- Define and explain Subcultures and Countercultures in your own words
- Use key terms such as Counterculture accurately
- Apply what you have learned to new examples and questions
- Avoid the common mistakes learners make with this topic
This lesson focuses on Subcultures and Countercultures: explore groups that live by different rules, from mods to hippies.
Explore groups that live by different rules, from mods to hippies.
Key ideas
Deviance is a label
Howard Becker argued in Outsiders (1963) that deviance is not a quality of an act but the result of social groups making rules and applying them: a person becomes deviant by being successfully labelled as such. His labelling theory, building on Chicago School studies of urban life, shows how being called a criminal or a troublemaker can push people towards the very behaviour condemned. The theory's power is showing that reactions create deviance; its limit is saying less about why some acts are harmful in the first place.
Life is a theatre
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Erving Goffman used dramaturgy, the language of theatre, to describe social life: we manage impressions from our front stage, like a classroom, while relaxing into a truer self back stage, like a bedroom. Gender, ethnicity and class shape the roles we are offered and how audiences judge our performances. The idea reveals identity as something we do, not just something we have.
Key term — Counterculture: A subculture whose values deliberately oppose mainstream society, such as the hippies of the 1960s with their rejection of consumerism and conventional careers.
What is the difference between a subculture and a counterculture?
A subculture has distinct values or styles within mainstream culture, while a counterculture deliberately rejects mainstream values, as the hippies did.
Answer: A subculture has distinct values or styles within mainstream culture, while a counterculture deliberately rejects mainstream values, as the hippies did.
- Assuming subcultures are criminal gangs Most subcultures are harmless style or interest groups; researchers study them for what they reveal about mainstream values, not because members are criminals.
- Thinking globalisation makes everyone the same Global contact produces hybridity, new mixed cultures, and people also actively resist and adapt global influences rather than just copying them.
Practice
Deviance is created when social groups make rules and successfully label rule-breakers as outsiders.
The interview is front stage: you perform a polished self to manage the interviewer's impression. Home is back stage: you drop the performance among a trusted audience.
Any accurate example, e.g. bhangra music blending Punjabi folk traditions with Western pop and hip-hop in Britain.
Adorno argued that mass entertainment is standardised by profit-driven industries, keeping audiences passive, conformist and distracted from real inequality.
Quick check
Which of these best defines "Counterculture"?
A critic says audiences are not passive: fans remix songs and organise online. Which view of popular culture does this support?
- Subcultures and Countercultures: explore groups that live by different rules, from mods to hippies.
- Deviance is a label: Howard Becker argued in Outsiders (1963) that deviance is not a quality of an act but the result of social groups making rules and applying them: a person becomes deviant by being successfully labelled as such.
- Globalisation: The growing interconnectedness of the world through trade, travel, migration and media, which brings different cultures into constant contact.
- Watch out for: assuming subcultures are criminal gangs