). The insights of devel-
opmental psychology offered a perspective on youth as a time of
turmoil and change, in which adulthood was reached after complet-
ing specific normative tasks such as identity formation.
Johnson (1993) has also argued that the masculine bias in the
concept of youth derives in part from the significance that youth had
in the 1950s and 1960s as a symbol of the emerging post-war, virile
and self-determined economies and societies of the developed world.
The fit between this imagery and the experience of white middle
class young people at that time was close enough to maintain the
myth, with the promise that the transition from youth into a secure
20 RETHINKING YOUTH

and certain adulthood would also be the process for working class
males. Johnson’s analysis offers a useful perspective on the use of
the concept of youth in Australia in the 1950s. However, what is
the symbolism of youth in the 1990s? Now, the transition into
adulthood is into a world of widespread uncertainty and scarcity.
Young people in the 1990s are seen to face significantly different
circumstances from those of previous generations. Giroux, writing
specifically about young people in the United States, suggests that
‘plurality and contingency’ either mediated through ‘media culture’
or the economic system ‘have resulted in a world with few secure
psychological, economic, or intellectual markers’ (1994, p. 287). For
Giroux, young people are:
condemned to wander within and between multiple borders and
spaces marked by excess, otherness and difference. This is a world in
which old certainties are ruptured and meaning becomes more contin-
gent, less indebted to the dictates of reverence and established truth.
While the circumstances of youth vary across and within terrains
marked by racial and class differences, the modernist world of cer-
tainty and order that has traditionally policed, contained, and
insulated such difference has given way to a shared postmodern cul-
ture in which representational borders collapse into new hybridised
forms of cultural performance, identity and political agency (1994,
pp. 287–8).
Giroux’s analysis suggests that popular conceptions of youth in
the media not only represent youth, but actively construct the
experience and meaning of youth, offering a frame of reference that
may replace traditional frameworks.
In the 1990s, we argue, popular conceptions of youth continue
to portray the dualism of young people as both the symbol of
society’s future and its victims, ‘at risk’ of succumbing to lives of
violence, drug dependence and moral degeneracy. In the 1990s, the
symbolic representation of youth lies in the areas described by Giroux
above as ‘cultural performance, identity and political agency’. Instead
of symbolising the certainty of reaching the defined status of adult-
hood, youth in the 1990s, as portrayed in popular conceptions,
symbolises the use of new forms of consumption. For those who can
afford them, the technologies are now available to modify, shape or
transform the body, so that young people can become ‘perfect’ and
old people can look young. ‘Youth’ now has symbolic value as the
‘outcome’ of the process of becoming more and more in control over
one’s body.
The changing symbolic representation of youth has meaning and
value in an increasingly global way, in a world in which traditional
boundaries are eroded. The traditional markers of the end of youth
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 21

are less and less meaningful. The implication of this is that youth as
a social experience can be continuously available, regardless of
age—the ‘becoming’ can go on and on. Youth, then, has symbolic
meaning as an item of consumption. Of course, this symbolic repre-
sentation of youth does not mean that everyone, or even a majority
of people experience this. It is enough for highly visible media
personalities to keep coming back, ‘younger’ than they were the first
time around.
‘Youth’ as a symbol of consumption does, in a paradoxical way
challenge the concept of youth as an age category. This emerging
meaning of ‘youth’ means ‘appearance’, rather than age as such. The
symbolic value of the concept of youth in the 1990s, then, is of
youth as the future of society, not in the sense of the 1950s when
coming to maturity was the imagery, but in the sense of having access
to the trappings of youth throughout life, through consumption, and
through performance. The symbolic meaning of youth, then, is not
‘coming of age’, but ‘being anything you want to be’.
In addressing the question of what is the symbolism of youth in
the 1990s, it is apparent that, as in previous eras, there are a number
of dimensions which are simultaneous. At the same time that the
concept of youth is an emerging symbol of consumption in society,
young people continue to be presented as victims and therefore as a
problem. This side of the multiple representation of youth is dis-
cussed in the following section.

