Youth Culture

Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.
The Glocalization of Youth Culture: The Global Youth Segment as Structures of Common
Difference
Author(s): DannieKjeldgaard and SrenAskegaard
Source: Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 33, No. 2 (September 2006), pp. 231-247
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Glocalization of Youth Culture: The Global

Youth Segment as Structures of Common
Difference
DANNIE KJELDGAARD
SREN ASKEGAARD*
In this article we present an analysis of global youth cultural consumption based
on a multisited empirical study of young consumers in Denmark and Greenland.
We treat youth culture as a market ideology by tracing the emergence of youth
culture in relation to marketing and how the ideology has glocalized. This transnational market ideology is manifested in the glocalization of three structures of
common difference that organize our data: identity, center-periphery, and reference
to youth cultural consumption styles. Our study goes beyond accounts of global
homogenization and local appropriation by showing the glocal structural commonalities in diverse manifestations of youth culture.
Global teens from New York, Tokyo, Hong

Kong, to those from Paris, London, and Seoul
are sharing memorable experiences [through
television, international education, and frequent
travel] which are reflected in their consumption
behaviour. . . . The teenage culture on a
global scale shares a youthful lifestyle that values growth and learning with appreciation for
future trends, fashion and music. (Hassan and
Katsanis 1991, 21)
excitement stems from the allegedly uniform consumption

habits of young people all over the worldtheir clothing
styles, music tastes, and media habits. As noted by Lukose
(2005, 915) a short-hand way to mark the advent and
impact of globalization is to point to the evidence of global
youth consuming practices. For marketers and consumers
alike, such signs of a global youth culture are all too readily
treated as obvious evidence of a homogenized group of
consumers. In the Barthesian tradition, myth is exactly such
a naturalization of a social set of signs (Barthes 1957). The
myth of a global youth hence constitutes an ideological
explanatory framework for practices observed in social
reality. Contemporary popular culture discourses are
increasingly intertwined with marketing vernacular and vice
versa. Hence, these colloquial discourses reflect and
reinforce the myth of global youth culture, legitimizing a
monolithic conceptualization of youth in both daily language
use and the breathless pronouncements of marketers, as
exemplified in the opening quotations.
This article critically examines the mythology of the
global youth segment. Of late, critical commentators have
pointed out that members of the youth market do interpret
and rework global cultural practices and meanings to fit into
their local contexts (e.g., Bennett 1999; Klitgaard Povlsen
1996). Consumption practices are hence inscribed in local,
historically constituted cultural discourses (Holt 1997;
Thompson and Troester 2002) of youth cultural consumption,
modernity, and globalization. Holt (1997, 1998), in particular,
emphasizes how consumers are reliant on their predominantly
class-based, sociocultural resources for negotiating global
meanings and practices in their daily lives.
Last year I was in 17 countries, and its pretty

difficult to find anything that is different, other
than language, among a teenager in Japan, a
teenager in the U.K. and a teenager in China.
(Quotation in Marketing News 2002, 49)
n the marketing and popular business literature, youth

has been held up as the prototypical example of a global
segment (see, e.g., Hassan and Katsanis 1991; Marketing
News 2002; Moses 2000; Tully 1994). The basis for this
*Dannie Kjeldgaard is an associate professor at the Department of Marketing, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M,
Denmark ([email protected]). Sren Askegaard is professor of marketing
at the Department of Marketing, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark ([email protected]). The authors
would like to thank the three reviewers and especially the associate editor
for a fruitful review process and critical yet constructive comments.
Dawn Iacobucci served as editor and Craig Thompson served as associate
editor for this article.
Electronically published July 28, 2006
231
2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc. Vol. 33 September 2006
All rights reserved. 0093-5301/2006/3302-0009$10.00

JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
232
Our goals are to advance this line of inquiry by

demonstrating how these local appropriations are shaped by
discernible structural commonalities and to extend prior
theories concerning the processes through which consumers
appropriate the symbolic resources provided by global
consumer culture. We pursue these goals by means of an
empirical investigation of the variety of patterns and
practices of young consumers in four localities (an urban
and a rural locality in both Denmark and Greenland).
We conceptualize global youth culture as a manifestation
of a transnational, market-based ideology that is manifested
through a dialectic between structures of common difference
(Wilk 1995) and the adaptation and objectification of these
structures in local contexts, or what Robertson (1992) terms
glocalization. This market ideology serves to cast
consumers in certain ways that give rise to certain similarities
in their consumption patterns. Our analysis illustrates how
these patterns and practices acquire distinctive meanings
within the context of young consumers discourses of identity
and consumption practices. The structural commonalities
serve diverse sociocultural functions, grounded in the centerperiphery dynamics of the global cultural economy (Hannerz
1992).
THE YOUTH SEGMENT AS A GLOBAL

MARKET PHENOMENON
Marketing Youth
The emergence of youth as a social category has been
closely linked to the development of modernization. The
taken-for-granted idea that youth is a distinctive identity
position having inherent qualities (e.g., rebelliousness, experimentation, etc.) is a fairly recent cultural invention. In
premodern society, childhood was seen as a transient state
of unfinished adulthood (Arie`s 1965). With the onset of
modernity, the rise of the bourgeois classes, and urbanization, childhood gained a separate cultural role as a life stage
of innocence and freedom that had to be isolated from the
responsibilities and various hardships of adulthood (Valentine, Skelton, and Chambers 1998). This period of precocious independence was gradually extended over time,
and the notion of youth as a social category emerged (Arie`s
1965). The model of the teenager that arose in the early
twentieth century gained cultural significance in the
postWorld War II economy of growth and affluence (Bennett 1999), where young, middle-class consumers were freed
from wage-earner responsibilities. As a result, the teenage
identity became inextricably linked to leisure and hedonic
consumption.
During this postWorld War II phase, young people came
to be seen as a lucrative market segment and the very embodiment of the emerging mass popular culture (Morin
1962). This cultural viewpoint led to the marketing industry
becoming increasingly preoccupied with youth, as exemplified by marketing books such as The Teenage Consumer
by Mark Abrams (1959). Abramss report has often been
referred to as the first evidence of the conspicuous con-
sumption habits of young consumers and, as such, marks

the beginning of seeing youth as a segment and hence as a
distinct marketing identity, the youth or teen segment. While
not the first, this study played a particularly significant role
in spreading the idea of the teenage consumer and, in this
way, established the link between youth and consumption
more widely in culture.
Youth culture as an ideological phenomenon hence emerges
from the development of Western modernity and the growing
sophistication of advertising and market-segmentation strategies and now looms quite large in the cultural landscapes
of the global cultural economy (Appadurai 1990). The dominant dimensions of this ideology are identity, style, and cultural innovation.
Youth is thought to constitute an in-process identity that
is enacted at the individual level (ODonnell and Wardlow
1999), as well as at a cultural level (Fornas 1995). At a
cultural level, being young has been associated with a
rebellious breaking of the style codes of mainstream
postWorld War II society, and, conversely, youth culture
was often equally portrayed as a problem or was victimized
in social policy studies (Hebdige 1979). Youth culture has
therefore always been articulated with conflicting but mutually implicative interests: on the one hand, marketers
praised the continuously innovating youth culture as an engine for market expansion and profits; on the other hand,
public policy makers and moral watchdogs condemned
youth cultural practices as threats to the social order or
problematized youth as a vulnerable population desperately
in need of adult stewardship. This cultural intersection between youth as a desirable market and youth as a deviant,
antisocial state forms a critical narrative that sets the stage
for the transnational ideology of the global youth culture.
The postWorld War II period marks the beginning of the
tacit partnership between rebellious antiestablishment youth
culture on the one hand and commercial consumer culture
on the other (Chambers 1986). Marketers were quick to latch
onto the coolness of rebellious youth culture and offer it
in a commodified form, not only to those in the youth demographic but to any consumers who wanted to feel young
(Frank 1997). Therefore, youth becomes an autonomous cultural ideal no longer tied to a particular biological or psychological life stage. By lionizing youth as an aspirational
ideal (Featherstone 1991), the age boundaries of youthfulness expand both upward and downward. The emergence
of the tween segment illustrates the latter, while the former
is illustrated by the youthful consumption styles brandished
by consumers from the baby boom generation and beyond.
The market systems universalizing construction of youth
cultural consumption styles has become radicalized under
the social conditions of late modernity. Contemporary social
theories of identity in late modernity suggest that the project
of identity has become a reflexive process in which the self
is negotiated in terms of choice among a plurality of lifestyle
options (Giddens 1991). These options are made available
by the materialization of the global market in local contexts
(Arnould and Price 2000; Firat 1997). This is thought to be

