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DIY and alternate cultures are important social spaces to study because they are where young people can find themselves when they feel like they do not fit in and where they can find like-minded peers with whom to work, make and play. DIY and alternative cultures are also key objects of co-optation and value creation, where resistive and creative practices are denuded of their artistry, politics and emotional authenticity, repurposed through immaterial labour, and resold as aesthetics and affects. Beginning by situating the analysis in wider conceptualisations about late capitalism's business ontology, this article contributes to unpacking these processes firstly by making a theoretical/methodological distinction between ‘youth’ and ‘young people’. I then develop the affects of ‘youthful culture’ not only to conceptually rethink how youth cultures still play a role in the lives of young people in terms of identity formation and everyday forms of escape and creativity, but also to highlight processes of co-optation, commercial culture and how figurative distortions of youth create value in late capitalism. As ‘youth’ is conceptually cut loose from age brackets, it becomes an affect operationalised for an array of vested interests. Importantly, what is often left out of considering co-optation are the actual physical bodies and everyday emotions of living, breathing young people from whom these affects are extracted. This article will discuss these aspects using empirical examples from research on punk and hospitality showing how the immaterial labour that ‘youth’ enacts in these spaces is exploited from backs of the physical and creative labour performed by young people themselves, aspects of which they are sometimes reflexively aware and are attempting to negotiate.

This article critically engages with the Australian Cultural Fields project and the book Fields, Capitals, Habitus to make suggestions as to what future research on consumption practices needs to consider, including the place of young people; increased material inequality and its implications for cultural production; the development of consumers participating in cultural production; and the importance of considering emotions and affect in Bourdieusian sociology.

This article explores how the social relationships of precarious workers contribute to employment and labour practices in the hospitality industry. In so doing, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the nature of post-Fordist labour, and to studies of the social relations of precarity as they are enacted in workers’ intimate lives. Empirically, the article describes a distinctive mode of interpersonal negotiation and sociality practised by workers that is connected to the requirement that workers be ‘fun’ at work to facilitate consumption and to support the labour of co-workers. This sociality also shapes access to employment. However, the way that this takes place sheds light on divisions within the service labour force, in which employment opportunities are distributed through a social ‘scene’ that excludes migrant and ethnic minority workers. Involvement in this scene places the relationship between the public and the private in workers’ social lives into a constant tension, but exclusion increases vulnerability to poor working conditions and exploitation. The article concludes by arguing that the relationship between the public and the private in the practice of affective labour is not dissolved so much as posed as a problem that workers must negotiate within the disciplinary requirements of labour in specific industries and the modes of embodied inequality shaping the service labour force.

While Australia has experienced low COVID-19 case numbers relative to other countries, it has witnessed severe economic consequences in the wake of the pandemic. The hospitality industry, in which young adults are overrepresented, has been among the most affected industries. In this article, we present findings from an interview and a digital methods-based study of young hospitality workers in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Newcastle who lost shifts or employment due to the pandemic. We argue that the participants’ ability to cope with the loss of work was mediated by the degree of family support that they could access, with some experiencing the pandemic as an inconvenience, while others suffered extreme financial hardship. Findings from this study show that the most severe impacts of the pandemic play out along pre-existing lines of inequality and marginality, causing the most severe consequences for those who were already most vulnerable to them.

Explanations of inequality in higher education primarily use the dominant language of institutional equity discourses, such as low socio-economic status (LSES), ‘under-represented’ or ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds. We argue that analysis that relies on a static series of objective categories regularly fails to account for the symbolic-historical conditions that have produced class boundaries. In acknowledging this, one of the challenges in higher education research is to illuminate how working-class understanding of education systems is brought into universities, and how it relates to, and is contested by, the dominant middle-class culture of the university. We propose a Bourdieusian-inspired class analysis be adopted for Australian higher education that focuses more closely on the way in which symbolic power is distributed through the misrecognition of species of capital as symbolic capital. Using this approach we argue that universities, rather than ameliorating class difference, are a poorly understood site of its generation.

This article explores young people’s consumption of credit and the role of credit and debt in the distinction between youth and adulthood. The article engages with recent shifts in the nature of credit that have turned credit into an object of consumption in itself, as well as broader arguments about the financialisation of daily life, in order to understand the temporalities and moral distinctions enacted in different forms of credit and debt among youth. While it is well recognised that financialised capitalism operates and creates value from differences including gender, racialisation and class, the formation of youth subjectivities through credit and debt technologies remains unexplored in the literature despite an emerging crisis of consumer credit among young people. With this in mind, this article draws on a qualitative study of youth, credit and debt, to show that young people experience debt within contradictory temporalities and calculative logics, including the long-term ‘investments’ required to become an adult, and the logic of consumption attached to consumer credit which positions credit as a failure of self-responsible adulthood because it places future creditworthiness in jeopardy. In this way, the article suggests a future research agenda on the way that biographical distinctions are enacted through credit and debt, and how notions of youth and adulthood contribute to the qualification and consumption of credit. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article explores the ways that gender, sexuality, pleasure, and risk are entangled in affective labour and the production of value in ‘front of house’ bar work. Through their work as bar staff at ‘hip’ inner-city Melbourne venues, the young women we discuss produce affects in the form of a ‘vibe’ of relaxation, fun, pleasure, and release. We address McRobbie’s call for the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour to be explored and highlight the ways gender relations including the heterosexual matrix of desire are mobilised in the production of value in young women’s bar work. We discuss the tensions at play in this context where women are required to generate both a positive and a pleasurable feeling in their interactions with others while negotiating the complex politics of heterosexual desire while at work, including managing and negotiating harassment from male customers. This management requires complex sensate and embodied practices that are both conscious and unconscious (described, for example, as an ‘instinct’), involving constantly ‘scanning’ and ‘reading the crowd’ and monitoring their own embodied and affective responses to particular men while they carry on other conversations or pour drinks. We argue it is critical to study the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour in order to expose the ways relations of inequality can be mobilised in the production of value in this context.

