Dick Hobbs
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199565955
- eISBN:
- 9780191701948
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199565955.003.0005
- Subject:
- Law, Criminal Law and Criminology
David Downes' Delinquent Solution was publicized in 1966 and presented a rich and rewarding picture of East London in the early 1960s. It produced a platform for scholars to understand the worlds of ...
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David Downes' Delinquent Solution was publicized in 1966 and presented a rich and rewarding picture of East London in the early 1960s. It produced a platform for scholars to understand the worlds of successive generations of British Youth. This chapter reconsiders the socio-economic changes that have taken place in the East End during the past forty years. A few of Downes' old haunts are described in a contemporary context, and the validity of the concept of dissociation that emerged from his fieldwork is interrogated along with the relevance of the subcultural canon. It specifically had a tremendous influence upon the study of British youth subcultures. In general, The Delinquent Solution was an important text in the sociology of youth culture, and in its careful unravelling of the realities of being young in the 1960s Downes succeeded in contradicting some of the crude stereotyping of working-class youth, and in its place created a complex picture of a rich culture that was both oppositional and subservient.Less
David Downes' Delinquent Solution was publicized in 1966 and presented a rich and rewarding picture of East London in the early 1960s. It produced a platform for scholars to understand the worlds of successive generations of British Youth. This chapter reconsiders the socio-economic changes that have taken place in the East End during the past forty years. A few of Downes' old haunts are described in a contemporary context, and the validity of the concept of dissociation that emerged from his fieldwork is interrogated along with the relevance of the subcultural canon. It specifically had a tremendous influence upon the study of British youth subcultures. In general, The Delinquent Solution was an important text in the sociology of youth culture, and in its careful unravelling of the realities of being young in the 1960s Downes succeeded in contradicting some of the crude stereotyping of working-class youth, and in its place created a complex picture of a rich culture that was both oppositional and subservient.
