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Young people make their choices and live their generational lives largely with their friends. Individuals create the sub-cultural diversity which offsets the apparently strong contemporary pressures for cultural uniformity. As peer groups form, their members bring to them their past experiences and the effects of the pressures acting upon them in other social positions that they fill. Sociologists have analyzed such effects by using the concept of latent role to cover the behavioral expectations brought to a situation from outside it.
Various types of grouping amongst youth are normal, not pathological, social phenomena. Some groups create styles that older generations tolerate or even praise; the behavior of Boy Scouts doing 'bob job' week is not labeled as outside the boundaries of tolerated behavior in young persons. Other groups clearly take part in breaking the law; the behavior of those who take a bob rather than earn it is seen officially as juvenile delinquency. Between these two extremes there is a wide range within which young people can choose to create or adjust to very different sub-cultural styles of life.
The importance to the contemporary young of such sub-cultures is largely based on the fact that adolescents have extremely restricted choices for action at work or at school so that a major part of their response to their social class location can be made in the sphere of consumption and leisure. These spheres of action provide 'a more negotiable space than the tightly disciplined and controlled work (or school) situation'. Within this space the young can create what Mannheim called 'concrete groups', the members of each of which can adopt or interpret or create a style of life that meets the needs of their position.
In this process groups draw upon the cultural sources around them to create new styles and to express generational meanings. The parent culture can provide materials. Thus, working-class youth can draw upon, for example, a tradition of collective activities, an emphasis on territoriality and a concept of masculinity, or middle-class youth upon the tradition of displaying individual initiative, the feeling of the importance of high art and on an apparently more casual role for the two sexes. But whatever materials are chosen there are certain focal concerns for the young generation of any historical moment and these now seem to centre on dress, music, ritual, slang and, perhaps, various means of transport.
During the early teens peer groups are made up entirely of boys or of girls and these small single-sex groups are isolated from one another. At about fifteen, though to specify an exact age is impossible, the members of the single-sex cliques begin to interact with each other and the leaders in each group seem to be the first to intermingle with the opposite sex. There is, therefore, a period during which the isolated single-sex cliques are being transferred into a linked system, the crowd, made-up of cliques, now containing both sexes. However, by the late teens the process of disintegration is likely to have begun as the members of the new cliques become engaged or married and tend to drift away from the very loosely organized activities of the crowd.
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