THE GLOCALIZATION OF YOUTH CULTURE
particularly prevalent among young consumers, where a shift

is seen from an identity based on group affiliationsuch as
subculturestoward an identity as a project of individuality
(Giddens 1991) and postmodern neotribalism (Maffesoli
1996). However, late modernity is a social condition in which
individuals are encouraged to be mobile and flexible; hence,
settling with an identity that is too fixed becomes dangerous
(Bauman 2004). Youth as it is ideologically construed becomes an almost universal identity aspiration.
Style has become the most prominent cultural medium
for expressing the identity aspirations of youth culture. The
emergence of style-based subcultures during the latter part
of the twentieth century, such as hippies, mods, punks, and
so on, can be seen as a result of the expansion of the teenage
market, which began to fragment into a number of style
groups that stood in a differential relation not only to mainstream and parent culture but also to each other (Clarke
1976; Hebdige 1979). Ironically, although such groups were
seen as manifestations of class struggles (at least by the
classic British sociology of youth), both these and other
youth groups were highly dependent on commercially produced and distributed style objects for manifesting their
identities through the process of bricolage (Hebdige 1979).
Youth consumption is generally thought to be played out in
a set of highly stylized arenas of clothing, grooming, music,
communication technology (notably the mobile phone), and
going out (including the consumption of nondurables of
food, drinks, and drugs). These arenas (and they are exemplary but not exhaustive) operate to both homogenize
youth cultural style expression at a structural level and also
enable differentiation at a more microcultural level. Such
differentiations have multiplied in the last decades, leaving
us with a plethora of stylized consumption patterns available
for the young, often combining, for example, musical and
clothing tastes into a syntagma: a type. Young peoples consumption is generally thought to be hedonistically oriented
and highly attached to the individual identity negotiation
characteristic of the life stage of youth.
The combination of emergent identity articulation and its
expression through style constitutes the last dominant dimension of the ideology of youth, namely, youth as cultural
innovation. Youth is, for good reasons, thought of as the
adult culture of the future; hence, it is often seen as having
seismographic capabilities in terms of cultural development (Fornas 1995). Therefore, youth becomes integral to
the cyclical nature of mass culture, which relies on continuous inspiration for innovation of new cultural products
(Fornas 1995; Frank 1997), signaling the transformation
from a producer to a consumer culture. The markets appropriation of style from sub- and street cultures and the
provision of style to wider mainstream markets accelerate
with new techniques of knowledge. The market research
industrys speedy and efficient monitoring of youth cultural
style developmentthe emerging coolhunt industry (Gladwell 2000)and the decreased turnaround time from market
intelligence to products in media and in-store worldwide
mean that stability in subcultural expression becomes prob-
233
lematic. Whether one formulates an individual style through

or in opposition to the market offerings, the market becomes
the central locus for self-realization (Miles 2000). Through
the market systems perpetual readings of youth cultural
styles and consumption practices, and the continuous introduction of retro style, the youth culture is continuously being
given back its own style practices through the media and
marketing complex.
To summarize, youth culture and marketing have been
historically intertwined, representing a transnational market
ideology of youth. The dominant dimensions of this ideology can be said to be identity construction, the ideology
holds that young consumers have an unsettled identity by
being placed in between the presumably stable categories
of childhood and adulthood; stylized consumption, through
which this identity search is handled; and, finally, the combination of identity construction and stylized consumption
arenas, which constitutes youth as a stage for innovation
and cultural renewal. In a late-modern consumer society,
youth culture is equally as much about learning to consume
as it is about learning to labor (Willis 1977).
The Glocalization of Youth Culture

As was argued above, youth culture is an institutionalized
facet of the market, emerging predominantly from Western
cultural currents and diffusing globally. Early youth cultural
styles diffused primarily in the West but also to other parts
of the modernizing world (as part of the development of
mass society). In Greenland, for example, the dansemik
(dance get-togethers) in the 1950s were influenced by early
rock and roll and the jitterbug introduced by U.S. army
personnel stationed in Greenland.
Youth culture, like other spheres of social life, is increasingly shaped by and constitutes global cultural flows. Appadurai (1990) analyzes the global cultural economy by using the landscape metaphor to illustrate such flows within
five scapes: ethnoscapes (the flow of people), technoscapes (the flow of technology), finanscapes (the flow
of finance and capital), mediascapes (the flow of mediated
images), and ideoscapes (the flow of ideas and ideologies).
These flows increase the availability of symbols and meanings in consumers everyday lives in such a way that much
of what is available in one place is also available in any
other place (Waters 1995). They can also lead to an increasing globalization of fragmentation (Firat 1997) in
which the consumer has at hand a multitude of resources
for dealing with everyday life. The globalization processes
constituted by these flows shape sociocultural reality in dialectical processes between the consumer and consumer culture (Holt 2002) and more generally between the local and
the global (Friedman 1990; Giddens 1991).
Through these processes, the styles characteristic of youth
culture spread globally, instigating the development of local
versions of youth culture through appropriation and creolization (Hannerz 1992; Klitgaard Povlsen 1996). Bennett
(1999), for example, shows how hip-hop in Newcastle, England, and Frankfurt am Main, Germany, is used to handle

234
very different local sociocultural issues. Jenkins (2004)

demonstrates how the process of appropriation and recontextualization of mediated imagery across cultures often
leads to metamorphoses of meanings that make these meanings both unpredictable and contradictory in relation to their
origin of broadcasting.
However, youth culture diffuses not only in terms of style
expressions but also as a particular space for social identity
and hence as an institutionalized feature of the standard
biography expected by the society of its members. As such,
youth culture is translated, appropriated, and creolized to fit
into local social structures and issues. For example, Liechty
(1995) analyzes youth as a category of modernity in the
context of Kathmandu, Nepal, where youth and teenageness
are relatively recent phenomena. The study illustrates how
the emergence of local youth cultural media (e.g., the Nepalese youth magazine Teen) becomes a blueprint for living
in consumer modernity (177). This serves to illustrate that
youth culture is therefore not just globalizing in terms of
contentthat is, the objects and images consumed by young
consumers globallybut also in terms of form, as the institution of youth spreads and becomes integrated, appropriated, and creolized in a variety of local modernizations,
statehoods, and postcolonial discourses. Youth has become
an institutionalized and mediated identity space, readily available transnationally for the construction of youth culture.
Wattanasuwan and Elliott (1999), however, demonstrate
that such local appropriations are constrained by its global
epitome. In their study, a locally based youth culture of
teenage Buddhists finds it difficult to maintain a conception
of identity and consumption that does not include an idea
of being an individual consumer. They are hence interpellated to a Western (late-modern) model of identity. Youth
culture, like other manifestations of Western modernity, is
inherently modern and global and Western at its core. The
simultaneous processes of diffusion and appropriation of
both youth cultural styles and modes of identity can be
summed up in Robertsons (1992) concept of glocalization.
Glocalization implies that the global always become localized, and the local, globalized (Thompson and Arsel 2004).
There may be localized versions of global institutions of
youth, such as local versions of rock music, but they remain
global structures of common differences (Wilk 1995, 117).
Wilks construct highlights that the dialectic of glocalization
harbors an important power dimension. His analysis points
to the fact that homogenization based on Western models
primarily occurs at a structural level because consumers and
cultures alike increasingly organize their social and cultural
lives along similar institutional arrangements created by
globalizing power blocs, such as transnational corporations.
We argue, then, that the ideology of youth culture represents
such an institutional structure.
The Global Youth Segment as a Transnational

