Revisiting Resistance Through Rituals 50 years on

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue of Crime Media Culture that considers the legacy and currency of Resistance through Rituals (RTR) since its publication in 1976. While RTR and the wider work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) influenced a succession of research studies on youth culture and subculture, as well as paving some of the way for what has come to be called cultural criminology (which provided a foundation for establishing Crime Media Culture), they have not received universal affirmation. Most prominently, from the 1990s, RTR and the work of the CCCS were criticised by researchers associated with the post-subcultural turn for focusing on socio-economic class, and working-class youth in particular, when youth identities and styles at the turn of the century appeared far more fluid and fragmented than the clearly delineated and internally coherent youth subcultures of RTR. Notwithstanding those criticisms, many contributing to the special issue maintain there is currency in RTR, including in relation to its method of conjunctural analysis.

Introduction

Resistance through Rituals (RTR) was first published in 1975 as a double issue (7/8) of Working Papers in Cultural Studies, the journal produced by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Shortly after, it became a book (Hall and Jefferson, 1976), and this special issue marks 50 years since that publication. In essence, RTR sought to make sense of the emergence of highly stylised, ‘spectacular’ working-class youth subcultures, such as mods and teddy boys, within the context of changes impacting working-class communities in postwar Britain.

The title of the book is a reference to the questionable status and viability of cultural politics or what Willis (1978: 175) later characterised as ‘struggle waged exclusively at the level of lifestyle’. As some in this issue highlight, such thinking was inspired by Cohen (1972: 23), for whom, ‘The latent function of subculture is this – to express and resolve, albeit magically, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture’. Hence, working-class youth subcultures constituted resistance through rituals, offering no solution to the problems of being in a subordinate structural position. No solutions, for example, to unemployment, educational disadvantage, dead-end jobs, low pay and loss of skills. The mod style, for instance, was interpreted as ‘an attempt to realise, but in an imaginary relation, the conditions of existence of the socially mobile white collar worker’ (Cohen, 1972: 23, original emphasis). In fact, working-class youth subcultures tended to ‘reproduce the gaps and discrepancies between real negotiations and symbolically displaced “resolutions”. They “solve”, but in an imaginary way, problems which at the concrete material level remain unresolved’ (Clarke et al., 1976: 47–48).

To be sure, research into the changing nature of working-class communities and culture had begun prior to RTR. For instance, Young and Willmott’s (1957), Family and Kinship in East London, examined the effects on working-class communities of slum clearances and government schemes relocating entire neighbourhoods to housing estates on the outskirts of London. However, RTR focused specifically on the ways such transformations affected working-class youth, which, in turn, provided a means of understanding the socio-historical moment or ‘conjuncture’. Indeed, reflecting on the contributions in this special issue, it is apparent the stress many put on the enduring value of conjunctural analysis. With that in mind, I will now consider what it means to think conjuncturally.

Thinking conjuncturally

As Jefferson (2021) has said recently, when thinking about conjunctural analysis the first thing to consider is what is meant by the idea of a ‘conjuncture’. In its ordinary meaning, a conjuncture refers simply to the notion of ‘things joined together’ (Jefferson, 2021: 24). Sociologically speaking, the idea is yoked to Marxist analyses that examine contradictions at any given moment, including the writings of Louis Althusser who uses the term conjuncture ‘in the neutral sense of a meeting of circumstances or events’ (Jefferson, 2021: 24). Moreover, in the work of Gramsci, which was a key influence in RTR and on the CCCS generally, conjuncture represents ‘the set of immediate and ephemeral characteristics of the economic situation’ (Jefferson, 2021: 25, quoting Gramsci, 1971: 177). In summary, to Jefferson (2021: 26), ‘conjuncture refers to what is happening – politically, economically, ideologically, culturally – at any given historical moment’.