This article contributes to discussions of place and social change in rural sociology with a focus on the local politics of rural land use. In particular, the article explores the way that one rural place is responding to changes in the local and regional economy connected with the arrival of extractive industries such as mining and coal seam gas (CSG). The article shows how attitudes towards extractive industries are formed through notions of place and community within broader narratives concerning rurality and global capitalism. The local politics of land use enrols complex and contradictory forms of place attachment into the articulation of competing narratives about rurality, and intervenes in the local social relationships of rural areas. The politics of extraction in rural Australia is therefore situated at the forefront of contemporary economic and cultural changes that are part of the reshaping of place amid the broader dynamics of contemporary global capitalism.

Young people investing themselves in DIY cultures have to negotiate the complex but now normalised nexus of employment, unemployment and underemployment to make ends meet, while maintaining space in their lives to pursue their creative and artistic passions. This article presents research with young people in an underground music scene across Australia who are balancing economic pressures with their desires to generate and uphold DIY and punk-influenced activities in a networked community of likeminded friends and collaborators. Many of the participants actively ‘choose poverty’, that is, they knowingly and strategically make decisions that ‘keep overheads low’ to free up temporal and mental space to continue to be creative. Their ideas of being successful are not expressed in material terms, but are contingent upon a future where they continue to have the opportunity to invest themselves in their interests even if that means living in relative poverty. Using the oft-ignored Bourdieusian concepts of illusio, struggle and strategy, this article provides a case study of some of the ways young people deal with the risks and opportunities of a precarious existence. In this case, living an ethical life trumps material concerns, projecting a hopeful attitude towards the future.

In this article, we draw on a study of the transition experiences of young Indonesian musicians to argue that the social capital of creative youth may be productively understood in relation to reflexivity and temporality. This is particularly important if they move to other locations to further their careers. In brief, we offer three key contributions to social capital debates. First, social capital—as defined by Bourdieu—is most important as a valuable form of capital to deal with both actual and anticipated Beckian risk. Second, in fields of creative struggle, the development of social capital is closely related to possession of strategy and reflexivity as a form of cultural capital. Third, social capital cannot be operationalized effectively by youth without the element of timing and the temporal capacity to reflexively recognize and seize opportunities as they arise at critical moments of a creative career.

This article contributes to recent debates about the relationship between affective labour and class by exploring the classed distinctions enacted through affective labour in the urban night-time economy. Bringing theories of affective labour into a dialogue with Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the article explores the affective and symbolic dynamics of hospitality labour in a gentrified inner-urban neighbourhood of Melbourne, Australia. It shows how the practice of hospitality labour enacts classed distinctions and tensions emerging from the gentrification of inner-urban areas, and how the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of class contribute to the valorisation of affect in hospitality venues. The valorisation of affect are processes in which the value attributed to an atmosphere or consumption experience is based on the forms of distinction practised within the venue, enacted in aesthetics, tastes and modes of embodiment. The article also shows how practices of class distinction – both ‘punching up’ and ‘managing down’ – are connected to the gendered politics of service work in the way that workers manage the threat of violence or sexual harassment in venues. In general, the article shows how the classed dynamics of gentrification are enacted in affective economies, and therefore how Bourdieusian analysis of class can be usefully deployed in theoretical debates about affective labour.

Ulrich Beck was one of the most influential sociologists of recent decades. Concepts he developed – including risk society, individualization, cosmopolitanization, subpolitics and the democratization of science – are among the most cited, used and contested in contemporary sociology. In the wake of Beck’s recent death, this review article revisits his key contributions and legacy. He proposed that a momentous shift to a new modernity has begun and challenged sociologists as to whether the concepts they use are up to the task of tracing this emerging dynamic. Provocatively, Beck asked whether concepts like the nation-state, family and class are functioning as ‘zombie categories’, continuing on in sociology but no longer relevant to social experience. We argue that Beck was not denying the significance of such social factors, but setting a challenge to the discipline to show how the key concepts of sociology can be reimagined in the face of social change.

Using research examples, this article expands the theoretical premise that the `new' reflexivity constitutes an element of cultural capital for contemporary youth. Employing the sociological ideas of cultural capital, habitus, reflexivity and risk, the authors propose that Beck's notion of `risk' provides a useful way of understanding what drives the development of this reflexivity in the habitus of groups of young people, especially negotiation of risk. However, the emergence of this new reflexivity in youth habitus does not diminish the importance of socioeconomic class as some proponents of reflexive modernization claim. Quite the contrary. The capacity for reflexive negotiation of future risks, both real and perceived, has become another form of what Bourdieu calls embodied cultural capital — which remains inequitably distributed along class lines.

Cyberbullying is a relatively recent phenomenon that can have significant consequences for young people’s wellbeing due to the specific technological affordances of social media. To date, research into cyberbullying has been largely quantitative; thus, it often elides the complexity of the issue. Moreover, most studies have been “top down,” excluding young people’s views. Our qualitative research findings suggest that young people engage in cyberbullying to accrue social benefits over peers and to manage social pressures and anxiety, while cultural conventions in gender performance see girls engage differently in cyberbullying. We conclude that cyberbullying, like offline bullying, is a socially constructed behavior that provides both pleasure and pain.