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I second the recommendation to read Transforming The Difficult Child.

When my kids were younger and decided defiance might be an acceptable attitude, this is what worked for me:

I took them out to a special place they liked to go for lunch - just the two of us. While we were eating, I told them that their choices to disobey and not pitch in at home hurt the whole family. I described the stress it caused, explained the added burden it made for someone else, etc. and I asked them why the change in their choices. My kids were always pretty honest about why, and if there was something that had hurt them so that they were acting out or if there was an added chore that had made them feel overwhelmed, etc., they told me. We would take it through and negotiate.

Once we agreed on what would work, I asked them for a commitment to live up to their responsibilities. And I laid out the consequences if they continued to create a disruption at home. I made sure the consequences were severe - no door on their room, no electronics, no distractions. I couched all of it in, "We are going to support your new commitment to doing your homework and your chores by helping you to stay focused on that. As long as you can stay focused on your own, we won't need to step in. But if we have to, then we'll remove all the distractions like your iPod, the computer except for homework, and your door, since we wouldn't want to make it more difficult for you to be distracted from your commitments once the door was closed."

The fear of losing the door was enough for one of them that the miracle change happened overnight. The other of our older kids pushed, and they lost their door for a week. She escalated during that week, but we stuck to it. She finally realized upping the drama wasn't going to work and asked what it took to get the door back.

My two now college kids recently told me that it was rather a challenge to see what they could "handle" in the way of consequences, so a scaled approach of little punishments at first never worked. It was part of the challenge for them and made it interesting. But once they lost their privacy (they still had the door on the bathroom, but how long can you hide in there with no iPod to entertain?), the fun of the challenge was gone. I think sometimes the gradual methods don't work on our kids, because they already live on the edges of things in their own mind and emotions.