Market Ideology
These reflections on structures of common differences
indicate the ever-present danger that cultural analyses that
detail the many ways in which consumers creatively appropriate global brands, symbols, and styles will be too ideographic and too emic, thereby overlooking dominant structurations. As a result, such accounts have little explanatory
power, other than to illustrate a plethora of differences and
the wondrous multiplicity of cultures.
The global youth segment as a transnational market ideology is available as a global structure of common difference
based on the historical link among youth, the emergence of
mass culture, and the development of global marketing. This
ideology is reflected in the market-segmentation literatures
focus on similarities of consumption patterns. Based on the
presence of global brands and consumption practices, the
global youth segment is discursively constructed in the marketing literature as sharing a similar set of desires. This
construction does not deny that there are differences, but
differences are of such a kind that nothing general can be
said about them. In a similar vein, Miller (1995) argues that
researchers overestimate the presence of global branding,
since Western brands are conspicuous because of their foreignness or exoticness in many localities but account for
only a small proportion of the total population of branded
goods in a given locality.
A segment is not generated externally to marketers (from
the ground up, so to speak); it emerges through marketers
sense making and enactment of the market (Askegaard and
Christensen 1994). From a macro perspective, marketing
can be said to be an institution of modernity, which has
transparency (of the market) and progress (fulfilling needs
better) as core values (Applbaum 2004). The enactment of
the global youth segment by consumers is reflexively related
to the mythology of the segment as presented in the academic and popular business literature (e.g., Hassan and Katsanis 1991; Marketing News 2002; Moses 2000). The elements of the ideology (identity, stylization, and cultural
innovation) are made available in local markets, in mediated
or manifest form, through the system of the global cultural
economy ready to be incorporated in a variety of identity
discourses (Thompson and Arsel 2004; Wilk 1995).
Extending Appadurais (1990) conceptualization of flows
and scapes, Maira (2004) introduces the notion of youthscape, understood as a site for local youth practices that
is embedded with local and global forces. In her study of
South Asian Muslim youth, this youthscape is characterized
by two types of identities: flexible and dissenting citizenship.
Flexible citizenship refers to the way local youth negotiate
the global youth consumer cultural forms with their own
traditional backgrounds as well as their expatriate experience
in the U.S. context; dissenting citizenship articulates a
position of criticism against U.S. social relations on a national and international level in the aftermath of September
11, 2001. This site for practices is a space for articulating
and performing glocalized versions of youth culture, always
contextualized locally and always shaped by the global
ideoscape of youth and youth consumption practices.
The institution of youth and the historically global nature
of youth culture, as mediated through the market, can there-

fore be said to be what facilitates the apparent similarities

in consumption preference. Youth, rather than a segment,
becomes a deterritorialized context that is available to
allavailable for different purposes, however. Market representations of youth (in terms of images and products, as
well as scripts for identity available in markets) provide
resources for articulating local identity discourses and hence
local versions of youth culture. Therefore, the institution of
youth and social agents subscription to this institution facilitate an identity space where certain products and symbols
can become representative. Youth as an aspect of modernity
thus becomes the site through which global products can
enter into local contexts and facilitate local articulation of
youth culture. Likewise, but possibly less common, local
products can become globalized through their inclusion in
an ideological youthscape of cool consumption practices.
For example, such seems to be currently the case with eating
sushi or practicing yoga.
In summary, the concept of youth and youth culture is
always constructed in relation to local sociocultural conditions. Youth in the Western highly industrialized world is
shaped by the social conditions of late modernity. In other
cultural contexts, youth means something very different,
depending on the sociocultural historical development and
its relation to modernity. Nevertheless, these local youth
cultural projects are structured by the global ideology of youth
encompassing identity, stylized consumption, and cultural innovation. The global youth segment therefore emerges as a
transnational market ideology through the dialectical process
of glocalization. The empirical part of the study analyzes
the different discursive manifestations of the ideology of
youth. These manifestations are organized by key structures
of common differences but as they are articulated in different
cultural contexts.
METHOD
The study was carried out as a multisited study (Marcus
1995) in which common themes (youth, identity, consumption, and globalization) were studied in diverse localities.
The research sought to identify discourses of consumption
and identity in order to analyze the impact of structures of
the local and the global. As such, the study did not look at
lived experience, as in phenomenological approaches (Thompson, Locander, and Pollio 1989), but used lifeworld accounts
of informants for analyzing structural categories of discourse
(Thompson 1998). The research was conducted in four localities: an urban and rural locality in both Denmark and
Greenland. Denmark was chosen as representing a developed consumer society, relatively centrally situated in the
global cultural economy. Greenland, however, represents a
geographically and socioeconomically much more peripheral position in relation to the global cultural economy and
with strong links to Danish society. The particular relationship between Danish and Greenlandic cultures provides an
interesting case of the globalization process. First of all, the
old colonial relationship can be seen as an instance of globalization. Second, the dissolving of this relationship implies
235
renewed reflection on Greenlandic identity in relation to

both Danish and global culture (for more detail, see Askegaard, Arnould, and Kjeldgaard [2005]). In principle, any
set of localities could be used as sampling sites for studying
the cultural phenomenon of the glocalization of youth culture, each of course with its own historical and sociocultural
contexts that shape the particular outcomes of the globallocal dialectic.
Within the two localities, a central (urban) and a peripheral (rural) locality were chosen, each site represented by
one high school class (approximately 20 students aged
1720 per site). In Denmark, the capital of Copenhagen
(population 1.5 million) was chosen to reflect an urban environment with many consumption and leisure opportunities, and a country high school (Svendborgpopulation
42,000) to represent the periphery of the Danish cultural
economy. In the latter case, students come in from the countryside (e.g., from the islands of r and Langeland) and
small surrounding towns and villages to attend high school.
In Greenland, Nuuk (capital of the countrypopulation
14,000) was chosen in order to reflect the locality in Greenland with the most consumption opportunities and under the
most influence by Danish and global culture. For a rural
locality, the town of Aasiaat (population 3,500) was chosen,
since it is a smaller place with many students from towns
and villages in northern Greenland moving there to study.
This way of sampling was followed in order to throw light
upon center-periphery perspectives with regard to global
consumer culture (Hannerz 1992).
Data collection was carried out in three stages in all localities:
1. Consumption diaries.All students were asked to keep
a diary on the use of money and time over a period of
2 weeks. Furthermore, they were asked to note what they
dreamed about having and becoming, their favorite clothing and clothing style, their favorite music and music
style, and their favorite food and drink. The diaries were
used to improve preunderstanding of the informants lifeworlds and consumption patterns and what was important
to them in their everyday lives. The diary information
was used in subsequent interviews. Finally, the diaries
were used to identify informants for the next stages of
the process. This was done in a way that sought to obtain
as much variety as possible in the informant group (see
table 1 for informant overview).
2. Photographic life description.Six informants from
each high school class were given a disposable camera.
The instructions were to take pictures of a week in their
lives, including taking pictures that tell who you are
or reflect things of importance in your everyday life.
3. In-depth interviews.The same six informants were subjected to an in-depth interview. The interviews were structured in two parts. The first part was based on auto driving
(Heisley and Levy 1991) on the basis of informant photographs. The other part was based on questions about
favorite and most important objects and other issues from
the diaries, as well as questions about being and becoming

236
TABLE 1
INFORMANT PROFILES
Name
Copenhagen:
E`variste
Fatima
John
Line
Stine
Tim
Svendborg:
Christoffer
Cille
Kris
Lars
Mie
Rosina
Nuuk:
Karl
Lene
Paavia
Aqqaluk
Britt
Aviaq
Aasiaat:
Ernetaaq
Ursula
Najannguak
Else
Niviaq
Lea
Sex
Age
Dwelling
M
F
M
F
F
M
18
17
17
18
17
17
At
At
At
At
At
At
M
F
M
M
F
F
18
18
18
18
18
19
At home
At home
At home
Dorm
At home
At home
Svendborg (main town, southern Funen)