In accordance with classic Marxism, which strives to understand the ‘social totality’ in respect of the relationship between phenomenal forms and real, material relations or the seen and unseen, in the case of youth subcultures, a conjunctural analysis ‘starts with the visible activities of particular youth groups en route to the hidden relations these signify’ (Jefferson, 2026: 4, emphasis added). As Jefferson explains in his contribution to this special issue, ethnography represents the best way of examining the particularities of the phenomenon in question on the journey to deriving a better understanding of the social totality. That is because ethnography entails ‘spending time with the group as a participant observer; participating with them in their way of life in an attempt to “walk in their shoes” (to gain an “insider” perspective); while also maintaining sufficient distance to continue to observe them from an “outsider” perspective’ (Jefferson, 2026: 4).

While RTR has often been criticised for overclaiming its ethnographic credentials, in the introduction to the second edition of the book (published 30 years after the first edition), Hall and Jefferson (2006: x) make plain that while their approach to subcultures was influenced by the qualitative tradition in contemporary American social inquiry, including symbolic interactionism and ethnographic approaches, ‘Few of the case studies reported in RTR were the result of a sustained ethnographic or participant observation methodology’. In short, while ‘what might be called the “ethnographic” level was of critical importance to the project, RTR was not “an ethnographic study”’ (Hall and Jefferson, 2006: xi).

Nonetheless, RTR sought to ‘situate’ meaningful human action through the use of ‘secondary ethnography’. Developing a phenomenological understanding or ‘reading’ of what, for instance, it meant to be a hippie, a teddy boy or a skinhead, did not resemble ‘pure’, primary ethnography, where researchers spend time with real-life people and groups. Rather, it was ‘achieved largely through an extensive reading of secondary materials’ (Jefferson, 2021: 30). Despite what its detractors may say, to Jefferson (2026: 5), secondary ethnography has conceivably greater potential than primary ethnography, since, being the work of many, it ‘has a better chance of one person’s blind spots being cancelled out by a better-sighted observer’. Indeed, in many respects, secondary ethnography might yield better results when conducting a conjunctural analysis that is attempting to understand the social totality, since ‘the (sometimes) vast existing material on the topic which, carefully sifted, can provide a range of information and insights that may prove more enlightening than spending time in the field’ (Jefferson, 2026: 4).

The next step in any conjunctural analysis is to situate phenomenological or subjective meanings within their particular context of determinations, structures and mediations. In relation to RTR, that meant situating working-class youth subcultures within their appropriate socio-historical contexts to determine the extent to which they could illuminate the conjuncture (Jefferson, 2021: 34). The focus on working-class youth subcultures in post-war Britain was crucial given ‘youth’ had become something of a metaphor for notions of ‘classlessness’, which translated respectively into economic, political and cultural spheres as ‘affluence’, ‘consensus’ and ‘embourgeoisement’. The question thus became, what could the emergence of these subcultures ‘at particular historical moments tell us about the state of play of class relations, and how were their respective subcultural “styles” implicated. This then was the conjunctural project: reading the phenomenology of style but historically contextualised in relation to the appropriate mediations’ (Jefferson, 2021: 34–35).

The continued merit of thinking conjuncturally is reasserted by Hall and Jefferson (2006) in the second edition of RTR. There, they restate their ‘predilection for symptomatic readings’, which stress historical specificity, as well as a theoretical and methodological approach that has capacity to comprehend new conjunctures (Hall and Jefferson, 2006: xxi). Hence, to the question, ‘what is the postmodernism in subcultures symptomatic of?’ (Hall and Jefferson, 2006: xxi), they say, it would be hard not to connect expressions of contemporary youth culture to broader social and cultural developments occurring under neoliberalism (Hall and Jefferson, 2006: xxx–xxxi). In relation to RTR, the styles of spectacular youth subcultures were of interest because they illuminated the particular historical moment or conjuncture. Later, in the highly influential, Policing the Crisis (PTC; Hall et al., 1978), the moral panic or over-reaction to ‘mugging’ was seen as ‘symptomatic of a crisis of hegemony partly manifested by “exceptional” state measures’ (Jefferson, 2021: 50).

