Representations of Youth

The Study of Youth and Adolescence in Britain and America

Christine Griffin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745602806, 9780745602790
• eBook ISBN: 9780745666747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Representations of Youth examines the various constructions of 'youth' and 'adolescence' in recent British and North American research. Mainstream and radical approaches have presented a series of 'crises' about young people in relation to, among other things, unemployment, 'teenage pregnancy' and 'delinquency'. This book considers research in psychology, sociology, education, criminology and cultural studies in order to assess these accounts.

The author offers a critical review of a wide range of findings about young people in areas as diverse as education and training, leisure, family life and sexuality. She shows that whilst youth research texts do not reflect young people's experiences in any straightforward manner, they do indicate the various complex and contradictory ways in which 'youth', 'adolescence' and specific groups of young people are represented in contemporary western societies. In so arguing, she presents new terms for thinking about the position of young people today.

This is an important new text accessibly written for students of sociology, social psychology and contemporary culture in both Britain and the USA. It will also be of great interest to social science researchers in a range of other disciplines.

1

Starting Points and Reservations: A Century of Adolescence: From 1880 to 1980

Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds but a single thought, bearing to one another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation. (Macaulay, 1923, p. 305)

Novelist Rose Macaulay was referring in the above quote to ‘common sense’ assumptions about British young people in the years following what came to be known as the First World War. The analysis presented in this book looks at the contemporary treatment of ‘the young’ as some ‘just [re]discovered species’, turning the investigative spotlight onto the work of youth researchers in Britain and the USA during the 1980s. One of the most striking aspects of this analysis is that whilst overarching conceptions of ‘youth’ do remain, young people are also represented as racialized, gendered and sexualized beings set in specific class positions within these research texts. Biological determinism, social constructionism and structural theories clash and intersect in the contradictory context of academic stories about ‘youth’ as a universal age stage, with certain groups of young people represented as particularly ‘deviant’, ‘deficient’ or ‘resistant’.

The origins of this book are disparate. The most obvious impetus was the publisher’s invitation to submit a proposal for a book ‘about youth cultures’ which would cover research from Britain and the USA. At this time (mid-1985), I was approaching the end of a research contract and facing (another) period of unemployment interspersed with part-time teaching and youth work. I expected to have plenty of time and not a great deal of money for the foreseeable future, so writing a book would solve the former problem if not the latter. As things turned out, I was lucky enough to get a full-time lecturing job at Birmingham University in the autumn of 1985. This helped on the financial front, but it put paid to the spare time. So what began as a book about youth cultural studies and the backlash against radical analyses during the first half of the 1980s eventually became an examination of youth research over the whole decade.

There is more to this book than a publisher’s request and my expectation of an indefinite post as a government artist (‘drawing the dole’, for the uninitiated). Through the practice of youth work and research as a feminist throughout the 1980s, I became increasingly aware of the ideological role played by youth research in the construction and reproduction of academic ‘common sense’ about young people. Youth researchers, including myself, are involved in presenting interpretations of young people’s lives, cultures and experiences. The institutions of academia, including access to publishing ‘serious’ texts like this one, provide us with a privileged ‘claim to truth’: an intellectual expert status about other people’s lives. However ‘radical’ our intentions, academics can never completely overcome the voyeuristic element of research, nor the power imbalances between researcher and researched. This is not to deny the potential benefits of social research, but it is important to recognize the consequences of the authoritative voice which comes with the researcher’s gaze. This is particularly relevant in youth research, where most research participants have minimal material, cultural or ideological ‘power’: their voices are frequently pathologized, criminalized, muted or silenced altogether.

In Representations of Youth, I have turned the spotlight onto youth research itself, especially those texts produced during the 1980s, to examine the causal stories and conceptual categories through which ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ have been constructed, represented and understood. The relationship between young people’s experiences and academic ‘common sense’ about ‘youth’ is not straightforward. Youth research does not simply reflect aspects of young people’s lives, nor does it merely misrepresent their experiences, as though the latter were sitting around like the truth waiting to be discovered – or misunderstood. Youth research is more complex than this, given the ideological role it plays in constructing the very categories of ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’, and in presenting stories about the origins of specific forms of youthful deviance or resistance.

