The National Youth Agency: Youth Policy

Talk to Frank: Youth Lifestyles, Branding and Governmental Rationality

The breakdown of working-class occupations, institutions and communities has contributed to a situation in which class culture has much less of a bearing on youth lifestyles than was previously the case. The things not just specific to being part of a particular generation but being a member of a particular social class, which might once have influenced the form and content of youth identifications and lifestyles have, if not entirely disappeared, waned enormously in significance.

In essence class no longer seems to provide an intelligent means of predicting - and importantly differentiating - youth lifestyle and taste. If, however, the spectacle of cultural homogenisation of youth lifestyles appears to confirm the waning of class, it also serves to mask enduring inequalities traceable now as ever to socio-economic and cultural location. Inequalities, moreover, which ensure an enormous variation in young people's experience, perception and access to consumer goods and leisure opportunities. And yet the historical decline of working-class communities and cultures is but a feature of more general tendencies in high modernity. One of the legacies of modernity was the opportunity afforded many people to cast off for the first time the constraints of religion, family, social class and nature and begin to determine for themselves the paths their lives would take on the basis of personal choice rather than tradition and inherited communal expectations.