Bringing Children (and Parents) into the Sociology of Consumption

ARTICLE
Bringing Children (and Parents) into
the Sociology of Consumption
Towards a theoretical and empirical agenda
LYDIA MARTENS
Durham University
DALE SOUTHERTON
University of Manchester
SUE SCOTT
Durham University
Abstract. The sociology of consumption pays relatively little detailed and systematic
theoretical attention to children, while the sociology of childhood tends to view
children’s consumption through what can be called the ‘production of consumption’
approach. This is surprising given the range of empirical and theoretical debate in the
sociology of consumption, where ‘mode of consumption’,‘consumption as aesthetics’
and ‘material culture’ represent a further three approaches. By bringing together the
sociologies of childhood and consumption, a framework for empirical research is
advanced. Four inter-related themes are suggested: learning to consume; lifestyle and
identity formation; children’s engagements with material culture; and the parent–child
relationship. It is argued that such a framework offers scope to further understandings
of how cultures of consumption impact on children, children and parents, and
construct notions of childhood. A focus on children’s consumption also represents an
opportunity to clarify key processes of influential theories of social change.
Key words
adulthood ● agency ● anxieties ● childhood ● identity ● lifestyle ● material culture ●
structure
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 4(2): 155–182 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540504043680]
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Journal of Consumer Culture
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INTRODUCTION
Consumption and childhood 1 have each become established as recognized
and valued academic projects since the 1990s. At the same time, childhood
has come to be regarded as increasingly commercialized and children are
no longer seen as outsiders to contemporary consumer culture. Yet, so far,
little effort has been made in either the sociologies of childhood or
consumption to theorize the relationship between them. For instance, in a
major edited collection on the sociology of childhood, consumption
appears as a mere subtheme of representations of childhood in just one of
the 10 chapters (Hunt and Frankenberg, 1997). In this article, we comment
on the sociology of consumption, and here, too, the silence when it comes
to examining or commenting upon consumption practices engaged in by,
and on behalf of, children, is surprising. 2 Given this, it may seem surprising
that there actually exists a wealth of literature on children’s confrontations
with material, service and popular culture.
Our starting point in this article is to situate this body of literature
within the sociology of consumption and then to outline the implications
of the neglect of children’s consumption in other areas of that work.
Developments in the sociology of consumption have been modelled in
different ways (Featherstone, 1990; Halkier, 2002; Lury, 1996; Warde and
Martens, 2000), although there is broad consensus about the major outlines
of the three dominant perspectives. The first,‘production of consumption’
(Featherstone, 1990), embraces early work by critical culture theorists who
conceptualize consumption through analysis and interpretation of the
characteristics of the sphere of production. The second approach draws
attention to the ‘mode of consumption’ and how it comes to represent
distinctions and mediate the social relationships between different groups.
Finally, what has been called ‘consumption as aesthetics’ groups together
work by postmodernists such as Baudrillard and social theorists including
Giddens, Bauman and Beck. The latter have approached consumption not
so much from the angle of aesthetics, but rather conceptualize it as
exemplifying the individualizing tendencies of modern society.
Recent trends in the sociology of consumption are perhaps more
difficult to fit into one thematic/theoretical group. Of particular interest
to our concerns are approaches that emphasize ‘ordinary consumption’,
concentrating on routine, conventional and repetitive conduct and on the
inconspicuous (Gronow and Warde, 2001). In part, such approaches are a
critique of the sociology of consumption’s overemphasis on highly visible
forms of consumption, on the spectacular and on symbolic value rather
than the practical use of goods. More significant is the insistence on
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conceptualizing consumption as practice (rather than, say, purchase or
display, which are but two elements of practice). This raises questions about
rules and competent conduct in the process of consuming; about belonging
or ‘fitting in’ to social groups; about the production of routines; and
about the power dynamics that define the relational social values of
consumption practices (Harvey et al., 2001).