This brings me to the third point of impetus for this book: anger and despair at some of the developments in British and North American youth research during the 1980s, just as social and economic conditions for many young people were taking a dramatic turn for the worse. Research funding in the social sciences became increasingly difficult to come by, and many youth researchers either moved on to another research ‘topic’, or scrambled over each other in a return to more acceptable mainstream methods and perspectives. A rising chorus of voices could be heard challenging that radical strand of youth research which had presented a strong critique of mainstream youth studies during the 1970s.

I have used the term ‘mainstream’ to refer to the perspective which presents those causal stories which are used to justify hegemonic discourses around ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’. The ‘radical’ perspective has been formed through theoretical, political and methodological critiques of the mainstream, and both perspectives can be defined as sets of discourses rather than as distinct types of research or specific theoretical frameworks. Any one academic text may incorporate a combination of elements from the radical and mainstream perspectives. The mainstream perspective is positivist, empiricist and conservative, presenting itself as an apolitical and objective project. It is characterized by the tendency to investigate young people as both the source and the victims of a series of ‘social problems’, adopting the victim-blaming thesis in the search for the cause(s) of specific phenomena. The radical perspective has been more likely to adopt structuralist and post-structuralist analyses, and to deconstruct the association between young people and ‘social problems’, asking different questions and viewing research as part of a consciously political project.

The 1980s also brought a series of crises for youth research as the mainstream perspective attempted to deal with the critiques posed by radical youth cultural studies during the 1970s. Within the radical perspective, Marxist analyses were facing up to the diversity of youth cultural forms, challenges to a predominantly class-based approach, the arguments of feminist and radical Black, lesbian and gay scholars, and the questions posed by post-modernism and post-structuralist analyses (McRobbie, 1980; McCarthy, 1988). The various elements of contemporary western youth research were facing the crises posed by rising rates of youth unemployment for young people, and for the conceptual construction of youth as a transition into the adult world of waged work, marriage and parenthood. The decade of Thatcher and Reagan saw the rise of the ‘New Right’ on both sides of the Atlantic, and a resurgence of biological determinism which had profound implications for the treatment of ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ (Rose and Rose, 1986).

The primary focus on British and US youth research in this book reflects the overwhelming dominance of British and US approaches within academic ‘common sense’ about young people. I am sure that youth researchers in Canada, Australia, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and across western Europe will be all too familiar with this form of academic cultural imperialism, and I have included some work from outside Britain and North America to illustrate this process. Youth researchers outside Britain and the USA are frequently compelled to use theories developed in these centres of western capitalism, which have minimal relevance to young people from different cultural and political contexts. Even within the UK /US nexus, many supposedly universal theories and models are not necessarily relevant to all young people in these societies (e.g. Mirza, 1992). The ideological force of British and US youth research during the 1980s was also strengthened by the political partnership between the Thatcher and Reagan administrations.

There are many thousands of publications which could be included within the sphere of ‘youth research’. Almost all areas of academic endeavour have addressed the ‘youth question’, and many journals published at least one special issue on ‘youth’ or ‘adolescence’ during the 1980s. Representations of Youth does not present a quantitative content analysis of youth research, nor does it pretend to be completely exhaustive or ‘representative’ in the positivist sense. This is a critical analysis of academic texts and the discourses through which ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ were constructed during a specific historical period. Rather than focusing on one segment of youth research such as delinquency or youth cultures, I have selected texts from a wide range of academic disciplines, and from ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ areas, including psychology, sociology, education, cultural studies, clinical psychology and social work.

The decision to cover such a broad range of academic texts was deliberate. I wanted to examine the various ideological resonances of ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ in the disparate discourses of psychological and sociological research, and in a range of topic areas. In selecting texts for detailed analysis I have used two strategies which relied on a combination of breadth and depth. Texts were selected for their reflection of academic ‘common sense’ about young people, and for their representation of contradictory themes within both radical and mainstream perspectives. I have also looked for ideological ‘gaps’, conceptual omissions and silenced voices, since an examination of such absences can be just as revealing as the analysis of those themes which are represented.

The decision to examine a range of academic disciplines, especially across the disciplinary boundaries between sociology and psychology, was also deliberate, since specific academic disciplines have tended to operate in relative isolation. Since notions of ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ have tended to be shaped by sociology and psychology respectively, it is important to examine the discursive interplay between these two related but distinctly antipathetic disciplines. I have looked at the ways in which a psychological perspective might be mobilized within a sociological framework, or vice versa, especially since psychological understandings have dominated representations of ‘youth’ in general, and in the construction of certain young people as ‘social problems’.

