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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) and 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 outlined are the main trends in youth drinking and the argument that there has been a switch from an industrial, modern alcohol order to a post-industrial, post-modern, consumer alcohol order.
Next demonstrated is young people’s consumer approach to drinking in this post-modern order, before a mapping out of two styles of contemporary consumer drinking; “bounded” and “unbounded” hedonistic consumption.
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.
The conclusion looks at the implications of the arguments presented for future public policy.
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