This article has some affinities with perspectives that focus on ordinary
consumption and ‘practice’. It is our contention that much work on
children and consumption largely falls within the ‘production of consumption’
approach. As such, analyses of the practices through which
children and their parents consume are absent. Following a broad review
of the literature on children and consumption, attention is turned to key
perspectives in the sociology of consumption.Theories of consumption as a
means of social reproduction and class differentiation (Bourdieu,1984;Holt,
1997; Savage, 2000; Warde, 1997), accounts of consumption as central to
identity formation through the cultivation of lifestyle (Bauman,1988;Beck,
1992; Giddens, 1991) and analyses of engagement with material culture
(Chin, 2001; Kopytoff, 1986; Messner, 2000; Miller, 1987) are discussed.
These theories of consumption raise a range of important questions about
the role of consumption in mediating parent–child relationships, how
children learn to consume, consumption and social reproduction, the
dynamics of social change and the creation of parental anxieties around
consumption. Moreover, and given arguments that children are increasingly
individualized as a result of their acquisition of independence at progressively
younger ages (Buchner et al., 1994; Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; Hood et al.,
1996), consumption represents a principal mechanism through which individualization
is expressed or suppressed by the parental and social network
and institutional influences that might shape children’s everyday lives. In
conclusion, we suggest that recognition of theories concerning the ‘mode’
of, degrees of autonomy in and material engagement with consumption
provides the framework for an empirical agenda that investigates the relationship
between children and consumption. A consideration of these issues also
offers the opportunity for theoretical and conceptual clarifications in understandings
of consumption, specifically with respect to debates regarding
consumer autonomy, reflexivity and structural constraints on social practice.
CHILDREN AND THE PRODUCTION OF CONSUMPTION
Perhaps the most straightforward way in which work on children’s
consumption may be categorized is through the type of children’s goods
or services that feature in the discussion. The specific areas of media
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(Alexander, 1994; Buckingham, 2000; Cook, 2000a; Higonnet, 1998;
Kinder, 1993; Kline, 1993; Postman, 1994) and toy culture (Best, 1998;
Cassell and Jenkins, 1998; Chin, 1999; Clark and Higonnet, 1999; Cook,
2001; Cross, 1998; Hellendoorn and Harinck, 1997; Luke, 1994; Martin et
al., 1995; Pennell, 1994; Rand, 1995; Seiter, 1993; Sutton-Smith, 1986) have
without doubt received most attention, with a less extensive literature on
children’s clothing (Cook, 1995, 1999, 2000b, c; Storm-Mathisen, 2001) and
food (Charles and Kerr, 1988; DeVault, 1991; James, 1982, 1990; Lupton,
1996). These and other materials come from a range of academic disciplines,
including anthropology, education, feminism, geography, history,
marketing, media and cultural theory, psychology and sociology.
Of little surprise is that disciplinary background has a strong influence
on the theoretical questions examined. Psychologists and educationalists
have,for example,worked hard at understanding children’s consumer socialization
( John, 1999) and children’s play and toy culture (Kelly-Byrne, 1989;
Sutton-Smith, 1986, 1994). Those in marketing, media and cultural studies
have primarily been interested in the nature of markets for children’s goods
and services (Acuff, 1997; Guber and Berry, 1993; McNeal, 1992; Steinberg
and Kincheloe, 1997) and have concerned themselves with market
representations of childhood, with gendered identities and with children as
economic agents who actively engage in the production, distribution and
consumption of material goods (McNeal, 1999; Zelizer, 2002).
A range of social consumption relationships have been explored by
researchers. Some focus on peer group communication implicating material
culture (Adler and Adler, 1998; Storm-Mathisen, 2001), while others
concentrate more on intrafamilial dynamics (Cross, 2002; Foxman et al.,
1989a, b; McKendrick et al., 2000) or a combination of these (Evans, 2001;
Kempson et al., 1994; Middleton et al., 1994; Zelizer, 2002). However,
much work on children’s consumption shares an apparently uniform point
of departure in that it focuses on the relationship between the market and
children to the neglect of other pertinent social relationships. An oftrecurring
thesis – that children effectively pester their parents into parting
with their money when, rather than if, they succumb to the lures of the
market – provides an unacknowledged justification for this focus.