Lindelse (village, southern Langeland)
Lindelse (village, southern Langeland)
Svendborg (main town, southern Funen)
Rudkbing (main town on Langeland)
Rudkbing (main town on Langeland)
M
F
19
19
Own flat
At home
Nuuk
Nuuk
M
M
F
F
19
18
18
19
Dorm
At home
At home
At home
Nuuk
Nuuk
Nuuk
Nuuk
M
F
F
F
F
F
21
18
19
19
19
19
Dorm
Dorm
At home
Dorm
Dorm
At home
Aasiaat
Aasiaat
Aasiaat
Aasiaat
Aasiaat
Aasiaat
home
home
home
home
home
home
Home
Comment
Nrrebro (city neighborhood)

Vesterbro (city neighborhood)
sterbro (city neighborhood)
Brnshj (city suburb)
Amager (city neighborhood)
Sydhavnen (city neighborhood)
Moved to Denmark from Cote dIvoire at age 10

Moved to Denmark from Pakistan at age 8
Lived in Odense (main city on Funen) until age 16

From the island of r
Moved to Denmark from Bosnia at age 12
Father is Danish; mother is 1/4 Greenlandic; born in
Greenland
Danish father; has lived in Denmark and Manitsoq
Danish parents; born in Greenland
Danish father; mother half Greenlandic
From Illulisat
From Sisimiut; Danish father
From Sisimiut; Danish father
From Quasigianguit
NOTE.All informant names have been anonymized but given aliases that reflect their cultural specificities and origins.
young. Interviews lasted between 50 and 120 minutes. All

interviews were transcribed.
In order to get beyond the discussion of whether young
consumers are alike or not across different consumption
contexts, the study was designed to facilitate the emergence
of similarities and differences during the process of data
collection and analysis, rather than being part of an a priori
focus. As data were collected from the different sites, comparisons were made as part of the hermeneutical process of
understanding (Alvesson and Skoldberg 2000; McCracken
1988). The study sought to explore consumption patterns
and identity narratives of individual informants and to analyze each of these intratextually, followed by intertextual
analysis (Thompson et al. 1989). The study sought to take
a lifeworld perspective while at the same time acknowledging subjects immersion and situatedness in discourse,
structures, and relations.
Methodological Limitations
High school students in their second year of study were
chosen as the focal sampling group. This group of informants would be out of the initial abrupt transition from
elementary school to high school and were not yet about to
enter the next transition from high school to the labor market
or higher education. Both these transitional phases would

have brought temporary but quite strong identity negotiations to the fore, thus overshadowing the more day-to-day
practices of consumption and identity. Certain problems pertain to the chosen sample, however. In Denmark, while a
large proportion of youth attend high school, the general
form of high school is preparatory to higher education and
thus has a slightly different composition of students in terms
of social and lifestyle background compared to those in
business and technical high schools. In Greenland, there is
a relatively higher social status attached to being enrolled
as a high school student than there is in Denmark, due to
a small proportion of youths obtaining high school degrees.
Another issue is linguistic. All interviews were carried out
in Danish, which posed certain problems. In Greenland,
many of the informants did not have Danish as their mother
tongue (although Danish is taught throughout elementary
school and is the primary language in high school). In Denmark a number of informants were of immigrant background. This meant that some interviews did not generate
long narratives, due to a lack of language fluency. However,
the use of multiple data collection tools somewhat made up
for this. A further language problem exists in the translation
of interviews from Danish into English. Obviously this has
meant a certain rewriting into English phrases that would

cover similar notions. (This is particularly a problem with

colloquial languageone example would be the Danish expression sejt, which has been translated as cool. This translation should bring about the intended meaning but literally
sejt means tough, viscous, or leathery.)
FINDINGS
In the following, we present our findings from the two
overall sites of data collectionDenmark and Greenland.
Data are represented according to three common structures
through which the diversity of accounts of locally embedded
youth culture was organized:
Identity construction.Identity was a core structuring
category of informant narratives in all localities. Although
all three structures derived from the data are part of the
total cultural identities of our informants, identity as a
specific structure is used to denote pieces of narratives
that explicitly deal with how informants perceive themselves and indeed feel the necessity to be able to articulate
this. We understand this as a structure of common difference that springs out of a long historical diffusion and
development of modernity (Giddens 1991). Identity is
therefore a common structure, but the way in which identity is articulated, and at which level, varies according to
local sociohistorical processes of modernization.
Center-periphery.This structure was part of the a
priori setup of the study, but the role of locality in structuring informants narratives emerged relatively explicitly. We interpret this structure as being a core part of the
development of modernity. Consciousness of a localitys
position in relation to a global system of centers and
peripheries (Hannerz 1992) is part of the formation of a
consciousness of the world as a whole (Robertson 1992).
Youth as a site of consumption.The third structure
of common difference is one that is probably most closely
aligned with those typically emphasized in Wilk (1995)
and others (e.g., Thompson and Arsel 2004). This is a
structure where youth culture and youth cultural style
itself is a reference through which one can express differencesfor example, by constructing a Greenlandic
youth culture.
The findings, therefore, are analyzed as stemming from
wider structures of modernity but operating on different
levels of cultural identity and according to local sociohistorical developments.
Denmark
Danish informants discourses of identity and consumption were generally found to be organized around the construction and articulation of a narrative of the self, including
reference to a perception of authenticity of the self. These
narratives of the self were complemented by a spatial discourse of center and periphery, which constitutes a figureground relationship between the global and the local that is
experienced in opposite ways in the two sites. What is shared,
237
however, is a third discourse on consumption styles as the

general mode of expression of a youth cultural identity.
Identity Construction: Authenticating Acts and Personal Biographies. Predominant in all informants narratives was a core theme of perceived individual uniqueness
and authenticity, reflected in informants practices of distancing themselves from what they considered mainstream,
using consumption objects for authenticating acts (Arnould and Price 2000). Authenticating acts are carried out
to create or maintain a conception or story of the self. This
process is ongoing, and the day-to-day activities and actions
of the individual are incorporated in the narrativeor life
storyof the individual (Giddens 1991). One example of
how market-mediated objects enter into discourses of individual authenticity came out in the interview with Stine
(female, aged 17, from central Copenhagen). She had a
friend take a picture of her showing off her new piercing
(fig. 1).
Stine: And then a new, very important thing to me [points
to the picture of her belly button piercing] is my new belly
button piercing. . . . I mean, I have ten holes in my ears and
then this one. And thats the only places I dare to get them
done. Or else it hurts too much. And I really look forward
to the summer so I get to show it. [And it tells other people]
that I dare, that I have courage. This kind of thing tells
something about people. Because it hurts to get it done.
Stines account is a reflection of a general perception of

authenticity among informants from Denmark, where personal characteristics, values, and virtues (courage in Stines
case) can be reflected directly in consumption. The striving
for uniqueness and expression of a perceived individual authenticity may be carried out in relatively few areas of consumption for some or in many areas of consumption for
others. The discourse of authenticity, although self- or innerdirected, is, to a large extent, a relational dimension of identity work where the individual seeks positions of identity to
occupy in relation to others and the representations of others
(particularly styles). This can be in relation to parents, to
peers, to styles of distaste, and to identity imagery drawn
from the past or the future. It is important to note, however,
that not all positions are possiblethey depend on a number
of personal and structural factors as to what is possible, for
example, past and present social roles, the nature and variety
of the consumptionscape of the informants locality, and the
identity positions taken by others.
Christoffer (male, aged 18, from central Svendborg) elaborates on the importance of a personal expression through
style:
Interviewer: So, would you still dress the same wayif many
others were dressed like that?
Christoffer: Yes, I think so. If thats the way I felt comfortable. . . . Maybe I would be fed up with looking like everybody else. No, I dont actually think I would be. I just
wear what I like, and thats that. So, in a way I dont really