YOUTH AS A PROBLEM

The idea that youth are a problem to society, and to themselves, is

a central theme to which the media and youth researchers alike
return. We have pointed out that one dimension of popular concep-
tions of youth in the media involves the positioning of young people
as a threat to accepted social values, and as likely to engage in risky
behaviours. In this section, we discuss this dimension briefly, fore-
shadowing the more detailed treatment of some of these issues in
subsequent chapters.
Historical analyses of the ‘youth as a problem’ approach,
although acknowledging that it goes back to the turn of the century
or earlier, usually focus on the 1950s, seeing this as a time when
both media and social researchers treated the phenomenon as if it
were new. The new interest in young people as ‘troublesome’ is often
linked to the changing economic and social conditions and circum-
stances, and their impact on working class youth. In his succinct
treatment of the sociology of youth, Frith (1986) argues that the
increased affluence of working class youth created new modes of
22 RETHINKING YOUTH

consumption, of leisure, and of distinctive styles of clothing and

music, which were identified with ‘youth’ culture.
At the same time, the concept of ‘juvenile delinquents’ came into
use. Johnson’s discussion of ‘troublesome youth’ provides a useful
summary of juvenile delinquency as a ‘set of concerns about the
activities of young people and their supervision by institutions or
individuals representing the social order’ (1993, p. 96). What John-
son’s analysis makes clear is the integral link between development
of a discourse of youth as a problem, and the establishment of many
levels of institutions and processes for the monitoring, processing
and surveillance of young people (see also Cunneen & White 1995).
While these institutions (schools, social welfare organisations and the
juvenile justice system, for example) were increasingly charged with
a responsibility for young people, this role was seen to be comple-
mentary to and possibly in support of family life. However, signs of
failure to develop appropriately were to be dealt with by interven-
tions of experts in the lives of children or their parents. The
monitoring of young people has inevitably led to the idea that some
young people can be identified as ‘at risk’ (of a variety of things,
including not developing through the assumed stages of adolescence
properly or failing school).
This concept plays a key role in positioning young people as a
problem. There are many variants of the discourse of ‘at risk’, but
most involve the following elements. It is assumed that not all young
people are a problem, only a group who are not growing up in the
way that they should. This problem group is identified as different
in identifiable ways from an assumed mainstream of young people,
either in terms of psychological characteristics (such as learning
difficulties) or social characteristics (for example, young people from
single-parent families).
The concept of ‘at risk’ depends on the idea that a majority of
young people are ‘on target’, making the transitions towards adult-
hood in the appropriate way. The concept of ‘at risk’ and its
corollary, the idea of a ‘mainstream’, are central to a categorical
approach to conceptualising youth. The assumption that an identifi-
able group of young people are at risk gives credibility to the notion,
integral to most education systems, that all other young people are
by and large the same.
The idea that some young people are at risk is also central to
one of the dimensions of ‘youth as a problem’—the idea that youth
are victims of society, as well as a threat to it. In the last decade,
the newly found affluence of working class youth has been replaced
by the poverty of communities who are bearing the brunt of econ-
omic restructuring. With the virtual disappearance of traditional
youth labour markets, young people who would rather get a job are
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 23

refugees in education systems which were never intended to address

these people’s approaches to life or to education and which cannot
deliver their promise of access to a better life.
Recently, this approach has re-emerged with the idea that the
young are a ‘lost generation’ (Daniel & Cornwall 1993). Daniel and
Cornwall’s study of young people focuses on disadvantaged young
people, presenting their perspectives on work, school and youth
services. The picture which emerges from this study is of a group of
young people who have few points of engagement with society, and
feel that they do not belong. This group of young people were
portrayed as a ‘lost generation’, not because of their own behaviours
or characteristics, but because they were the victims of changes to
and developments in the economic and social organisation of Aus-
tralian society, which marginalised them.
The concept of a youth ‘underclass’ is also gaining currency as
a concept which describes the victim status of young people who are
marginalised from society. Some writers focus on this group from
the point of view of behaviour, arguing that young people themselves,
through antisocial attitudes and activities, are a threat to society.
Others argue that the notion of an underclass is useful because it
highlights the marginalisation of young people by society (see
Robinson & Gregson 1992).
Both concepts of lost generation and youth underclass, although
useful in drawing attention to the plight of some groups of young
people, do so at the risk of sensationalising their situation. Both
concepts are descriptive, collecting together groups of young people
who have been marginalised from the major benefits and institutions
of society, emphasising the hopelessness of the situation of this group,
and at the same time rendering invisible the differences amongst
them.
Critics of the concept of a youth underclass argue that it is too
broad a concept to generate an understanding of the marginalising
processes themselves, focusing instead on the results of marginalisa-
tion (Williamson 1995). This means that although the concept is
useful in pointing out the severity of some young people’s circum-
stances, it does not provide the basis for an analysis that would
enable their situation to be addressed. For example, although they
are both marginalised, it is not useful to place in the same category
black teenage mothers with young white men in rural communities
in the United States, because their marginalisation can only be seen
as the same in the broadest possible terms. Although the effects may
be seen as marginalisation, the processes creating these outcomes are
very different, and their routes towards gaining an adequate liveli-
hood are likely to be very different.
24 RETHINKING YOUTH