One corollary of this is the notable lack of interest in the symbolic
meanings that people, whether adult or child, create around the goods and
services they consume. Given that we are talking about children’s consumption,
it is surprising how little empirical research has been conducted with
children (Best, 1998; Chin, 1999; Seiter, 1993). There apparently exists a
preference for data being generated from documentary and pictorial
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evidence (Alexander, 1994; Chandler and Griffiths, 2000; Clark and
Higonnet, 1999; Cook, 1995, 2000c; Cross, 1998; Higonnet, 1998; Luke,
1994) or by a direct reading from toys (Best, 1998; Rand, 1995; Varney,
1996) rather than investigating children themselves,whether by talking with
them, through observation of their negotiations in commercial space
(Bullen and Kenway, 2001; Russell and Tyler, 2002) or engagement with,
and utilization of, children’s material culture (Chin, 1999; Messner, 2000)
and services (Buckingham, 2000).
Another consequence is that children are often treated as a homogeneous
social group of apparently impressionable and pressurized individuals
rather than as diverse in terms of age, abilities, sense of self/agency
and knowledge of, and experience with, material and consumer culture.
Although analyses of situations in which young children are present have
increased in recent years (Harden, 2000; Scott et al., 2000), few researchers
address contexts of consumption (for exceptions, see Cook, 1995, 2000b;
McKendrick et al., 2000; Sutton-Smith, 1986). Consequently, accounts of
children’s consumption tend to focus on ‘older children’,with limited attention
paid to social context; indeed, a great deal of consumption takes place
on behalf of children still to be born and babies and toddlers who have not
yet developed a sense of consumer culture. This is necessarily consumption
engaged in by adults (parents, family, friends, colleagues and neighbours) on
behalf of children where the type of questions that ought to interest the
researcher should be distinctly different from those appropriate in households
with older children.
As must be clear from the above, much of what we currently recognize
as scholarly work on children’s consumption shares some of the main
characteristics of the approach known as the ‘production of consumption’
and, thus, reproduces some of the fears that have beset this approach.
Importantly, we find in this work a concentration on the sphere of production,
distribution and products (i.e. toys) to the exclusion of users (i.e.
children and parents). It utilizes a narrow definition of consumption that
concentrates on the market and does not pay attention to other modes of
provision such as the domestic or communal modes (Harvey et al., 2001).
In addition, and as suggested above, empirical research shuns an interpretation
of the consumer cultures experienced by children or adults, whether
in the household context or not (Best, 1998; Buckingham, 2000).
Moreover, the construction of the child consumer as easily manipulated
and in need of guidance mirrors the patronizing tone adopted in the
construction of the adult consumer in critical thought. Lastly, as is the case
with other ‘production of consumption’ work (for example, Finkelstein,
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1989;Wood, 1995), consumer behaviour is often read off from production
trends – a feature that has been criticized for resulting in inaccurate readings
of the reasons why consumers engage with goods and services in the
manner they do (Martens and Warde, 1997; Warde and Martens, 2000).
What we find here is a characterization of the relationship between production
and consumption in which production simply stipulates consumer
behaviour.
The latter is all too evident in the so-called ‘effects research’, which
attempts to identify and establish the negative impact of the products of
production on the consumers of those products (i.e. children). Children’s
playthings have, for example, primarily been conceptualized as ‘reproducing
society’s troubling features’ and concern has centred on ‘hazardous toys, war
toys, sexist toys, or racist toys’ (Best, 1998: 197). Kline suggests that the
problem with effects research lies in the difficulty of pinpointing in a
convincing manner any significant ‘effects’ of cultural goods upon children.
