Modelling the Dynamics of Youth Subcultures

One can often distinguish youths from adults, not only by their faces, but also by their jargon, clothing, gait and posture. Their relative lack of experience and generally different position in life have probably always separated the youth and adult worlds (2). The prosperity of Western societies during the 20th century has postponed the entry of adulthood. This has increased the importance of youth culture in the search of identity. It has also diversified youth culture so that one (in academia since ref. (11)) speaks of youth subcultures rather than one youth culture. Whereas “subculture,” in general, refers to a social group with particular behaviours or beliefs, this paper specifically focuses on youth subcultures. Today, youth subcultures are conspicuous features of Western and other societies of the world. We note that youth subcultures, as known in the West, often require some economic strength from the follower. Many aspects of our discussion are probably ubiquitous, but to simplify we focus on youth culture in wealthy democracies. Subcultures may be long lived like the hip hop or punk cultures, or die out almost as soon as they have a name. They may be centred on music, sports (such as the surf or snowboard culture (18)) or literature (such as the Beat generation (16)), religion (5), etc. The reason a subculture may flare up and vanish soon is related to that adolescents in search of an identity are very adaptive in terms of the defining traits of a subculture. An adolescent’s formation of a personality is both an individual and a social process (4; 9). For the social part the subcultures often play a major role. In this study we attempt to model the dynamics of subcultures based on a few assumptions about the rationale behind the subcultures’ roles in the formation of a personal identity. Our goal is to observe the skewed distribution of sizes of the subcultures—like Thornton’s example about the club subcultures of late-eighties Britain: “Hundreds of dance genres are coined every year. While most fail, acid house prospered.” (Ref. (21), p. 156.) “Genre” refers to a division of an art form, in this case club music. Just as music can be classified hierarchically, one can divide subcultures into sub-subcultures. Since, in the club music world of Thornton, the subcultural identity is closely tied to the music, it is natural to associate the genre with a subculture. This is, of course, a very fine distinction of a subculture; henceforth, we will not explicitly state the level of the hierarchy we are discussing, but presume that the same precepts govern subcultures at all different hierarchical levels. To model youth subcultures is, no doubt, an exceedingly complex problem; and any approach runs the risk of either being an over-simplification or so complex the actual mechanisms become indecipherable. Since this question is, to our knowledge, not earlier addressed, we propose a simple framework that can easily be extended to more elaborate future models. We mention that this model can be applied to different social and economic systems. In this paper, however, we focus solely on the question of youth subcultures.