A critical examination of the new economy and its impact on youth culture studies

Abstract

Youth culture is a key area of research within cultural studies. Seminal projects so far have explored everything from the politics of delinquency, to the consumption of pop music, to the role of pedagogical institutions in framing young people's sense of identity. Nonetheless, there seems to be a lack of research on youth entrepreneurs within this field. This dissertation analyses the representation of entrepreneurial youths within popular media narratives during the dot.com boom period. It also explores the extent to which certain critical frameworks established within the field of cultural studies, about how youth energies are expressed and interpreted, might contribute towards developing a broader understanding of the entrepreneurial narratives that have emerged recently as a vital dimension of contemporary popular culture. These might in turn lead us to re-evaluate certain interpretive and theoretical assumptions of the discipline, in significant ways.