Representations of Youth reflects the diversity of contemporary youth research, without taking each study as a straightforward reflection of ‘what young people are really thinking and doing’ (Lather, 1990). It presents an analysis of the various discourses through which ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ have been constructed in academic texts. Embarking on an analysis of ideologies and discourses in the 1980s is a daunting prospect. The shelves of academic libraries and bookshops are well stocked with texts on discourse analysis, semiotics, ideology, social representations, post-structuralism and textual/linguistic analysis. The various theories contained therein are diverse, but most share one common factor: they are almost incomprehensible to all but the most dedicated reader. Hidden within the groves of ‘subjectivities’, ‘interpellation’ and ‘signifiers’ are some important and interesting arguments about the analysis and construction of ideologies and discourses. Even if I were to dismiss all these texts as elitist rubbish – which is not my intention – it would be impossible to ‘do’ a critical analysis of contemporary texts without addressing some of these ideas.

Despite undeniable reservations about theories of ideology and discourse, born of repeated problems in trying to understand them, I have struggled through the various approaches in search of those theoretical perspectives which can most usefully be applied to the changing discourses around ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ in contemporary academic texts. I have deliberately tried to avoid many of the more mystifying terms used in this literature whilst retaining some of the key arguments. My aim in this analysis is not to conduct an exercise in theoretical one-upmanship (sic), but to take a critical look at the ways in which ‘youth’ appeared on the academic agenda in the 1980s, highlighting the continued prevalence of the victim-blaming thesis in mainstream studies, examining the construction of ‘crisis’ (or crises) as a key element of radical and mainstream perspectives on youth, and signalling some of the major absences in both mainstream and radical analyses.

Representations of Youth has been shaped by many influences, and I want to mention three starting points for this analysis: Gramsci’s notion of hegemony; the post-structuralist approach to the analysis of discourse; and feminist theories and practices.¹ In brief, Gramsci argued that in capitalist societies, the ruling class maintain control partly by coercion through state institutions such as the police and the judicio-legal system. They can also achieve hegemony (or dominance) through ruling by ‘consent’, but this consent is based on the mystification of existing power relations as natural and inevitable, and the concealment of opposition and oppression (Gramsci, 1971). Hegemony operates at the ideological level as well as the political and the economic, and struggles over the gaining of ‘consent’ through the ideologies of the New Right were the focus of considerable debate on the Left throughout the 1980s (Hall, 1988). Hegemony is concerned with the production and reproduction of forms of consciousness, as a form of domination which is imposed through a mixture of persuasion and coercion.

So contemporary youth research can be read in part as a reflection of hegemonic ‘common sense’ about ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’: or all those meanings and values which academic researchers have tended to take for granted. This involves the construction of the age stage of ‘youth’ or ‘adolescence’ itself and distinctions between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ forms of adolescent behaviour with the associated family forms and cultural practices. Such notions are put together via a complex process of interaction between research funding agencies, academic career moves, research designs and techniques, publication of research ‘results’ – and the practices of young people and other adult groups with whom they are involved. ‘Youth’ is not a uniform category, and young people’s material conditions and lived experiences are by no means identical, nor do they exist untouched by the arguments of youth researchers and policy-makers. Contemporary youth research can be seen as a contested terrain in which mainstream and radical perspectives jostle for position in the construction of dominant and oppositional discourses around ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’.

With the growing impact of post-modernism, feminism and post-structuralism on radical analyses during the 1980s, the Marxist concept of ideology and Gramsci’s notion of hegemony came under considerable critical scrutiny (e.g. McRobbie, 1991). In this analysis I have retained what may appear (to some) an unfashionable use of concepts such as ideology and hegemony alongside an examination of discourses which is informed by materialist feminist versions of post-structuralism (e.g. Roman et al., 1988). The latter approach has proved useful in its capacity to appreciate the ways in which specific discourses and discursive configurations can construct, marginalize, silence and reproduce certain concepts and arguments within particular structural relations of domination. Although Representations of Youth is a critical analysis of discourses rather than ideologies, I have tried to show how specific discourses operate in the ideological domain. The discourses discussed in this book make certain arguments, institutions and practices possible, whilst precluding or obscuring others (Parker, 1989). For me, it is power which provides the link between discourse and ideology.