Yet he appears to take the same route himself by offering an apparently
sophisticated argument about producers grasping children’s imaginative
worlds and catering for them to the detriment of children developing their
own imaginative capabilities (Kline, 1988, 1993). 3
More recently, this ‘simple’ effects research has been accompanied by
commentaries that centre on the textual messages encoded in, and
embodied by, goods and services. Some of this contains a similar reasoning
and lack of attention to the contribution consumers make to circulating
meaning systems as found in the above example. Carmen Luke, for
example, suggests that ‘how children negotiate and experience the messages
of popular cultural texts is crucial to any understanding of the relationship
among cultural texts, artefacts, social subjects and practices’ (1994: 289;
emphasis added). Even so, and like most of her predecessors, her research
exhibits a preference for ‘the larger discourses – the rhetorical constructs –
of childhood and parenthood in popular cultural representations’ (1994:
289). In the ensuing discussion, Luke gives the impression that listening to
children and parents may not reveal much at all. After arguing that the
‘public sites and texts’ of popular culture ‘encode constructs of childhood
and parenthood, and act as powerful public pedagogies in the production
of social identities of the “child”,“family”,“gender” or “race”’, she progressively
moves on to a conceptual terrain that posits children as inevitably
and invariably enveloped by popular culture – an ‘intertextual universe, a
network of desire’ that is experienced as natural and taken for granted
(1994: 291) and that predates actual children and effectively frames
children’s meaning systems. 4
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To date, dissenting voices have been rare in what seems like a continuous
flow of critique about children’s consumer culture. Best (1998),
Buckingham (2000), Seiter (1993) and Zelizer (2002) all address the persistent
dominance of negative interpretations of children’s consumer culture. 5
All agree that the way forward is in the examination of consumers’ meaning
systems, with Best, in particular, arguing that sociologists should do what
they do best, which is to examine where the action is:
We should be fully aware that studying material culture means
studying people – not objects. We should be watching children
playing with toys, talking to children about their play, or – as I
have tried to do here – at least examining how claimsmakers
turn toys into social problems, rather than trying to read the
meanings embedded in these, or any other, cultural artefacts.
Studying people is something we know how to do well. Culture
emerges in actions, not artefacts, and we ought to be where the
action is. (1998: 208)
However, despite such agenda setting, few have put the advice into
practice. We agree that, as commercial endeavours continue to expand and
impact on consumer practice, elaboration of our knowledge about the
production side of children’s consumer culture is necessary. It could be said
that this is the theme of Dan Cook’s work. In his studies of the children’s
clothing industry, for example, he explicates how this market has historically
utilized medical psychological theories of child development as a
means of fragmenting the market for children’s goods, producing childhood
categories such as ‘the toddler’ along the way (Cook, 1995, 1999, 2000b).
However, and rather than transgressing into claims about the impact of
consumer culture on children, the part played by consumers (whether
children, parents or related network members) as individuals and as
members of interrelated social groups appears to have been missed in
empirical and theoretical accounts of children’s consumption. Despite all
the valuable insights gained by a focus on the ‘production’ of children’s
consumption, relatively little is known about how children engage in practices
of consumption or what the significance of this is to their everyday
lives and broader issues of social organization.
The sociology of consumption has seen exactly such a shift towards
consumers and their practices and, ironically, recent critiques have highlighted
how this has led to oversights regarding the significance of ‘production’
in the configuration of consumption (Fine, 2002; Harvey et al., 2001).
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However, this shift has led to different sets of questions being asked about
the role and purpose of consumption in contemporary society. For
example, about how consumption mediates social relations, whether it
represents structural inequalities and how it connects with, and acts to
sustain, cultural ideologies. Other approaches have paid attention to
consumption and identity formation in response to the broader social
changes of globalization and economic restructuring; to the sites of
consumption as places of desire, pleasure and escapism; and questions are
asked about how people engage in material culture and make the world of
objects subjectively meaningful. This is not to suggest that existing studies
of children and consumption do not consider some of these issues or
questions, but to suggest that the weight of research endeavour fits within
one particular approach to consumption. Consequently, there remains
significant scope for empirical and theoretical applications of insights from
the sociology of consumption to the study of the relationship between
children and consumption.
