This thesis describes the results of an ethnographic investigation of a group of new middle class respondents studying GCE subjects at a college of further education. It seeks to describe and account for the origins and effects of their subcultural style. It further attempts to examine some of the social consequences of acts of affirmation and challenge on their part, and to add to a body of theory examining the relationships which exist between cultural production, cultural reproduction and social reproduction. The thesis is arranged in eight chapters. '!he first of these critically examines existing theories relating to the origins and effects of youth subcultures. Chapter two considers a number of features likely to c~aracterise a more adequate (than hitherto) analysis of both the phenomenal form and structural determinants of youth subcultural practice. In chapter three, I describe the manner in which the sample of respondents in the present research was constituted, aNi the way in which the~ ethnographic fieldwork was organised. The fourth chapter moves :3 to a consideration of the class and gender problematics likely to confront subjects from the new middle class locations occupied by respondents in the present study. Chapters five to seven pr'3sent the findings of the ethnographic investigations carried out at three principal sites of respondents' experiences the home, the site of educational experience and the subcultural site. These chapters further seek to analyse articulations between practices across sites of experience in the constitution of cultural effects. Such themes are further developed in the final chapter of the thesis where the effects of such articulations for the processes of cultural reproduction and transformation are examined. In doing this, the findings of the present research are related to theories concerning the cultural and social reproduction of class and gender relations, and a grammar of modes of cultural affirmation and challenge is developed which analyses the origins and effects of articulations between social practices across sites of experience in terms of their overall contribution to hegemonic and counter-hegemonic tendencies.