238
FIGURE 1
SHOWING YOURSELF
NOTE.Color version available as an online enhancement.
care what the rest wear. . . . I dont go around thinking about

all the time whether its totally different. If theres something
I like, I buy it. Then its just too bad if someone else has
got the same thing.
Interviewer: But its better if they dont have the same thing?
Christoffer: Yes, I would say so. I like being a bit different.
I like being a bit different; I think its kind of cool that you
dont just look like the others.
The strong hesitation to admit that it was important to

stand out, to differentiate, and to be something special was
a recurring phenomenon in the discussion of identity and
style with the Danish informants. Informants are aware of
the paradox of anticonformisms inherent dependence on
conformity. Differentiation is legitimized through the rationale of expressing ones own preferences, which are
thought not to be related to ones image with others. For
Christoffer, the ideal is to stand out, but this may not be
possible if one merely adopts styles according to personal
preferences. On the one hand, it is considered inauthentic
if you just look alike (references to the pop style were
common among informants as a style of distaste). On the
other hand, as Christoffer notes, choice of style should be
a reflection of who you really are. As another informant
tells us, style is ideally individual since its more like showing yourself . . . and then obviously you get to stand out
because no one is the same (Stine, female, aged 17, from
Copenhagen). Furthermore, the devaluation of the pop-girl
style echoes the critique of much British subculturalist research (e.g., Hebdige 1979), that only those style expressions
that were considered spectacular and deviant were deemed
authentic expressions of identity, whereas mainstream youth

consumer culture styles were considered inauthentic, manipulated by the mass market fashion system (Slater 1997).
Identity, here, operates as a key structure of common
difference at an individual level. The call for the necessity
of being able to articulate who one is is a prime feature of
modernity (Giddens 1991) and one at the core of youth
culture (Ziehe 1992). This structure of common difference,
although not particular to youth culture but perhaps more
intensely present in the ideology of youth culture, is partly
constituting the transnational market ideology of youth and
is a driving force for the reference to global youth cultural
styles.
Center-Periphery: Youth Cultural Consumption Styles

in a Figure-Ground Relationship. On the more general
level, locality and the consumption styles of youth cultures
seem to be in a figure-ground relationship, since they are
both present, but the focus differs. In Copenhagen, styles
are numerous and lived out and manifest in the metropolitan
setting and therefore enter into the individuals lifeworld.
At the same time, these styles are clearly embedded in very
localized contexts. One informants (Tim, male, aged 17,
from central Copenhagen) participation in the local hip-hop
scene took place against the background of people he met
through his work involvement in a trendy cafe in central
Copenhagen (fig. 2).
Tim: And thats also why we want our own. Like an ad
agency. . . . And we both have a lot of contacts from Zoo
Bar, and Ive worked for a photographer. . . . Hes made a
lot for Dolce and Gabbana and Gucci and so onand through

239
FIGURE 2
LOCAL ROOTING OF GLOBAL IMAGERY
him and his wife theres a lot of contacts as well. . . . And

thats this . . . I mean if you have your own and you know
a lot of people in the business, its much easier to get contracts
or something. And then, with the visual thing, weve both
painted graffiti at some pointonly legally, however. . . .
We could be standing there for 11 hours by some legal wall
and just paint.
Here we find the global consumptionscapes of the advertising industry, international fashion, and global hip-hop
culture present and manifest in the locality in which Tim
lives. The global, thus, provides symbolic resources for negotiating meaning about and for his present and future life
in the locally lived everyday life (Ger and Belk 1996). On
the periphery, however, (global) styles are in the background
due to their lack of manifestation (in relative terms compared
to the center), and a discourse of locality emerges in the
foreground instead (expressed in elaborate considerations of
a future place of study, e.g.). The articulations of locality
are, to a large extent, defined by the consumptionscape available. Among periphery informants, this leads to a stronger
reflexivity over locality, which comes to form a significant
element of the informants identity narratives. To Mie (female, aged 18, from the town of Rudkbing), who lives on
Langeland (an island near Svendborg) and whose identity
was peripheral in both a geographical and social sense, the
participation in mediated Internet culture, together with her
abilities for drawing, all come together in her career ambition:
Mie: My dream job must beI would like to go to the USA
and work at something called Industrial Light and Magic.
Its a company that makes computer animations and effects

and so on. They are very famous. Theyve made everything
fromthey didnt make Titanicbut almost all other FX
movies, as they are called. They have made the new Star
Wars movie too, and so on. It is said to be the best company
in the world, so if you could get in there then . . . so I
probably wont. But still, its something of a dream job. To
get in and thenbecause I could combine my interest in
computers and my interest in drawing.
Since Mies aspired lifestyle is not present locally, she

draws together various elements from global culture production, which gives her the possibility of positive identification. But this is explicitly a dreamworld rather than a
local livable reality. Thus, in her biographical sketch of
future opportunities in a global center, she becomes as, if
not more, globally oriented than most informants from the
local center of Copenhagen. The relation between center
and periphery and global and local is therefore contextual:
exactly because of the local constraints in the periphery, this
periphery may become more globally oriented in certain
waysin a global world, why should peripheral aspirations
stop at local centers?
Summarizing our figure-ground discussion, the ironic
finding is that the global youth in the center is much more
local than it thinks, and, inversely, the peripheral youth captured in its locality is much more global than it thinks. When
global youth cultural styles are readily available, a glocalized
version of youth culture emerges. However, when these
styles are lacking, the process of glocalization is not as
intense, and therefore the style representations remain more

240
FIGURE 3
MOBILITY IN THE LOCAL VILLAGE
pure in their globality. This means that the ideology of youth

culture is a common reference pointan imagined centerbut it is referred to differently depending on its accessibility.
guess theres skater look. A bit like hip-hop, its just, I would
say more earth colors. Dark green and brown and so on. And
the characteristic skater shoes.
Youth Culture as a Site of Consumption: Central Style

Immersion versus Peripheral Positions. In terms of
These relatively elaborate descriptions and explanations

of the semiotics of the consumption style landscape are used
in a mirroring process of identity work. Often it is a matter
of explaining styles to which one does not belong and thus
giving meaning to ones own position in the landscape (cf.
Wilk 1997). It is furthermore interesting to note the establishment of style homologies (Clarke 1976) of particular
clothing and music that indicate references to specific rules
for given styles.
Among periphery informants, discourses of identity centered not so much on youth cultural consumption styles and
their interrelations as on the constitution of the local consumptionscape. Not that there is no search for and expression
of authenticity through styles, but the authenticity is articulated in slightly different terms and, more important, in a
different relation to consumption. Where the center informants reflexively tried to handle the making of choices from
styles available in their local consumptionscape, periphery
informants reflexively tried to handle the lack of choice in
their locality. The role of place and locality comes out quite
clearly in connection with the picture of the bus stop in
figure 3 taken by Cille, who has to go to her high school
by bus every day, like two other informants (who also both
took pictures of either the bus or the bus stop).
Living in the periphery means a lack of immediate and
spontaneous participation in many aspects of consumer cul-
central versus peripheral consumptionscapes, there was little

difference in the references to the universe of styles but
much difference in terms of the ease with which you can
partake in the style universe that defines youth culture as a
site of consumption. Tim, who expressed his uniqueness
through affiliation with a subculture of consumption (Kozinets 2001; Schouten and McAlexander 1995), the Copenhagen hip-hop scene, spent most of his spare money on
clothing, music, and electronic equipment that enabled his
participation in this subculture. He was quite aware, however, of the other style positions that surrounded him:
Tim: In my surroundings I would say there aretheres the
typical pop girl, . . . tight trousers a bit wide at the legs and
tight shirts so that the breasts almost jump in your face. That
kind of look. That Britney Spears look. And then I guess
there are the techno types, you know, wide trousers with
traffic-safe colors and so on. Who likes to party at In [a
Copenhagen nightclub well known for its techno and drug
scene]. And then theres the typical pop boy, a bit trendy
. . . how can I explain it . . . maybe a tight T-shirt andnice
clothes but, well, maybe a knitted sweater with a zip and
then the collar is hanging loose in some funny kind of way
and . . . the typical pop-trendy type. And . . . yeah then I

