Divisions in the dark: Youth cultures, transitions and segmented consumption spaces in the night-time economy.

Examines the question of how one might begin to re-conceptualize contemporary youth cultural identities in the context of social divisions created through different transitional pathways, by reference to recent ethnographic work on young adults and nightlife. There has been a historic divide between analyses of youth cultures and studies of youth transitions. This has led to charges that transition studies are not only somewhat mechanical and structurally biased, but rather dull and positivistic in their orientation. Recent analyses of youth styles have been pre-occupied with more post-modern readings of club-cultures, post-subcultures, neo-tribal patterns of activity and lifestyles, and have often failed to address questions of inequality, segmentation and spatial separation amongst differing consumption groupings. This paper interrogates these two traditions, and seeks to advance the debate by looking at the complex relationship between labour market divisions and cultural identities in the night-time economy. It argues that while minority elements of 'hybrid' forms of identity/consumption exist, they are overshadowed by the dominance of a 'mainstream' form of nightlife provision that exploits existing cleavages and segregates youth into particular spaces/places. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)