Dick Hebdige (geboren 1951) is vooral bekend om zijn invloedrijke boek in subculturele studies, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, oorspronkelijk gepubliceerd in 1979 waarin de punk een prominente rol speelt.
Grote gedeelten van het boek zijn in te zien via google books.
Op een site over de mod-cultuur heeft Hebidge het over het na verloop van tijd 'normaal' vinden van een subcultuur :
For the ideological form, Hebdige uses Roland Barthes’ concept of the threat of the Other (in this case, the teenager belonging to a specific subculture). He explains that there are two basic ways of dealing with the Other: on the one hand, the difference between the Other and society can simply be denied, so that the Other can be domesticated (or “naturalised”) and its threat disappears. On the other hand, the Other can be turned in some sort of meaningless spectacle, an alien that is so bizarre it does not really belong to society and is therefore not threatening as well. So in one way, society tends to regard subcultures as almost inhuman, something that falls outside the boundaries of common sense; on the other, they are led back towards the self, and in particular the family (‘these could be your children’), thus minimising the Otherness of the specific subculture. “The way in which subcultures are represented in the media makes them both more and less exotic than they actually are. They are seen to contain both dangerous aliens and boisterous kids, wild animals and wayward pets”
