A group of people who consciously define themselves as different to or apart from the culture to which they officially belong. The study of subcultures was important to Cultural Studies in the early part of its history, particularly in the formative Birmingham period, because it seemed to offer an antidote to the pessimistic outlook of the culture industry thesis, which was dominant in the 1950s and 1960s. The best known example of this line of thinking is Dick Hebdigeâs bestseller Subculture: the Meaning of Style (1979), which argues that subcultures use style as a means of creating an identity (what