Importantly, says Jefferson (2021: 34), conjunctural analysis must proceed from ‘a concrete starting point’. And on that, the groundbreaking work of Cohen (1972) was highly influential. Briefly, Cohen provided an account about the relationship of youth subcultures to changes that had occurred in London’s East End during the postwar period. His study was grounded in a community activism project and was thus an ethnography of sorts. Cohen sought to make sense of what was happening to working-class communities at a particular point in time. He worked through the way subcultural ‘subsystems’ (dress, music, argot, ritual) were articulated together and how they changed ‘from one subcultural moment to another’; what he termed the ‘structural or semiotic’ level of analysis (Cohen, 1972: 23–24). That analysis was then connected back to the historically specific class problematic or what he called the ‘historical’ level of analysis. As with any conjunctural analysis, his account was ‘attentive to the structural mediations between subculture as lived reality and the socio-historical moment it crystallised’ (Jefferson, 2021: 35). Cohen’s impact on RTR, and more broadly, is considered in this special issue by Wood and Morgan (2026).

Motivation, impetus and significance

In the years since its publication, RTR has impacted hugely in studies of youth, subcultures and allied areas of research. It has also been subject to much scrutiny and, at times, intense debate, some of which is foregrounded in this issue. Indeed, part of my motivation to edit this special issue has been personal, given the salience of RTR in my own research. As far back as my undergraduate studies, I drew on RTR and the work of the CCCS in my final year dissertation to develop an understanding of the sociological significance of blues music (Martin, 1992). Among other things, I used Shepherd’s (1991) just published seminal book, Music as Social Text, which adopted and adapted Willis’ (1978) concept of ‘structural homology’ to interpret the ways genres of music are socially constituted.

At various points in my academic career, I have returned to RTR and the research of the CCCS, including in my doctoral thesis (Martin, 1997), which combined subcultural theory and social movement studies in an ethnographic account of New Age Travellers (Martin, 1998, 2002a, 2002b). Later, in an article published in Crime Media Culture, I developed a critique of contemporary ‘cultural criminology’ for conceiving of ‘subcultural identity’ and ‘style’ in more vague and diluted terms than were originally conceived in RTR (Martin, 2009, referring to Ferrell et al., 2008: 53, 198). More recently, Jefferson (2021) has discussed this as a function of cultural criminology’s failure to think conjuncturally.

Given the concepts of subculture (or subcultural identity) and style were decoupled from the structural contradictions of class, I saw cultural criminology as displaying the same post-structuralist tendencies as ‘post-subculture’ theory (e.g. Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2004), which took its cue from Maffesoli’s (1996) conception of ‘neo-tribe’ that, according to post-subculturalists, best captured the elective and more fluid lifestyles and identities of late modernity. Post-subculture studies therefore stood in contrast to RTR, which was seen to focus too much on ‘predetermined and external factors’, like class, that ‘press down like dead weights on the individual’ (Bennett, 2008: 428). Post-structural perspectives were also evident in studies of Acid House, rave and ‘clubcultures’ conducted by researchers in the 1990s at Manchester Metropolitan University (Redhead, 1990, 1993, 1998) as well as in ‘new social movement’ theory (Melucci, 1989).

Notwithstanding divergences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ variants of cultural criminology (Martin, 2009), there is a genuine sense in which the work of the CCCS paved the way for the establishment of Crime Media Culture. That is perhaps most obviously embodied in PTC. While RTR was published before PTC and both were separate projects emphasising, respectively, the meaning of the action of youth subcultures and the social reaction to delinquent, youthful activity or ‘mugging’, ‘they were undertaken simultaneously and used the same theoretical resources that were developing in the Centre at that time’ (Jefferson, 2021: 33). That is, ‘they were both conjunctural analyses’ (Jefferson, 2021: 33). Relevant to the ‘media’ part of the trinity, Crime Media Culture, Stuart Hall, CCCS Director at the time RTR and PTC were produced, ‘was also a member of the media subgroup, a fact of particular relevance to the work of PTC, and led the weekly theory seminar, which fed into all the many subgroups’ (Jefferson, 2021: 33).

