The Enactment of Identities in the Context of the Night-Time Econom: Youth Cultures and Gender Divisions

Beccaria, F and Sande, A (2003) “ Drinking games and Rite of Life Projects: A Social Comparison of the Meaning And Functions of Young People’s Use of Alcohol During the Rite of Passage to Adulthood in Italy and Norway, Youth 11(2), pp 99-119.
The aim of this article is to present a social comparison of modern youth culture and the local traditions regarding the drinking of alcohol in Italy and Norway. We argue that the use of alcohol in ‘wet and dry drinking cultures’ in northern and southern Europe has grown more similar. Young people, in both countries, drink beer and spirits at weekends, holidays and during the period of their final exams for intoxication, transition to a new phase of life and celebration purposes within the peer group. The modern innovations of practice combine a ritual structure of traditional forms of ‘rite of passage’ (Turner,1969; Van Gennep, 1960) with modern individualistic rites (Beck, 1997). In the modern local and global youth culture, use of alcohol for intoxication purposes is the key symbol for ‘free flow’ in the phase of transition from childhood to the individual life project of ,creating one’s social identity. This mixing of old ritual structures and modern reflexive individualization rituals has led to us coining a new concept of ‘rite of life projects’.

Brain, K (2002) ‘Youth, Alcohol, And the Emergence of the Post Modern Alcohol Order’, Occasional Paper Institute of Alcohol Studies, London. (pdf 330kb)
This paper attempts to outline and provide an explanation for recent trends in the youth alcohol market. In doing so, it draws on some ethnographic research undertaken into youth drinking patterns for the report Drinking with Design: alcopops alcohol and youth culture (Brain and Parker 1997) an integrates this with some strands of contemporary social theory. The ethnographic research is based on underage (13-17) drinkers. However, this data is held to both reflect and be indicative of similar trends in the 18-30 youth market. First, I will outline the main trends in youth drinking and argue that there has been a switch from an industrial, modern alcohol order to a post-industrial, post-modern, consumer alcohol order. I will then go on to demonstrate young people’s consumer approach to drinking in this post-modern order before mapping out two styles of contemporary consumer drinking; “bounded” and “unbounded” hedonistic consumption. I will then go on to suggest that, currently, young drinkers are caught between two of the processes which, as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, characterise post-modern consumer societies - “seduction and repression”. The bounded and unbounded hedonistic drinkers are the seduced and the repressed of the post-modern alcohol order. Finally, I will conclude by briefly considering the implications of the arguments presented for future public policy.

Eggington, G; Williams, L and Parker, H (2002) “Going out Drinking: The Centrality of Heavy Alcohol Used in English Adolescent’s Leisure Time and Poly Substance Taking”, Journal of Substance Use, 7, 125-35

Harnett, R Thom, B; Herring, R, and Kelly, M (2000) “Alcohol in transition: Towards a Model of Young Men’s Drinking Styles”, Journal of Youth Studies, 3(1)pp. 61-77.

Hollands, R (1995) Friday Night, Saturday Night: Youth Identification in the Post Industrial City. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Department of Sociology, University of Newcastle.

Hollands, R and Chatteron, P (2001) Changing our Toon: Youth, Nightlife and Urban Change in Newcastle. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Department of Sociology, University of Newcastle.

Both are available in PDF format online:
www.ncl.ac.uk/youthnightlife/home.htm

Hollands, R. (2000) “Lager louts, tarts and hooligans: the criminalisation of young adults in a study of Newcastle nightlife, in Jupp, V, .Davies, P and Francis, P (Eds) Doing Criminological Research, London:Sage.

Hollands, R (2002) “Divisions in the Dark; Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Segmented Consumption Spaces in the Night-Time Economy”, Journal of Youth Studies, Vol 5 (2).
This paper tackles the question of how we might begin to re-conceptualise contemporary youth cultural identities in the context of social divisions created through different transitional pathways, by reference to some recent ethnographic work on young adults and nightlife.

Katovich, M and Reese, W (1987) “The Regular: Full Time Identities and Membership in the Urban Bar”, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 16(3) pp 308-43.

Kingsdale, J (1993) ‘The “Poor Man’s Club”: Social Functions of the Urban Working Class Saloon, American Quarterly, 24(4), pp 472-489.

Measham, F. (1996)” The ‘Big Bang’ approach to sessional drinking: Changing patterns of alcohol consumption amongst young people in north west England”, Addiction Research, 4(3), pp.283–299.

Melbon, B (1998) Clubbing: Consumption, Identity and the Spatial Practices of every Night Life, in Skelton, T and Valentine, G ‘ Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures’, London: Routledge

Parker, H and Williams, L (2001) “Intoxicated Weekends: Young Adults’ Work Hard Play Hard Lifestyles, Public Health and Public Disorder”, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 40.
Going out at the weekends binge drinking is a leisure priority of the majority of young English adults. This going-out sector is described via a cohort (n = 465) of 22 year olds who have been tracked by the North West Longitudinal Study (1991-2001) since they were 13. This cohort is made up of conventional, educated and employed young people. However, over half are regular heavy drinkers and occasional recreational drug users. They often mix alcohol and illicit drugs on nights out. Their motives for intoxicated weekends relate to maintaining successful work hard-play hard lifestyles. Most nights out are perceived as functional and enjoyable but some go wrong leading to arguments, fights and assaults (the public disorder agenda) and impaired judgement, illness and accidents (the public health agenda).These negative outcomes are probably inevitable given the scale and functions of nights out. Better management of nightlife requires an integrative strategy which recognizes the added value of focusing on the care and welfare of the overall going-out population rather than targeting 'trouble makers' and reacting to ad hoc disorder and mishap.

Talbot, D (2004) “Regulation and Racial Differentiation in the Construction of Night-time Economies: A London Case Study”, Urban Studies, 41(4), 887-901.
The clubs and bars of contemporary nightlife are held by supporters in the cultural industries and critics in social policy to be a zone of transgression where the state is powerless to intervene. However, closer inspection of the processes by which nightlife is regulated and incorporated into economic development strategies indicates a more differential approach to social control. Far from being deregulated, nightlife is still largely understood as a 'social problem' to be contained by law, policy and policing. However, the forms in which strategies of regulation are being redefined indicate renewed concerns by policy-makers with acceptable and unacceptable cultures. The duel impact of economic development strategies and licensing policies has been to reinforce particular cultural forms in nightlife spaces at the expense of others. This paper explores findings from a London case study and will attempt to pinpoint the ways in which the practices of economic development and licensing have thrown up barriers to cultural expression and racial diversity being realised in the city spaces of the night. It will argue that, far from being a solution to the perceived problems of the 'night-time economy', regulatory strategies reinforce the notion of nightlife as consumption against that of experimental and racially diverse cultures.

Tomsen, S (1997) “A Top Night Out- Social Protest, Masculinity, and the Culture of Drinking Violence”, British Journal of Criminology (37), 990-1002.