241
FIGURE 4
INFORMANT PICTURE OF THE ICE BREAKING UP AROUND AASIAAT
ture. Kris, a male informant (aged 18), also from a small

village on the island of Langeland says the following.
Kris: Something like the bus, you know. I know it seems
banal, but there is no bus to this place at three oclock in the
morning, but it goes to Rudkbing, but it doesnt continue
to here. And theres not a shop that you can go towell,
theres Kajs Grocery, but it closes at six and is closed on
Tuesdays. So if you sit here one evening, you cant just go
around the corner to buy something. And its not as if we
just order a pizza down here. . . . Its a bit boring here.
Youre very dependent on the buses.
For this informant, the infrastructural conditions generate a

real and imagined center-periphery structure that becomes
part of the articulation of identity.
Consumption opportunities, with reference to a general
style sheet of youth culture(s), become a defining characteristic of what it means to live in a given locality, and
consumption in general could be said to become a key site
for articulation of identity. In other words, there is greater
similarity in the stylistic universe youth makes reference to
than in their actual abilities to participate in it.
Greenland
Identity negotiation among Greenlandic informants
was found to be less focused on individual life projects.
Obviously, Greenlandic informants were engaged in constructing narratives of the self, but the late-modernization,
authenticity-seeking discourse was not predominant in
informant narratives. Consumption was a fundamental

field for articulating authenticity in the form of an identity
struggle between Danishness and Greenlandness, as well
as articulating identity in relation to the world at large,
situated within center-periphery structures of consumption opportunities.
Identity Construction: Practicing Ethnicity. Authenticating acts in a Greenlandic context are articulated more
at a collective level than at an individual level. The identification of a discourse of ethnicity emerged from informants marking of certain consumption objects and practices
as particularly Greenlandic in diaries and interviews but also
in photographs as in figure 4. Ernetaaq (male, aged 21, from
Ilulisat, who lives in a dorm in Aasiaat) says the following.
Ernetaaq: Nature . . . I care a lot about nature. . . . My dad
and I have been hunting reindeer, caught seal and fish and
trout in the river. . . . You find yourself out there in nature.
. . . So, in the summer we collect eggstheyre very delicious. We boil them and dip them in sugar and eat them
with fishcod. . . . You think more clearly when youre in
nature . . . without stress and depressions and all that. . . .
Youre just together with nature . . . and the silence. So you
need that. Everybodyalthough they dont know that they
need itthinks more clearly in nature. But its a long time
since Ive been in nature.
When these marked terms were discussed in more detail, a

reflexive account of what constitutes Greenlandness emerged
(e.g., food, nature, traditional clothing, and Greenlandic mu-

242
sic). We interpret this as an example of a postcolonial nationalism well known to Greenland, resulting in veneration
for the one consumption opportunity found in plenitude:
nature.
The fascination with nature was a common theme for all
informants from Greenland, whether Danish, Greenlandic,
or of mixed origin. Nature was referred to as something that
provided ease and calmness and as something one misses
when away; for many, this was considered typically Greenlandic. Else (female, aged 19, from Aasiaat) spoke about
photography, which she had noted down in her diary as
something she liked to spend time on. She elaborates: I
love taking pictures of the sunset and the sunrise and flowers
and so on. Those kinds of things remind me of Greenland.
. . . Its . . . I mean the smell, just the smell of Greenland.
Its . . . I always feel secure about it. To Else, photography
is a way of expressing her love for Greenlandic nature and
thereby her Greenlandic cultural identity. The experience of
Greenland is expressed in terms of multisensory experiences
such as vision (photography and the view) and smell, as
well as in terms of psychological well-being (feeling secure
and having room to breathe). These accounts of nature were
prevalent among the informants and consistent with former
research on Greenlandic identity (cf. Askegaard et al. 2005).
Identity in the Greenlandic context is an important structure
of common difference, as in the Danish context. However,
in the specific cultural context, the level at which identity
is articulated varies, illustrating why identity construction
can be conceived of as a structure of common difference.
Center-Periphery: Ephemeral Modernity and Peripheral Consciousness. In opposition to the plenitude of nature, ephemerality and lack are also highly constitutive of
Greenlandic cultural identity when referring to global consumer products and symbols as well as the limited leisure
opportunities. Similarity of consumption patterns was predominant in the Greenlandic contextnot only among
young people but also generally in discourse. One of the
first things both contact persons and some of the informants
said was: You know, up here everybody looks alike. We
buy the same things (extract from field work diary). This
could be seen in other consumption areas too: many students
in the high school class in Aasiaat had piercings and tattoos.
However, it was only possible to get a tattoo, for example,
when a tattoo artist from Denmark or Iceland would travel
from town to town on the Greenlandic west coast, spending
about a week in each place.
When consumption objects become available all of a sudden and are bound to disappear again, consumers desire
for these goods results in less reflexivity as to any socialpositioning meaning such goods may have now or in the
future. They are bought for their temporary presence, due
to daily inaccessibility. Therefore, the goods do not so much
enter into a discourse of an individual life project; they,
rather, become (perhaps involuntarily) a reinforcement of
belonging to and inclusion with global consumer culture on
the one hand and the local community on the other. So,
partly it is difficult to differentiate and authenticate ones
individuality on the basis of global consumer culturesince

what is available will be used by everybodyand partly it
is a nonissue, since being alike is not considered a problem.
However, the ephemeralness of the consumptionscape results in strong desires for the objects of global consumer
culture because consumers are still exposed to global consumption styles through the media- and ethnoscapes (due
to many young peoples annual or biannual travels to Denmark). Consumption opportunities, then, play a key role in
describing life as it is imagined and experienced in different
localities. The discourse of opportunities is strongly present
in Greenland because its relation to the rest of the world is
often described as lacking opportunities. The following
quote from Lene (female, aged 19, from Nuuk), echoing the
discourse of the Danish periphery, captures the discourse of
a lack of opportunities so prevalent among many Greenlandic informants:
Lene: I mean, everything is far away when you want to travel,
for example. Itll cost you a fortune, and its so far. You have
to go on long trips before you can see something new. And
of course we get all sorts of impressions from the rest of the
world, but its far behind with, like, fashion and music and
film and stuff like that. You know, generally there just isnt
much going on. . . . All other places in the world are different
from here. . . . Its in all areas that I think something is
lacking.
Although most informants were content with their lives,

they nevertheless pointed to the uniformity of life in Greenland. This characterization of life in Greenland is partly
created through a mirroring, when fragments of the global
media and ethnoscapes are encountered. This mirroring is
not only related to life in Denmark (which all informants
had encountered on occasional visits and school stays) but
to the world at large. Echoing the Danish results, Aasiaat
informants discussed the consumption opportunities in Nuuk
as something that was missing. For the informants from
Nuuk, however, their locality does not represent a place of
many opportunities. To them, the center is somewhere else.
What is considered periphery for some is a center for others,
illustrating the multitiered nature of center-periphery structures (Hannerz 1992). Hence, references to the center primarily represent an imaginary relation.
Obviously, the media play a role in providing symbolic
imagery of what is considered to be available in the center
as opposed to the periphery. However, even in terms of
media access, the scape is relatively barren and the Internet
plays a relatively important role compared to TV. In terms
of television, Danish national public TV is available in
Greenland only in packaged excerpts broadcast with delay.
Also, relatively few satellite programs are available due to
Greenlands geographical position in relation to the orbits
of the satellites. As with consumption opportunities more
generally, one could argue that for the informants, the global
mediascape is present in Greenland, but it is present through
its absence.
In the discourse of peripheral consciousness, deprivation

seems to be the underlying logic of the discoursethe discourse is based on what is not in Greenland in a very general
sense. The specific references to areas of deprivation are the
horizon of a global consumptionscape that makes itself present in the form of desires. The discourse stands in opposition to the ethnicating acts, to paraphrase Arnould and
Price (2000), discussed in the previous section, in that it
largely relies on a negation in relation to dominant (global)
culture. This negation is translated into mimetic desirethe
desire for something because someone else (is imagined to)
desire the same thing (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2003).
Center-periphery relations in the Greenlandic context operate as a structure through which Greenlands and the specific sites relations to global consumer culture can be handled. In the specific glocalized form, this is through the
notion of lacking what is thought to be available at an imaginary center of consumption opportunities.
Youth Culture as a Site of Consumption: Modern