It is no coincidence that, in 2008, to mark 30 years since the publication of PTC in 1978, Crime Media Culture undertook to publish a series of articles, which, not unlike this current issue, aimed to revisit the influence of the text and the issues it canvassed, including, as one of the book’s original authors then put it, returning to ‘themes about the place of authority and of race in representing the crisis, given that they are some of the continuing echoes of that conjuncture’ (Clarke, 2008: 126). The journal’s editors at that time stated, ‘Given that Policing the Crisis emerged from the interplay of social critique and cultural theory, criminology and media studies, there seems no better place to commemorate and reconsider the book’s importance than here in the pages of Crime Media Culture’ (Greer et al., 2008: 7).

And so, beyond my individual motivation, the impetus to edit a special issue to mark 50 years since the publication of RTR has similarly come from an interest in exploring the significance, legacies and currency of the book. Like the editors of the issue containing the PTC essays (Greer et al., 2008: 7), I was keen to enlist some of the original contributors to RTR so that they might provide personal recollections and reflections on their own involvement in the book’s production and the wider work of the CCCS, as well as show how those formative experiences influenced and shaped their subsequent work. Here, I was interested too in biographical details, which are provided in some of the accounts in the issue, meaning parts of certain articles deviate slightly from traditional modes of academic writing, though that is something Crime Media Culture is entirely open to.

Special issue synopsis

At the outset, I approached several original RTR contributors, many of whom are present in this special issue. Some have retired and are no longer working, others were too busy or not interested enough in the project. Finding contemporary scholars to comment on the currency of RTR was somewhat confounding. However, Brewis (2026) emerged as a prime candidate. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Glasgow over a 4-year period, his analysis of Neds and Ned Culture makes a compelling case for the currency of RTR and, in particular, the enduring value of conjunctural analysis. In arguing for a ‘renewal’ of RTR, Brewis (2026: 3) points out neither he nor the original authors expected RTR to be canonised and treated as a ‘closed system’, nor did they intend subcultures to be treated ‘as timeless entities’ or ‘universal templates that could be shoehorned into contexts to which they did not belong’.

Much like Hall and Jefferson’s (2006: xxx–xxxi) assessment of the impact of neoliberalism on expressions of contemporary youth culture, Brewis shows how a conjunctural analysis or symptomatic reading entails situating Neds and Ned Culture within a particular moment or context, namely the conditions of a changing political economy and the material consequences of the neoliberal shift. Neoliberalism has impacted working-class communities in contemporary Britain most profoundly through ‘deindustrialisation, new housing policies and an urban entrepreneurialism’, leaving ‘a pronounced spatial signature’, that has ‘zones of affluence, and those of clear abandonment’ (Brewis, 2026: 6). Accordingly, Ned style and culture – territorial rituals in leisure spaces of neoliberal disposition, aesthetic (dress) codes, consumption and music circulation in alternative ‘grey’ economies – function as patterned practical responses to territorial stigmatisation and spatial dispossession, creating a sense of belonging and means of recognition in the face of alienation, police violence and media labelling as folk devils.

Original contributors, Jefferson (2026) and Clarke (2026), argue the very same in respect of the merit of continuing to think conjuncturally. For Jefferson (2026: 4), that is because thinking conjuncturally is a means by which we are able ‘to understand the present moment in its full complexity: economically, politically, culturally, ideologically’. As stated above, Jefferson (2026: 4) argues ethnography (whether primary or secondary) is a crucial starting point for this exercise, since ethnography can offer a qualitatively rich appreciation of the particularities of the phenomenon in question en route to better comprehending the social totality. To Clarke (2026: 2), it is important to think conjuncturally, not least ‘because conjunctural approaches have always unsettled reductive and essentialist ways of thinking’; including in relation to class, which must be understood ‘as a complex and conjunctural formation’ (Clarke, 2026: 3).

Similar ways of thinking conjuncturally apply to conceptions of generation; a concept frequently reified in public discourse, thus producing ‘generationalism’, which centres homogenised generations when generations are, in fact, heterogeneous in terms of class and other forms of differentiation (Martin and Roberts, 2021). Take Brexit, for example. Data indicated voting distribution was ‘dramatically skewed by age’, whereby, generally speaking, Gen Z (18–24 years old) voted ‘remain’, while baby boomers (65–74 years old) voted ‘leave’ (Clarke, 2026: 12). However, these figures risked reifying age and/or generation as well as masking material divisions. According to Clarke (2026: 12), that is why it is important to analyse specific articulations of class and generation, which reveal how the ‘generation’ voting for Brexit comprised, ‘strikingly different material conditions and motivations for voting, combining fractions of the “left behind” working-class of England and Wales and the post-colonially anxious traditional middle classes’.