Rather than identifying specific discourses as either dominant or subordinate, I have viewed discourse as ‘a system of statements which constructs an object. This fictive object can then be reproduced in the various texts written or spoken within the domain of discourses (that is, within the expressive order of society)’ (Parker, 1989, pp. 61–2). The analysis of discourse reveals those sets of rules and practices through which power is legitimated. Discourses are governed by rules that determine what can be said and how it can be said (Newton, 1990). This concerns both what is apparent in the text and what is obscured, and the ways in which texts organize what Dorothy Smith has termed the ‘relations of ruling’ in contemporary society. She uses discourse, in an approach which draws on Foucault’s work: ‘to identify those distinctive forms of social organization that are like conversations mediated by texts and are carried out by and co-ordinate subjects situated in multiple local sites and organizational jurisdictions’ (D. Smith, 1991, p. 159).

In this analysis I examine some of the ways in which discourses have been used in contemporary youth research, focusing on sets of rhetorical connections through which certain arguments about (certain groups of) young people are produced, and through which (certain groups of) young people are represented as deviant, deficient, perverted or resistant. I look at how these discourses have coincided in particular texts, especially in the context of constructed crises around youth during the 1980s. I also consider the mobilization and transformation of discursive configurations within and between radical and mainstream perspectives. I have adopted Kum-Kum Bhavnani’s use of the term ‘discursive configurations’ here, since I am concerned to examine the ways in which arguments and ideas are given shape in youth research texts through specific discourses which are ‘embedded in social relationships of structured domination and subordination’ (1991, p. 181).

My debt to feminism is rather different, and cannot be traced solely to the influence of specific texts nor to a clear-cut theoretical position. The contemporary feminist movement has generated a broad range of analyses and actions, adopting a critical view of the relation between theory and practice (Christian, 1988). Much feminist debate has never been published in academic texts, despite the embattled expansion of Women’s Studies courses and feminist publishing initiatives (e.g. Outwrite, 1988). In order to encompass this diversity within and between feminisms, I have used Barbara Smith’s definition of feminism as ‘the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women’ (1982, p. 27, original emphasis; see Griffin, 1989).

So as a feminist analysis, this text is not ‘just’ concerned with sex, gender and sexuality, but also with ‘race’ and ethnicity, class, nationality, dis/ability and age relations. This produces an analysis of the ways in which these sets of power relations interact, working against and with each other in different contexts, without necessarily viewing any one set of power relations as always overdetermining in all periods and all conditions. Power is not an innate capacity, nor is it an idiosyncratic characteristic of particular individuals. Power operates in the context of social structures, cultural and ideological practices. Ideologies are constructed through relations of power and dominance, which are also disputed and contradictory. As an ideological category and a social condition, ‘youth’ is not uniform, but it is seldom invested with significant power, especially compared with those groups of adults who have varying degrees of authority over young people’s lives, from parents and teachers to employers and academic researchers. This feminist analysis will examine the construction and dis/empowerment of ‘youth’ and of specific groups of young people in different strands of youth research.

Throughout the process of writing this book, I experienced continual doubts and reservations about the relevance and value of such a project for young people in the 1980s and 1990s. A little voice in my head kept repeating that yet another book about academic youth research was surely the last priority at the end of this disastrous decade. Yet it is precisely because academic texts and research reports have had such a significant impact in shaping government policies and popular ‘common sense’ around youth that I continued to struggle with the analysis. I hope to make new points and argumen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Perspective
• Contents
• Acknowledement
• Abbreviations
• 1 Starting Points and Reservations: A Century of Adolescence: From 1880 to 1980
• 2 Schooling for the Scrap Heap: Research on the Transition from School to Work’
• 3 Constructing the Crisis: The Impact of Youth Unemployment
• 4 Bad Boys and Invisible Girls: Youth, Crime and ‘Delinquency’
• 5 The Threat of ‘Unstructured Free Time’: Young People and Leisure in the 1980s
• 6 Young People and the ‘Private Sphere’: Family Life and Sexuality
• 7 Recovery and Survival: Youth Research after Thatcher and Reagan
• References
• Index