1. The main chacteristics of consumer culture

Consumer culture is an assumption that human society is strongly subjective to consumerism. The concept states that social and economic cultures are based on purchasing commodities and services that will be fostered social behavior.

Consumer culture refers to a theory that human society is strongly influenced, even predominantly influenced, by consumerism. This concept states that economic and social cultures are based on the purchasing of commodities and services and that social functioning and behavior is bound up with the fostering a desire for these goods. It is also intricately bound up with notions of advertising and globalization.

Contemporary features of consumer culture existed in the early modern mind, but they were recognizable in different forms. Under the disguise of commerce and trade, not production or consumption, the early modern man came to contact with a new ideology of free exchange, not only of goods and services, but of ideas, opinions, and meanings as well. Consumer culture, according to Slater, is not a reference to a recent phenomenon: it is rather part of a new terminology that came to replace the notion of civil society, which itself is born to modernity. The ideal of autonomous individuals rationally pursuing their interests in a free market – a notion so much cherished within consumer culture – stands at the heart of the project of modernity in the eighteenth century.

2. Social conditions of the emergence of post-war youth subculture

A youth subculture is a youth-based subculture with distinct styles, behaviors, and interests. Youth subcultures offer participants an identity outside of that ascribed by social institutions such as family, work, home and school. Youth subcultures that show a systematic hostility to the dominant culture are sometimes described as countercultures.

Early studies in youth culture were mainly produced by functionalist sociologists, and focus on youth as a single form of culture. In explaining the development of the culture, they utilized the concept of anomie. Talcott Parsons argued that as we move from the family and corresponding values to another sphere with differing values, (e.g. the workplace) we would experience an "anomie situation."[citation needed] The generalizations involved in this theory ignore the existence of subcultures.

Marxist theories account for some diversity, because they focus on classes and class-fractions rather than youth as a whole. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson described youth subcultures as symbolic or ritualistic attempts to resist the power of bourgeois hegemony by consciously adopting behavior that appears threatening to the establishment. Conversely, Marxists of the Frankfurt School of social studies argue that youth culture is inherently consumerist and integral to the divide-and-rule strategy of capitalism.[citation needed] They argue that it creates generation gaps and pits groups of youths against each other (e.g. mods and rockers), especially as youth culture is the dominant culture in the west. Subcultures may also be seen as extensions of crowds, subcultures that emerge within a specific school.