Functionalist perspective of youth culture

Marxist view on youth culture

Recognizing that the most rebellious of youth cultures of the s had been commodified by entrepreneurs and later by mundane retail outlets, some youth cultures searched for identities that could either not be quickly coopted or that embraced consumer culture for its own ends. Youth culture also acts as a social glue for young people, bringing people of the same age together social integration. Youth cultures have been clearly evident in the twentieth century, particularly since the end of World War II. I suggest that postmodernism's reluctance to focus on social structure promotes an individualistic understanding of the social. Still, the repeated complaints over long periods during the medieval period in Europe suggest that young men were "claiming the night" as a realm of their own in a new way, and their elders were deeply concerned about it. This is known as social integration. At roughly the same time, the field of medicine and the emerging discipline of psychology began to differentiate the stages of the human life course more precisely, determining a "normal" standard for biological and social development based on chronological age.

Youth culture also acts as a social glue for young people, bringing people of the same age together social integration. Youth subcultures offer participants an identity outside of that ascribed by social institutions such as familyworkhome and school. Marxist theories account for some diversity, because they focus on classes and class-fractions rather than youth as a whole.

Children aspired to or were pulled into adulthood as fast as their physical development allowed.

Fass, Paula S. The Internet, like "lovers' lane," is a more or less unpatrolled wilderness that has allowed new cultural affiliations e.

Most young people did not formally "join" a subculture, although they may have bought the records and adopted some of the clothing styles when they became available in stores. Adults have only limited abilities to constrain the activities of their youthful subordinates, and young people across history have demonstrated great resourcefulness in collectively exploiting those limitations to gain some self-directed social space. What is the purpose of youth culture according to functionalists? Youth cultures have been clearly evident in the twentieth century, particularly since the end of World War II. During the war, youth cultures in high schools became a national social problem, initiated through a series of moral panics about their sexual activities especially between high school girls and GIs , delinquency, and the influence of mass popular culture, particularly comic books, films, and rock-androll music. Is youth culture a pleasant period of ones life that gently smoothes the transition to adult life? In other words, and the media is the bodywork. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. To what extent are youth cultures functional for a liberal capitalist society? Eisenstadt Youth culture also offers a sense of togetherness and binds young people into society. Youth Culture Culture is among the most complicated words in the English language. Wood Report, Parliamentary document. The analytic frameworks and debates about youth cultures that have emerged from the three major disciplines have been taken up in other areas of study, including history.

Functionalist attitude to youth culture Functionalists argue that a key role of youth culture is to promote social integration for young people by offering a transitory phase between childhood and adulthood. They ignore gender.

Youth Cultures in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries As the institutions and practices of civil life within modern capitalist nation-states began to take their characteristic shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several cultural, social, and economic trends emerged that formed the material basis for modern notions of mass youth culture. Despite its best efforts to resist mass marketing, punk too became a style available in shopping centers around the world. Merton used the concept of subculture in a substantial revision of the paper for Social Theory and Social Structure There is some evidence suggesting that youth cultures may have existed in certain circumstances during the medieval period. However, breaking from the home is emotionally stressful, so Eisenstadt agreed with Parsons that youth culture offers a mechanism for doing so. Functionalists therefore see youth culture as one homogeneous age group. As this group moved to assume responsibility for the unintended and unattended consequences of urbanization and industrialization, it took up an advocacy role for those young people who had been socially and economically displaced by the transition from agriculture to industrialization. Research into youth cultures has been most prolific in the disciplines of sociology, psychology, and anthropology; it is readily apparent in criminology of juveniles, demographic analyses, studies of the family and adolescent social development, and the study of ritual.

These developments began to coalesce to form a new understanding of the "place" of young people in leading industrial societies after the mid-nineteenth century.

See The Face son rave as an international subculture, linked to drug tourism, new age culture and hedonism. Drug use, like drinking rituals, became an expected part of youth, although the majority of young people did not participate.

Being part of a subculture provides a forum for the frustrations of this period and process. Furthermore, it could be seen to offer an outlet for tensions young people may experience on the road to independence. Most young people did not formally "join" a subculture, although they may have bought the records and adopted some of the clothing styles when they became available in stores. Scenes are distinguished from the broad culture through either fashion ; identification with specific sometimes obscure or experimental musical genres or political perspectives; and a strong in-group or tribal mentality. The uneven rate and extent of this shift both within and across national boundaries is important to bear in mind. To what extent are youth cultures separate and different from the cultures of their parents? Spectacular subcultures continued to appear in Great Britain as well, notably mods, rockers, and near the end of the decade, skinheads. Certain crowds jocks, geeks, preppies, druggies, emos are found in many, even most, high schools across the United States, though the particular terms used by the adolescents in them may vary nerds instead of geeks, etc. Stanley Hall attempted to synthesize and codify the contradictory biological, psychological, and social understandings of youth that had emerged during the nineteenth century in a two-volume work entitled Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. A sixty-year-old hippie? College-age youth once again took the public and world stage as "hippies" and as organized radical groups, which often spread to the high schools. First, while the conditions for mass youth cultures to emerge were in place, young people did not become a homogenous social group; there has never been a singular youth culture in complex societies, but rather a wide variety of youth sub cultures. London: Routledge. Despite these limits, however, elements of a youth culture in the form of games, rituals, and stories did develop among young slaves, particularly during the period of their lives sometimes as late as fifteen years old before they entered the regulated agricultural work of adulthood.

How is the range between contributory and resistive youth cultures socially negotiated and contained? While the development of national markets did offer new connections between youth people across great distances, the youth market did not lead to a homogenization of youth cultures.

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