« April 2005 | Main | July 2005 »

May 17, 2005

Gary Alan Fine & Sherryl Kleinman: "Rethinking Subculture: An Interactionist Analysis"

Fine, Gary Alan and Sherryl Kleinman. "Rethinking Subculture: An Interactionist Analysis." The American Journal of Sociology, Vol 85, No 1 (July 1979), 1-20.

Abstract:

Subculture, despite the term's wide usage in sociology, has not proved to be a very satisfactory explanatory concept. Several problems in previous subculture research are discussed: (1) the confusion between subculture and subsociety, (2) the lack of a meaningful referent for subcultures, (3) the homogeneity and stasis associated with the concept, and (4) the emphasis on defining subcultures in terms of values and central themes. It is argued that for the subculture construct to be of maximal usefulness it needs to be linked to processes of interaction. Subculture is re-conceptualized in terms of cultural spread occurring through an interlocking group network characterized by multiple group membership, weak ties, structural roles conducive to information spread between groups, and media diffusion. Identification with the referent group serves to motivate the potential member to adopt the artifacts, behaviors, norms, and values characteristic of the subculture. Youth subcultures are presented as illustrations of these processes operate.

Meta-Notes:

This is a great essay looking at how sociology must reframe subcultural studies. It is even more relevant today because of the post-BCCCS work. There is an extensive bibliography in this article that is quite relevant to anyone interested in the history of these ides.


Notes:

Intro: Society is heterogeneous and culture is not spread out evenly. It is from here that ideas of subcultures/subsocieties emerge. Subcultures are linked to the deviance literature and some sociologists have focused on subsociety to avoid the culture issue altogether.

They go through each of the four problems referenced in the abstract.

1) Subculture has often been treated as synonymous with the population comprising the subsociety. 2) Subculture has been examined without sufficient concern for delineating the groups of individuals serving as its referent. 3) The subcultural system is pictured as homogeneous, static and closed. 4) Subculture is depicted as consisting in its entirety of values, norms and central themes. (2)

Issue #1.

Where subsociety should be used, not subculture:
- aggregate of persons or a collectivity (i.e. gang)
- membership category that is structural or network based rather than dependent on a system of beliefs and practices

"The confusion between these terms arises when it is assumed that a person can 'enter into' a subculture" (3).
- membership in subsociety is defined structurally, not culturally

Issue #2.

Studies in subcultures often assume that the population can be defined through demographic features. (community dependent)

no referent: "a clearly defined population which shares cultural knowledge" (4)... thus, vague and imprecise
- boundaries of the subsociety and thus subculture are usually assumed
- it's also assumed that group culture is derived from the subculture

"presence of a subculture cannot be inferred from relative agreement on a set of attitudes, behaviors, or values within a population" (5)

Issue #3.

ethnographic accounts only show a slice of things because subcultures are changing so quickly. "Cultural traditions ill spread across the targeted group at various rates, with the traditions of one segment of the referent population becoming part of the designated subculture, but only at a later time" (6).

- ongoing negotiation of meaning of symbols, socially constructed realities
- "culture of the group" is always in flux

"Sociologists should not allow themselves to be trapped into reifying subculture so that it seems like a material thing" (6).

Issue #4.

- subcultures are typically limited to: "basic value orientations, publicly proclaimed attitudes, or reports of stereotypical behavior" - becomes a caricature

- all subcultures have ranges

Re-conceptualization:
- interlocking group culture
- multiple group membership
- weak ties
- structural roles
- media diffusion
- identification
- community/outsiders' response

Becker (1961): shared definition of the situation
Spector (1973): effective interaction in a group

"culture is meaningful only when it is activated in interaction" (8).

"the social network serves as the referent of the subculture" (8).

Multiple group membership is fine - overlapping memberships allows spread of information (10).

Weak ties are maintained outside of any major group, thus nothing is ever bounded or finite (10).

Some people perform particular structural roles which affects how cultural info spreads (11).

media diffusion (when a speaker addresses multiple groups simultaneously) increases cultural flow (11-12)

Identification. "Selves are acquired through self-indication (Blumer 1969), whereby individuals can view themselves as members of a group, as marginal to a group, or as outsiders" (12)

"cultural usage consists of chosen behaviors" (12).

Identification can be analyzed using centrality ("member's degree of commitment to the population segment") and salience ("frequency of the identification").

Outsiders are involved the development of subcultures. Outsiders often label groups and then one can identify with that or not. Media portrayal helps solidify groups and the outsider is constantly a factor in the development of a subculture by affecting the centrality of identification.

