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While aimed in general at supporting and underpinning these initiatives, there is
no intention that this volume should stamp the field indelibly with the Centre’s
particular concerns. We hope that the ‘openness’ of our approach is reflected in
the selections which follow, and that readers and users of the volume will bear this
caveat in mind as they read.
The selection of articles in this volume has been drawn from the first nine
issues of the Centre’s journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies (WPCS), from
the Centre’s list of Stencilled Papers and from some more recent work. The
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early issues of the journal are now all out of print. The journal itself has been
absorbed into the CCCS/Hutchinson series of books and now appears as the
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annual ‘Special Number’, along with other volumes. In the interim some of
those earlier articles and issues, however, have become ‘collector’s items’. In
any event, the founding of the journal was an important moment in the Centre’s
development, and its early numbers reflect many key themes and topics in the
formative phase of Cultural Studies. So we responded positively to Hutchinson’s
proposal that a selection should be made available, drawing principally on those
earlier sources of work, though including one or two pieces in each section more
representative of our recent work. A number of things should therefore be said,
by way of guidance to the reader, about how the book is organized. First, it does
not reflect the full range of Centre work. For example, work on the position and
oppression of women is the core of the second Special Number already published
in our new series, Women Take Issue. This theme is therefore not given a section
on its own here, though the impact of feminism is reflected in several of the more
recent contributions published in this volume (see below). Work in the
‘subcultures’ area did appear in WPCS 7/8, subsequently reprinted as Resistance
Through Rituals. But this book appeared some three or four years ago.
Moreover, there have been important developments in the work in this area,
which deserve recognition. The ‘ethnographic’ emphasis which marked it from
the outset has been retained, but its focus has shifted, first, to more ‘mainstream’
aspects of youth formation (Roger Grimshaw’s study of the Scout Movement,
extracted here, is an example), and then to the more central institutions and
relations (for example, recent work on the transition from school to work of
working-class boys and girls; on young manual workers; and women’s domestic
and paid work). These have thoroughly transformed the earlier, more
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‘subcultural’, concerns. These developments did seem to require some reference
here (see the section on Ethnography). The growing base in Centre work of
studies in such areas as education and educational institutions, the family, race
and ethnicity, aspects of the state, together with the general redirection of Centre
work towards more broadly ‘historical’ concerns—the analysis of particular
periods, the welfare state, work on cultural history and on the problems of history
and theory—are not substantially represented in these pages. Some of these

*Superior figures refer to the Notes and references on pages 277–304.