Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north‐east England who were caught up in ‘the low‐pay, no‐pay cycle’, this article describes how people living in poverty talk about poverty – in respect of themselves and others. Paradoxically, interviewees subscribed to a powerful set of ideas that denied poverty and morally condemned ‘the poor’. These findings are theorized in four ways: first, informants deployed close points of comparison that diminished a sense of relative poverty and deprivation; second, dissociation from ‘the poor’ reflects long‐running stigma and shame but is given extra force by current forms of ‘scroungerphobia’; third, discourses of the ‘undeserving poor’ articulate with a more general contemporary prejudice against the working class, which fuels the impetus to dissociate from ‘the poor’ (and to disidentify with the working class); and fourth, the hegemonic orthodoxy that blames ‘the poor’ for their poverty can more easily dominate in contexts where more solidaristic forms of working‐class life are in decline.

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We argue that this critique of subculture is premised on a partial interpretation of the theoretical objectives of CCCS and that, in fact, some of the theoretical and methodological propositions of the latter remain relevant. This argument is supported by a brief review of some other, very recent youth research that demonstrates the continuing role of social divisions in the making and shaping of young people"s leisure lives and youth cultural identities and practises. In conclusion, we suggest that the ambition of the CCCS to understand, not only the relationship between culture and social structure, but also the ways in which individual youth biographies evolve out of this relationship, remains a valuable one for the sociology of youth.3

The issues of young people and drug taking have a long history, although recently the topic has been debated more intensely than ever before. Of key importance here has been the dramatic rise in the availability, range and consumption of illicit drugs, a factor that, in part, has been linked to the popularity of dance/club cultures. These changes have been interpreted by some, both within and without academia, as being indicative of a process of the 'normalization' of illicit drug use. This paper reports on qualitative research data that explored young people's youth cultural identi cation and experiences while also enquiring into how such experiences may be related to the use of illicit drugs. This paper critically examines normalization theory and draws attention to weaknesses on both an empirical and a theoretical level. It is suggested in this paper that, as it stands, normalization theory presents an overly simplistic account of young people's drug use. This paper argues instead for a more differentiated understanding of normalization.

The idea of 'intergenerational cultures of worklessness' has become influential in UK politics and policy, and been used to explain contemporary worklessness and to justify welfare reforms. Workless parents are said to pass on to their children attitudes and behaviours which inculcate 'welfare dependency'. In its strongest version, politicians and welfare practitioners talk confidently of 'three generations of families where no-one has ever worked'; even though no study, bar this one, has investigated whether such families actually exist. Solid evidence for intergenerational cultures of worklessness is elusive so this study tested the idea via interviews with twenty families in Glasgow and Middlesbrough that