CONSUMPTION AND THE INVISIBILITY OF CHILDREN
Children are largely invisible in theories of consumption. This is surprising
given the impact they have on lifestyle, on issues connected to social
reproduction and in terms of the emotional and anxiety-laden relationship
between childhood and consumer culture. This section explores three key
approaches to consumption – ‘mode of consumption’ and learning to
consume; lifestyle and identity formation; and material culture – in order
to sketch a framework for empirical inquiry and theoretical development
in the understanding of its relationship with children and parents. While
we do not have scope here to discuss all the theories that fall within and
between these three approaches, this section also explains how a consideration
of children and consumption would provide instructive insights into
debates that divide this field of sociological enquiry – particularly relating
to consumer agency and social structure – by identifying the most prominent
ones.
‘Mode of consumption’, social reproduction and learning to
consume
In recent years, and particularly in the light of debates regarding modernity
and postmodernity, attention has turned to the ‘mode of consumption’,
which Featherstone summarizes as ‘the way that goods are variably used to
create distinctions and reinforce social relationships’ (1991: 5). Of particular
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significance is the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984), who sees consumption
as a process of reproducing dispositions that constitute differential tastes and
emanate from the pursuit of the conduct of a life that is subjectively acceptable
in the context of objectively given circumstances. These objective
circumstances relate to class-based constraints associated with an individual’s
material wealth (economic), types of knowledge (cultural) and access to
networks (social), all acting as resources (accumulated to form capital) that
are deployed when judging taste in the pursuit of social practice. While
amounts of capital constrain action in the form of individual consumption
orientations, strategies of distinction employ shared tastes in consumption
to mark, and make subjectively meaningful, class-based social boundaries, a
process in which taste is understood and judged on the basis of identifications
with ‘us’ and classifications of ‘them’ (Southerton, 2002). Consequently,
class shapes consumption orientations while consumption is
representative of, and acts to reproduce, class-based social relations.
These processes are best captured in Bourdieu’s somewhat nebulous
concept of ‘habitus’. Habitus is ‘an acquired system of generative schemes
objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted’
(Jenkins,1992: 74). It is both a‘structured structure’and a‘structuring structure’.
It is structured in that it is the principal mechanism for the division
of social groupings according to class-based dispositions. It is a ‘structuring
structure’ because it organizes agents’ perceptions and practices: habitus is
both the producer and ‘the product of internalisation of the division into
social classes’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 170). Attempting to overcome the classic
structure agency antinomy,habitus can be regarded as dynamic to the extent
that it redefines itself according to new experiences as a structured structure.
Yet, any change will not be dramatic, as the structuring principles tend
to constrain any reorientation of habitus due to the internalized nature of
dispositions.
Curiously, given this emphasis on habitus as ‘learned’ and internalized,
no application of Bourdieu’s theory has been made with respect to
children’s consumption; rather, the intergenerational transfer of capital and
internalization of habitus are assumed to occur through conceptually vague
processes of socialization. There are, however, many reasons why theories
of consumption as a mechanism of social reproduction would benefit from
a consideration of children – not least because the parent–child relationship
must take centre stage in accounts of why children consume in the
way that they do. The key issues are how capital is transferred between
generations and through what processes the habitus becomes internalized.
Connected are questions regarding how and from whom/where children
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learn to consume; how skills related to competent practice, cultural values
and the formation of taste are transmitted between generations; 6 how ideological
notions of consumer autonomy and citizenship might be generated
in children’s consumption; and what an application of a Bourdieusian
approach might reveal about the role that consumption plays in the social
construction of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’.
Before addressing these specific issues, two related observations regarding
interpretations of children’s consumption are worth noting. Notions of
‘peer group pressure’ suggest that children are particularly vulnerable to the
need to gain acceptance and belong to social groups and, thus, use
consumption to gain recognition within their social networks and to
distinguish themselves from other groups of children (such as ‘geeks’ or the
‘in crowd’; Storm-Mathisen, 2001). 7 Despite the intuitive plausibility of
children using consumption for the purposes of distinction, it is important
that understandings of ‘adult’ consumption are not simply imposed on them
(Zelizer, 2002). The logic of Bourdieusian accounts would suggest that
children’s distinctions are class based. Alternatively, distinctions might relate
more to interpretations of age, with ‘maturity’ or ‘childishness’ counting as
bases for distinction (McKendrick et al., 2000).