Finally, they argue that research must take into account both identification and social networks and the evershifting elements.

Category: subcultures

Posted by zephoria at 6:26 PM | TrackBack (0)

May 7, 2005

Penelope Eckert - "Jocks & Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School"

Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks & Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. Teacher College Press: New York.

Overview (Introduction):

When i first picked up this book, i crinkled my nose at the terms "jocks" and "burnouts" and made a rash judgment that the author was clueless - those terms are so outdated, so binary, so limited. But as i dove into her Introduction, i actually got where she was going with this and began to really appreciate her structure. I still loathe the terms but i appreciate what she did with it.

Eckert offers two categories to frame all of American high school life (although her ethnography is based on one school in Michigan): jocks and burnouts. She makes it very clear that jocks don't just refer to the sporty kids but the embodiment of "an attitude - an acceptance of the school and its institutions as an all-encompassing social context, an unflagging enthusiasm and energy for working within those institutions" (3). In other words, these are the goodie-tooshoes, the popular kids, the hall monitors, the band geeks, and anyone who collects activities like baseball cards. Burnouts are, not surprisingly, not just the drug crowd, but all of those burnt-out of the system "from long years of frustration encountered in an institution that rejects and stigmatizes them as it fails to recognize and meet their needs" (4). This includes the art kids, the ones sleeping through all classes, the ones who are always tardy, the ones with their headphones on between classes, etc.

My next self-focused !but! concerns the binarism. I collected activities while dating the town's drug dealer and skipping over 1/3 of the school year; i had straight A's but my teachers preferred if i slept because i was less disruptive. What about me? is not the way to read a book but i can't help it. Luckily, Eckert addresses this by saying that many kids fit somewhere in-between but recognize the existence of these categories in the process of trying to place themselves in-between. While you can break down each category even more, the binarism still stands and the desire to move between them is significant in the social life of teens.

The significance of these two camps is that, together, they achieve "hegemony in the social structure of the school... It is not the categories themselves, but the opposition between them that is hegemonic" (5). The reason for this is startling - it helps replicate the class system that exists throughout adult society. You cannot have mainstream without having resistant; both create hegemony, not simply the mainstream.

With hegemony being constructed by oppositional forces, Eckert moves on to deconstruct an prevalent assumption - "Jocks become involved in school because their families have instilled in them confidence, ambition, and academic skills, while Burnouts become alienated from school because their families have failed them. Burnouts' rebelliousness is seen as resulting from problems at home and from frustration at their lack of academic ability" (a.k.a. "theory of cultural deprivation") (7). "In actuality, the years that lead up to secondary school withness a multifaceted process of separation of children on the basis of class and (in many schools) ethnicity, in which children's beliefs are built on adults' beliefs and in which individual beliefs are built into group beliefs" (7). In other words, by middle school, we replicate the adult values in our schools and children are positioned in relation to their parents' positions - "the perpetuation of class inequalities through the funneling of children into their parents' place in society, and the enculturation of children into hierarchical social forms through explicit and implicit educational practices" (7).

Eckert shares Shirley Brice Heath's definition of mainstream - "literate, school-oriented, aspiring to upward mobility through success in formal institutions and looking beyond the primary networks of family and community for behavioral models and value orientations" (8).

In elementary schools, there is no educational differentiation for kids - everyone is in the same class. By the time kids hit middle/high school, those who have been primed for leadership roles get to take their places. In middle/high schools, kids are split based on their "skills" which are usually marked by what mainstream parents/teachers think are generalizable values. Of course, this means that kids who come from non-mainstream communities are immediately placed in "lower" classes. Of course disdain for school will come out of this. "It is no wonder that those who stand to lose power in this new comprehensive school context react swiftly to reject the context itself" (13).

Talcott Parsons (1942) introduced the term "youth culture" but all of this early work concerned a classless, homogenous adolescent culture.

Eckert uses Michael Brake's (1985) definition of subculture: "meaning systems, modes of expression or life styles developed by groups in subordinate structural positions in response to dominant meaning systems, and which reflect their attempt to solve structural contradictions arising from the wider societal context" (14).

Jocks and Burnouts are very much overlapping subcultures which, to Eckert, "weakens the notion of culture intended in the term" (16). She talks about different approaches to subcultures, include a differentiation between 'fun' and 'delinquent' subcultures. She then introduces "progressive" subcultures (i.e. those who have access to social contexts outside of the school like the Punks, Beatniks and Freaks) - they "pose a treat to the Jock-Burnout hegemony, not only because of their 'unpredictable' style but because of their opposition to the category system itself" (18).

Category: subcultures

Posted by zephoria at 1:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)