Contexts and Backgrounds Youth in the Sixties

Models such as that of deviation amplification are incomplete unless set in the context of such questions. So far, in a series of somewhat mixed metaphors, we have viewed the objects of the 

The twin themes of affluence and youth the second essentially subordinate to the first - have dominated most analyses of postwar social change in Britain. In the popular rhetoric, they have appeared under the Macmillan Never Had It So Good slogan, in the sociological version, under the guise of the embourgeoise- 

Within a very short time, the ideal teenager was presented in consumption terms. As a reward for full production, he was to be allowed the full spectacle of commodities that the market could offer, and moreover offer and package in a way especially designed for him. This is not to say that he was simply exploited or manipulated such concepts, particularly when applied to pop music, are too crude to allow for the way in which the adolescent consumer is also an active agent in creating modes of expression which reflect his cultural experience.  

the emerging styles became associated with deviant or publicly disapproved values. The Teddy Boys were the first youth 

There are, of course, other streams, which perhaps now have become dominant. But their links with delinquency are not the simple ones of extrapolation from message to behaviour which are usually assumed to operate. It is some of the complexities of the relationship between social class, the teenage culture and what I will call expressive fringe delinquency, that I would like to refer to. The focus is not on mundane day-to-day delinquency (which consists primarily of property offences) but on behaviour labelled variously as hooliganism, vandalism, rowdyism and which occurs during middle to late adolescence. More specifically, it is on those manifestations of this behaviour associated with collective symbolic styles. Such behaviour should not be explained as being either instrumental or expressive, but simultaneously as both, and it is these parallel routes to the Mods and Rockers events that need separate consideration. 

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