The second observation is that distinction through children may well
be important for parents. The idea that children reflect their parents’
material and social status might be a prosaic point, but it does highlight the
relationality between parents and children when it comes to ‘modes of
consumption’. Children can act as symbolic representations of their parents’
cultural orientations and attitudes; indeed, Bourdieu’s (1999) ethnographic
accounts of the French working class detail fathers’ hopes and expectations
that their children would inherit their cultural orientations and that their
children’s acceptance reflected and displayed the legitimacy and merit of
such orientations. This is not to say that children are mere extensions of
their parents because the negotiations that take place between them regarding
consumption and the boundaries of acceptable behaviour indicate that
children have at least some agency in familial relationships (Scott et al.,
2000). Yet, presumably it is precisely through the social and symbolic status
that parents invest in their children that Bourdieu’s social reproduction of
habitus must take place. To follow his logic, parents’ habitus (as constrained
by their capital) will determine the cultural values employed to raise their
children, and the internalization of those values will act as representative of
their parents’ habitus while, at the same time, shaping their own. However,
given that children resist parental control and engage in ‘negotiation’regarding
the boundaries of accepted (rather than acceptable) behaviour (Zelizer,
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2002), significant questions emerge about how the habitus of children is
formed, how the habitus of one generation is interpreted and enacted in
the contexts presented to a different generation of actors and what impact
children might have on their parents’ habitus.
Both observations highlight that Bourdieusian analyses of adult
consumption cannot be imposed directly onto children’s consumption,
even if processes of distinction have captured popular understandings of
playground social relations. In addition to underlining the need to explore
empirically such theoretical reasoning within the world of children’s
consumption, these observations also reveal significant ‘weak spots’ in the
core mechanisms of social reproduction that these theories proffer. If the
internalization of habitus relates to the learning of cultural values, how to
consume and what is competent social conduct, and if habitus is structured
according to the objective constraints of capital, then it is in the external
social conditions (such as the influences of school and social networks) and
the transfer of capital (especially cultural) between parents and children that
the role of consumption in social reproduction will be revealed.
The principal means of intergenerational transfers of capital are
assumed to centre on education (see Allat, 1993; Bernstein, 1971; Bourdieu
and Passeron, 1977) and the utility of networks as a means of access to institutions
(Coleman, 1988; Portes, 1998). Such formal mechanisms are undeniably
important in social reproduction. However, the subtleties of the
habitus and tacit differences of orientation that relate to cultural and social
capital imply that much ‘capital transfer’ takes place beyond such formal
mechanisms. For example, empirical accounts suggest that the personal
characteristics associated with different volumes of cultural capital are
exhibited through different forms of competence associated with engagement
in cultural practice (Warde et al., 1999). Such studies reveal schemas
of cultural orientations, which correlate with group positions in social
space, as measured in terms of the formal indicators of cultural capital (for
example, educational attainment and occupational status). Custom versus
novelty (Warde, 1997), self-actualization and cosmopolitanism (Lamont,
1992) and object versus subject unity (Southerton, 2001) are examples of
such orientations. All represent different ways of engaging in consumption
based on cultural interpretations of the value of specific consumption practices.
Whether children exhibit a preference for custom or novelty in their
food tastes, whether they describe the material organization of their
bedroom through narratives of biography (subject unity) or the formal stylistic
complementarity of objects (object unity; Lincolm, 2001) or employ
other (non-adult) bases of cultural interpretation is an important question
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that would prove instructive as regards the social formation of different
‘modes’ of engaging in consumption. 8
Parents clearly represent a young child’s most significant influence
when acquiring such orientations. They not only act as gatekeepers regarding
what can be consumed, but also actively engage in cultivating ways of
consuming. For example, how parents deal with children’s pocket money
or saving to purchase desired goods and how the selection of goods (say,
Christmas presents or clothes) is managed, will hold significant implications
for how children develop an everyday understanding of the processes of
shopping, purchase and the consumption of goods.