Alongside original contributors, I sought to include researchers whose work followed on from RTR. Some of those are self-proclaimed fans of RTR, though not uncritical fans, including MacDonald (2026), who here considers RTR in the context of the longitudinal research he conducted with colleagues involved in the Teesside Youth Transitions Studies of the 1990s and 2000s. Among other things, this body of work recognises the salience of older criminological theories of subculture and concepts like ‘street corner society’ to the everyday lives of the majority of young people in poor neighbourhoods who would not have been included in RTR’s account of ‘the stylish and spectacular few’ (MacDonald, 2026: 1). MacDonald ends his contribution to the special issue restating the currency of RTR and especially a passage of the book he sees as a kind of ‘quasi-manifesto’ for contemporary youth sociology, which should continue to foreground structures (specifically the material conditions of class relations), youth cultures as responses to inherited conditions, as well as biographies that can be understood in terms of how structure and agency play out in the individual lives of young people. Linking biographical, cultural and structural mediations in this way is, of course, entirely consonant with conjunctural analysis (Jefferson, 2021: 50).

As an original RTR contributor, Colin Webster is a connector to the work of the CCCS and the Teesside Studies of Youth Transitions to which he also contributed. Along with gender, race is often cited as a notable omission in RTR. And it is here where some of Webster’s own research exploring intersections of race, ethnicity and crime serves as a corrective. In his contribution to this issue, he documents the intergenerational effects of deindustrialisation in Bradford upon British born Pakistani young men, many of whom took to drug dealing to provide money and status where there were few legitimate opportunities to achieve those cultural goals. Insofar as the economic marginalisation and criminality of these young men emerged from self-employment and entrepreneurialism, parallels with the political economy approach of RTR and wider corpus of the CCCS’s approach to race and class were evident in ‘the confluence of biography and social structure, and that entrepreneurial criminality was an attempt to recover from local deindustrialisation where they lived in Bradford’ (Webster, 2026: 11, original emphasis).

More a critic than a fan, Bennett (2026) has been a key proponent of post-subcultural theory, which emerged in the 1990s and, as explained earlier, was critical of RTR for focusing solely on social class as the determinant for subculture participation. In his contribution to this issue, Bennett (2026: 5) says the relationship of style to youth is now harder to pin down as ‘styles are no longer the exclusive purview of youth but are instead multi-generational in nature’. Moreover, the advent of the digital age now impacts young people in ways inconceivable when RTR was published. Young people are able to forge trans-local as well as global connections in online spaces where cultural practice and identity formation are also no longer restricted to music. Importantly, in contrast to the passive form of resistance epitomised in the notion of resistance through rituals, in the contemporary digital age, ‘youth on the whole has become more proactive in its strategies of resistance’ (Bennett, 2026: 7), which include subversive use of digital media and the creation of critical content rooted in a DIY ethos.

The final article of this special issue comprises a critical appreciation of the work of Phil Cohen, who died in November 2023 (Wood and Morgan, 2026). Some of the focus of that piece is on Cohen’s (1972) work in subculture theory and youth studies, which, as noted above and in other contributions here, inspired the conundrum at the heart of RTR, namely the idea that working-class youth subcultures in postwar Britain offered only magical resolutions to real structural problems. While Cohen himself may have felt burdened by that legacy, Wood and Morgan show how his oeuvre extended well beyond RTR and into areas as diverse as critical cartography, narratology and critical race theory. Indeed, his studies of racism in Britain chimed with the work of Hebdige (1979) and Hall (1988) in providing something of a corrective to the analysis in RTR that came to be criticised for not including enough about race and ethnicity. Throughout his life and career, though, Cohen continued to revisit the youth question (Cohen, 1999), and, like other urban ethnographers, he strove to centre lived experience and give voice to local people (Cohen, 2013). In many ways, too, his syncretic approach continued to resemble conjunctural thinking reminiscent of the CCCS in RTR (and PTC), which is something Cohen had in common with many contributors here.

