Rebels without a Cause? Socialization and Subcultural Style Among the Children of the New Middle Classes

This article presents the results of an ethnographic investigation into the subcultural practices of a group of new-middle-class students undertaking academic study in an English college of further education. It seeks to contribute to debates stimulated by neo-Marxist writing in the sociology of education concerning the radical significance, or otherwise, of student resistance to schooling. Sets of responses to aspects of the schooling process are identified, and continuities between these responses and those within family and subcultural sites, together with those across generations, are explored in the constitution of a grammar of modes of cultural affirmation and challenge. The analysis suggests that there is little evidence that challenges directed against principles of control within sites or carried across sites constitute effective resistances to prevailing patterns of class or gender relations in English society. In the light of this, the article concludes that the role of members of the new middle class in processes of social transformation remains to be demonstrated.