Pragmatics. A counter discourse stressing similarities
and, in a certain way, inclusion rather than difference and
exclusion was identifiedagain with a reference to the existence of a global youth cultural lifestyle. We will call this
a modern pragmatic discourse to denote that this discourse
has a pragmatic relation to ethnicity, postcolonial deprivation, and the consumptionscape. Rather than the more principled and ideological relations of the discourses of ethnicating acts and peripheral consciousness, this discourse
stresses global youth cultural similarity. As we shall see,
this does not mean that the modern pragmatic discourse is
not tied to ideology. To these informants, the similarities
between what life is like for young people in other localities
facilitate a feeling of self-worth and, hence, become a way
of challenging the discourse of peripheral consciousness and
ethnicity. The modern pragmatic discourse was clearly seen
in informant narratives concerning Greenlandic rock music.
At the time of data collection, a young Greenlandic grunge
rock band was very popular among the young, as indicated
in the following lengthy quotation (Lene, female, aged 19,
from Nuuk, with Danish parents):
Interviewer: Okay, so generally its popular to listen to
Greenlandic music?
Lene: Yes, among the older generationmy parents age I
would say. But now Sissisoq and Chilly Friday have just
come out. Theyre very popular among the young. So, its
cool that theres finally somethingespecially Chilly Friday.
. . . I think thats cool.
Interviewer: Could you try to explain why its cool that there
are Greenlandic bands?
Lene: BecauseI dont knowyou want to be expressed
somehow, right? And you can feel thatthat you kind of
know what theyre writing about. . . . Its a small society,
a lot about alcohol too, because thats a big problem. Many
young people pay a lot of attention to those problems, and
they want to do something about it. So its cool that its not
243
just taboo. . . . There are a lot of thingslike our politicians.
A lot of them are older men who sit on everything and just
close everything off because we dont need to talk about it.
So I think it is great that the young are so conscious about
it and want to do something about it. Many of my friends
are really keen on getting an education and doing something.
Greenlandic rock music comes to play a part in a

strengthened feeling of self-worth in that Greenlandlike
other nations and culturescan foster its own music
scene. Rock music, however, not only acts as the iconic
marker of cultural and national identity. As Lene tells us
in the quotation, locally produced rock music is also a
means of self-expressionin Lenes example, the expressions of her generation. Their lyrics, it should be said, are
not altogether as concerned with social and political issues
as might be gathered from the quotation above but are also
concerned with the everyday experiences of being young.
However, this very fact is youth political. One of the informants from Aasiaat (Else, female, aged 18) mentions how
she likes the new Greenlandic rock bands because they do
not sing these serious songs about Greenlandic traditions,
the stories of colonial repression, and the fascination with
nature, which have been the main themes of the parent cultures Greenlandic rock music. This does not mean that these
issues are not important to the informants; it is only that
they want their music to be like rock music from other
places. The politically charged rock music of yore is the
rock music of their parents generation, when self-rule was
obtained and a strong wave of Greenlandic nationalism was
presentin music as well as in language and education.
Here, rock music takes on its classical role as a cultural
product that belongs to a certain generation and thus signifies
identity within Greenland (i.e., one generation in relation to
other generations). However, although rock music in this
sense becomes part of an internal cultural identity struggle,
the identity markers are global in naturethe genre is a key
characteristic in the history of Western youth culture.
Global information technology was another area of consumption in which the modern pragmatic discourse manifested itself. Several of the informants used ICQ (Internet
chat protocolpronounced I seek you) because it enabled
them to participate in deterritorialized communities of peers.
Aqqaluk (male, aged 18, from Nuuk), who characterizes
himself as a computer nerd, considers the marginal differences in terms of lifestyle for someone similar to himself
in the United States:
Aqqaluk: He would probably spend more time on the Internet
because its cheaper over there. Other than that, I dont know.
. . . When you look around and see the prices around the
world, and you take a look at the Danish prices and talk to
them down there, then you hearusually they say that on
the other side of the Atlantic they have it much cheaper.
Just like traveling, the cost of access to the external world

is relatively high. Nevertheless, the Internet is widely used
for contact with the world outside Greenland, reaching as
far as Thailand and Argentina in Aqqaluks case. Experi-

244
encing that young people in other parts of the world participate in some of the same consumption areas and face
the same life situations can obviously create a sense of belonging and reflexivity as to global life experiences. In this
sense, the global is very much present in Aqqaluks locality
through communication facilities. Najannguak (female informant, aged 19, from Aasiaat) discusses her use of ICQ
in connection with a photo of her snow scooter (fig. 5) and
what comparisons she makes with the life of other young
people:
Najannguak: Uhm . . . I talked [chatted] with some from
the U.S., from ICQ, and . . . in a way we live in the same
way. I talk with people from many places who live in the
same way as me.
Interviewer: Live in the same way . . . how?
Najannguak: I mean, . . . we sleep, we watch television, we
listen to music, we party and go to school. . . . I ride a snow
scooter; they ride a motorcycle or a scooter. Its the same.
The consumption of technological means of communication with peers in different places means to this informant a possibility for reflection on her own life (consumption) conditions. The taken-for-granted idea of certain
media technologies becomes illustrative of a lived modernity in which Greenland is a place like any other place,
obviously with its own positive and negative aspects and
its own opportunities and limitations. The modern prag-
matic discourse of cultural identity contains a different

kind of reflexivity than the peripheral consciousness and
ethnicating discoursesone that refers to life in Greenland
as being ordinary and just like other places. The interpretation is not only centered on whether life is actually like
life for young persons in other places but can be interpreted
as an ideological break with the notion of difference and
deprivation (the lack). By claiming similarity, and thus referring to global youth cultural consumption styles, the informants are able to distance themselves from the deprivation discourse. Hence, a modern pragmatic discourse
represents a way of handling peripheral consciousness
(Liechty 1995) by referring to an imaginary style landscape
with the acknowledgment that ones own locality is not more
peripheral than many other places. The style dimension of
youth ideology manifests itself here as a reference to the
commonality of living conditions with reference to imaginary youth cultural consumption opportunities.
DISCUSSION
We have shown how our informants appropriation of
youth culture is shaped by three structures of common difference that give rise to glocalized identity articulations.
Identity construction in the Danish context was related to a
core discourse of life stories and the construction of individual biographies (Giddens 1991) in which past and present
actions project onto imagined futures. In the Greenlandic
FIGURE 5
NAJANNGUAKS SNOW SCOOTER: POLAR YOUTH CULTURAL MOBILITY

context, identity was of concern at a more collective level.