Conclusion

Reflecting on the contributions in this special issue, it is clear the stress many place on the legacy and enduring value of conjunctural analysis, including the reading or decoding of magical solutions, and the formative intellectual work and influence of Cohen (1972) in that regard, as noted by Clarke (2026) and Wood and Morgan (2026). Also of note, from a methodological standpoint, is the way the Teesside Studies into youth transitions as well as Webster’s study of racial violence have been able to interrogate intergenerational patterns of localised subordination in changing conjunctures using a longitudinal approach. Although this method is still ‘considered the “gold standard” for reliability in social science research’ (Webster, 2026: 10), it is quite a rarity in contemporary times where universities and funding bodies increasingly prioritise quickly executed, cost-effective, ‘impactful’ research.

One of the principal criticisms of RTR was it provided insufficient coverage of gender and race. While gender was considered by McRobbie and Garber (1976) in the original volume as well as some time later (McRobbie, 1981), race, ethnicity and the complex constitutive role of black culture in British society were examined shortly after RTR’s publication by Hebdige (1979) and subsequently Gilroy (1987). More recently, it has been argued criminology and cultural studies could benefit from referencing critical Africana perspectives (Agozino et al., 2020). The critique about the relative absence of gender has carried through to the most recent version of cultural criminology; for instance, in Miller’s (1991) application of Lyng’s (1990) concept of ‘edgework’ to female street hustlers. While some of contributors to this special issue have also cited research by female researchers focusing on gender (e.g. Miller, 2024 in Brewis, 2026: 4; Hamilton, 2012 in MacDonald, 2026: 7–8) and those looking at race (e.g. Gunter, 2016 in MacDonald, 2026: 8), it will be noted that, despite my best efforts to include a diversity of contributors, much like RTR itself, all of the contributors here are white men.

This is partly a function of the fact that virtually all the original cohort of RTR contributors were men, though not all were white, of course. It might also reflect the limits of my ‘recruitment’ process, particularly in respect of contemporary research contributions. Here though another possible explanation might pertain to an insight provided by MacDonald (2026: 7, original emphasis) in his article, and his point about the general paucity or ‘abeyance’ of critical youth culture research, evidenced by the fact that out of 200 papers given by researchers from over 20 countries at the 2024 Journal of Youth Studies international conference, ‘it would be hard to find more than a handful that were directly about youth culture or youth subculture in the sense conveyed by the CCCS (or their later critics)’.

Another plausible explanation MacDonald gives for the abeyance of youth culture research over the past three decades is lack of funding, which has made it harder for people to do youth research. This, he says, is particularly concerning ‘given the multiple, intersecting crises facing young adults in the UK in respect of stalled social mobility, widespread labour market precarity, increasing poverty, the impossibility of the housing market, worsening mental health and so on’ (MacDonald, 2026: 7). Moreover, when youth cultural research studies are conducted, they tend only to doff their cap to the lineage of the Birmingham School’s subculture tradition, and ‘rarely do they focus on the tightly defined, substantive, lasting, stylistic subcultures of the sort discussed by the CCCS’ (MacDonald, 2026: 7).

That point goes to a broader one about the current state of the academy. Here we might reflect on what some in this special issue have mentioned about the culture – or ‘atmosphere’ to use Jefferson’s (2026: 5) word – of the CCCS in the 1970s, which was one of trust, building confidence and collaboration. Clearly, we cannot expect universities in the 21st century to be how they were 50 years ago. And, as Jefferson (2026: 6) also documents, it was not always plain sailing back then either: Stuart Hall was involved in ‘constant struggles’ with university administrators and those working in existing disciplines when attempting to established cultural studies as a new area of study (conceivably presaging the subsequent boom of interdisciplinary research and teaching). It is, however, hard to imagine such an atmosphere pervading the contemporary neoliberal university.