The construction of youth as victims and as vulnerable was

challenged by the emerging cultural studies research traditions which
suggested that young people were not necessarily passive ‘victims’ of
society. During the 1970s cultural analysis of young people emerged
as a strong influence on thinking about youth. This tradition
explored the dynamic relationship between particular groups of
young people and forms of popular culture, including dress (style),
music, film and video (see, for example, Hall & Jefferson 1976). The
work of people associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contem-
porary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was especially influential. Their work
has been summarised in a number of places (for example, Jones
1988; Frith 1986), so it is not necessary to go into detail here.
Although the work which is characterised as fitting into the CCCS
tradition is by no means in agreement about the significance of
popular culture and of youth itself, it can be said that in retrospect,
this work has left an important legacy.
The detailed ethnographic studies of groups of young working
class men which were generated at this time were informed by a
perspective that highlighted the active participation of these young
people in negotiating their lives, albeit within the boundaries of their
communities. At the time, the concept of resistance offered a view
of these young working class men as agents rather than as recipients
of a dominant culture. In some of this work, the emphasis was on
their engagement in class relations, rather than on age as such (Hall
& Jefferson 1976). Others argued that it was necessary to examine
the relations between class and age, and particularly the way in which
age is a mediator of class relations (Murdoch & McCron 1976,
p. 10). However, despite this, the studies emerging from this tradition
have tended to give visibility to the practices, styles and perspectives
of young men, and later, young women, reinforcing their ‘difference’
from ‘adult society’ (Taylor 1993).
This tradition of ethnographic research on young people has also
provided a perspective on the way in which groups of young people
take up popular media, not as mindless consumers, but as an
expression of their resistance to the dominant culture. Many studies
have presented the practices of young people in terms of subcultural
styles of expression, which, in their everyday lives, subvert aspects
of the dominant culture (for example, see Hall & Jefferson 1976).
However, critics have pointed out that the focus on the relation-
ship of young people to popular culture has tended to underplay the
historically specific nature of this relationship. The meaning of ‘the
dominant culture’, the extent to which it is contested and the form
this takes are related to social divisions such as gender, ethnicity and
race. The expression of youthful self that is evident in the adoption
of popular music by young Aboriginal people in remote Australian
THE CONCEPT OF YOUTH 25

communities (Brady 1992) has very different meanings and implica-

tions from its use by middle class white young women in Brisbane
(Gilbert & Taylor 1991).
Johnson (1993) argues that in taking insufficient account of the
different expressions and meanings of the relationship of young
people to popular culture, the cultural studies approach has taken
for granted the idea that young people have a ‘pre-social’ self which
they strive to develop and express through their engagement with
mass media. By ‘pre-social’ self she means an ‘essential’ self, which
exists independently of social relationships, and which will strive to
gain expression. Hence, although the cultural studies tradition offered
an approach in which young people’s behaviour was seen as con-
structive rather than problematic, in some of its manifestations it
failed to challenge the categorical concept of youth.

CONCLUSION

The central issue addressed in this chapter is the contradiction that

young people do share in common their age, but the social, economic
and cultural significance of this physical reality is far from common.
The chapter outlines the argument, which forms the framework for
the following chapters, that a relational concept of youth offers an
approach to understanding the social meaning of growing up that
can take account of the diverse ways in which young people are
constructed through social institutions, and the ways in which they
negotiate their transitions. This approach problematises the meaning
of adulthood, a status which is generally taken for granted in
discussions of youth and youth transitions and development.
There are many studies of young people which offer insights into
the multiple and diverse experiences of growing up. Perhaps over-
whelmed by the dominance of the developmental psychological
approach to youth (‘youth development’), few have explored the
implications of challenging the categorical approach to youth re-
search, youth studies and to youth policy. The remaining chapters
of this book offer such a challenge, drawing on our own and others’
research to ‘rethink youth’, and to develop a framework for re-
searching young people’s experiences of growing up.