These collective identity concerns should be seen as partly
reflecting a postcolonial context. The identity discourses
from the Greenlandic context facilitate a broadening of the
notions of identity in late modernity. In contemporary social
theory it is posited that identity has become increasingly
reflexive and individualized. This is explained by the new
time-space configurations of late modernity (Giddens 1991),
the emergence of a global consumer society (Bauman 2001),
and the dissolution of traditional modern social categories
such as class (Beck 2001). The presence of the relatively
collective discourses in Greenland can be seen as products
of the localitys position on the periphery of the global
cultural economy. This position (and the sociocultural history of Greenland) means that other discourses are prevalent
and foregrounded, pushing the discourse of individual selfrealization into the background. While the discourses identified in the Greenlandic context are situated within the realm
of late modernity, they are different answers to different
problems of late modernity than those pointed out by latemodern theorists (as is also argued by Miller [1996]).
As we have argued, identity acts as a structure of common
difference to serve the construction of both individualized
and collective discourses of identity (reflecting more widely
two metacultures of modernity, namely, a metaculture of
similarity and a metaculture of difference as outlined by
Hannerz [1992]). This structure of common difference, although more general in nature, is particularly critical for
youth culture since youth culture is ideologically construed
to continuously articulate new identity (at an individual and
at a broader cultural levelFornas [1995]). In the Danish
context, this manifests itself in handling the multitude of
cultural opportunities handed down by the parent culture;
in the Greenlandic context, it means negotiating a positive
identity away from the deprivation and postcolonial celebration of ethnicity, which were the projects of the parent
culture there.
Center-periphery structures were found to be fundamental
in the marking and articulation of individual and cultural
identities. The center-periphery relations are not only a matter of objective structures that can be enabling or constraining or both, depending on the specific consumptionscapes
faced by individual consumers. They can also be seen as
an imagined relation that is part of the identification process.
That is, the articulation of identity occurs from a certain
perspective of a localitys position in a center-periphery relation. While the analysis of identity narratives among informants from Denmark largely confirms the construct of
individual biographing (Giddens 1991) and authenticating
acts (Arnould and Price 2000), center-periphery relations
nevertheless generate a variety of discourses. Those in a
locality with a rich and manifest consumptionscape, providing them with a wide range of readily available identity
options, were concerned with the choice of style that would
fit an imagined individuality. Those in localities with more
barren consumptionscapes were concerned with the lack of
consumption opportunities. In the latter case, what is (imag-
245
ined to be) available in other places becomes constitutive

of identity narratives, resulting in a different discourse on
those consumption alternatives that actually are available.
Consumption in the periphery is thus given meaning from
being situated within a discursive realm of lack. The organization of discourses around the structure of common
difference of center-periphery illuminates the imaginary nature of youth culture. Center-periphery discourses reference
imagined centers of consumption opportunities. To the informants in Aasiaat, it might be Nuuk, and to those in Nuuk,
it might be Copenhagen or somewhere else entirely. Centerperiphery, like identity, is a more general discourse of modernity that inflects the specific articulation of the ideology
of youth with reference to style and identity. Style opportunities and lack thereof are crucial for identity construction.
Hence, the cultural resources available for the construction
of glocal youth cultural projects are not just reliant on classbased resources (cf. Holt 1997, 1998) but as much on consumers position in a global cultural center-periphery context.
The structure of common difference youth as a site of
consumption is inflected with the structures of identity construction and center-periphery. However, the informant discourses organized by this structure of common difference
make references to global youth cultural style practices and
patterns and therefore constitute a discourse of similarity.
In the Danish data, this was expressed both in terms of
references to navigating the style landscape, as well as in
terms of referencing consumption opportunities that were
missing. In the Greenlandic data, it was through media technologies, such as the Internet, which served to alleviate the
constraining identity discourses of ethnicity and peripheral
consciousness by facilitating comparison with other youth
cultural life conditions globally. In the Greenlandic context,
rock music was a further example where the site of consumption structure organized discourse. Local rock music
serves the dual identity function of signifying difference
from other places in the world in terms of content and similarity by being a common, global form of expression. Thus,
at a youth cultural level rock music exemplifies a structure
of common difference (Wilk 1995). Rock music as an institutionalized form of youth cultural expression, and hence
more generally, becomes an institution of modernity, the
form of which is used to express, articulate, and negotiate
identity struggles for young consumers.
The glocalization of the structures of common difference
implies a coexistence of dimensions of similarity and difference. There is youth cultural similarity since the youth
culture is (becoming) universal as a symbolic space for identity articulation. And there are local contextual differences
that determine the particular way young consumers engage
with the ideology. The constructions of local versions of
youth culture are, however, restrained by glocal structural
commonalities. Youth as a transnational market ideology is
theoretically underpinned by the concept of symbolic tokens
(Giddens 1991). The symbols, imagery, and ideas representing the market ideology of youth have common currency
in many localities for articulation of local youth culture. The

246
imagery facilitates an envisioning of identity that goes beyond but includes local contexts of identity by exactly referring to its own globalness, facilitating an increased number of imagined lives (Appadurai 1990).
CONCLUSION
The findings presented in this study contribute to an
emerging stream of consumer research that investigates the
coconstitutive relationships between globalization and everyday consumption practices (Arnould and Thompson
2005). The study addresses several knowledge gaps by
showing that the oft-noted homogeneity of global youth
consumption practices overlooks their deeper structural differences and diverse localized meanings. These deeper differences flow from the manifestations of a transnational market ideology in glocalized forms. We argue that marketers
are immersed in this transnational market ideology, and
hence the myth of a global youth segment is a direct product
of marketers own ideologically framed cultural constructions via advertisements, practitioner-oriented literature, and
various other forms of cultural production.
The implementation of these readings into globally available consumption styles is made available to young consumers as markers of local youth culture. In this perspective,
segmentation operates as an organization and production of
constellations of singularities. The segment provides institutionalized models of identity representative of modernitymodels of identity, albeit based on the notion of difference. The identity is rearticulated in local versions,
although these appropriative reworkings are never totally
free of ideological influence. The ideological models carry
with them preferred readings, which consumers have to negotiate. Therefore, segments and segmentation appear as
stable categories or groups of individuals. This stability,
however, arises from the marketing systems attempts to
make sense of and organize a multiplicity of singularities.
The effect of these attempts ultimately is to freeze meaning
(Slater 1997), rather than reflecting a market reality external
to the marketing system.
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Journal of Consumer Research, Inc.

This content downloaded from 130.63.18.173 on Wed, 5 Feb 2014 10:06:51 AM

The Glocalization of Youth Culture: The Global

Global teens from New York, Tokyo, Hong

excitement stems from the allegedly uniform consumption

Last year I was in 17 countries, and its pretty

n the marketing and popular business literature, youth

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JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

Our goals are to advance this line of inquiry by

THE YOUTH SEGMENT AS A GLOBAL

sumption habits of young consumers and, as such, marks

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THE GLOCALIZATION OF YOUTH CULTURE

particularly prevalent among young consumers, where a shift

lematic. Whether one formulates an individual style through

The Glocalization of Youth Culture

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JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

very different local sociocultural issues. Jenkins (2004)

The Global Youth Segment as a Transnational

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THE GLOCALIZATION OF YOUTH CULTURE

fore be said to be what facilitates the apparent similarities

renewed reflection on Greenlandic identity in relation to

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JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

Svendborg (main town, southern Funen)

Nrrebro (city neighborhood)

Moved to Denmark from Cote dIvoire at age 10

Lived in Odense (main city on Funen) until age 16

young. Interviews lasted between 50 and 120 minutes. All

or higher education. Both these transitional phases would

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THE GLOCALIZATION OF YOUTH CULTURE

cover similar notions. (This is particularly a problem with

however, is a third discourse on consumption styles as the

Stines account is a reflection of a general perception of

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JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

NOTE.Color version available as an online enhancement.

care what the rest wear. . . . I dont go around thinking about

The strong hesitation to admit that it was important to

authentic expressions of identity, whereas mainstream youth

Center-Periphery: Youth Cultural Consumption Styles

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THE GLOCALIZATION OF YOUTH CULTURE

LOCAL ROOTING OF GLOBAL IMAGERY

NOTE.Color version available as an online enhancement.

him and his wife theres a lot of contacts as well. . . . And

Its a company that makes computer animations and effects

Since Mies aspired lifestyle is not present locally, she

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JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH

NOTE.Color version available as an online enhancement.

pure in their globality. This means that the ideology of youth

Youth Culture as a Site of Consumption: Central Style

These relatively elaborate descriptions and explanations

central versus peripheral consumptionscapes, there was little