But parents are not the only actors important in such processes and
their significance is likely to decline as children grow older. Networks of
‘other’ adults, especially kin, will also play a role in the types of goods
consumed, as will institutional settings such as schools. It is here that the
process of intergenerational cultural capital ‘transfer’ becomes complicated
and the importance of ‘social capital’ highlighted. The influence of media
and advertising also becomes more salient for older children, for it is the
capacity of the media to impact on which goods and services are ‘best’ for
the forging of social bonds and group acceptance (and, thus, forming social
networks) to which children appear susceptible (Acuff, 1997; Adler and
Adler, 1998; McNeal, 1992). At stake is how, and the degree to which, influences
external to the parent–child relationship shape cultural orientations.
Questions regarding which combinations of capital are most important are
also raised. For example, parents provide economic capital (which may
prove critical in gaining access to social networks), but, as children grow
older, it may well be their social capital (their friends, family, parents’ friends
and institutional contacts such as schools) that most influences their
consumption orientations. In such a case, how cultural capital is accumulated
is not simply a process of transfer between parents and children, but
between a host of social networks and institutional relationships. 9 In this
respect, children’s consumption relates to sets of complex interrelationships,
only some of which can be associated with mechanisms of familial distinction.
Equally intriguing in relation to the issue of learning to ‘consume’ is
how a sense of competent conduct in practices of consumption is acquired
and negotiated. In some respects, generic norms of consumption exist (for
example, gift giving and the fact that you have to purchase most goods
using money). However, and as Lamont (1992) and Southerton (2001)
detail, in many other cases what counts as competent conduct varies significantly
between social groups and represents different interpretations of
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cultural values and tastes; 10 indeed, given that taste and cultural values are
dynamic, as highlighted by generational differences, how children acquire
senses of competent conduct offers insights into broader processes of social
change. For, if children learn competence in consumption through their
parents, social networks and institutional settings, then it follows that when
these children reach adulthood, the diversification of those influences (say,
in terms of class, gender and ethnicity) might lead both to greater plurality
of consumption and increased confusion or anxiety regarding what
precisely is the appropriate way of consuming in different cultural contexts
(which is precisely the prognosis of many late modern and postmodern
theories of consumption and lifestyle).
Learning to consume also holds implications for the social construction
of consumption and the consumer. As Buckingham (2000) explains,
the contemporary consumer has come to take on many of the ideological
roles fulfilled by ‘the citizen’. A central ideological feature of ‘the consumer’
is that they exercise autonomy in their consumption choices. How parents
deal with issues such as pocket money, saving, expressions of choice for gifts
or clothes all point to processes through which ideologies of autonomous
consumer choice are constructed. Consumption is also implicated in the
social construction of other discursive categories, particularly adulthood
and childhood. For example, Davies et al. (2002) demonstrate how
children’s media tastes are represented as vulgar and crude in contrast to
the ‘sophisticated’ and ‘refined’ tastes of adults. Such classifications of taste
play a critical role in maintaining the boundaries of the categories ‘adult’
and ‘child’. Consequently, an empirical focus on how children learn to
consume offers fundamental insights into the reproduction of structural
differences and social change more broadly, and the social construction of
key ideological figures (‘the consumer’) and discursive categories (‘adulthood’
and ‘childhood’) in contemporary society.
Consumption, lifestyle and identity formation
Bourdieusian approaches permit agency in consumption only within the
constraints of traditional (modern) social structures. It is, however, debatable
whether consumption is as rigidly constrained as such theories allow,
not least because accounts like that of Bourdieu depend on clearly divisible
stratifications of social classification. For Featherstone (1991), the proliferation
of commodities in consumer culture has made this process of classification
less straightforward because of the growing difficulty of reading
displays of goods as signs of social status. Processes such as globalization,
economic restructuring and shifts from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of
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production are highlighted as key mechanisms that mean that identities are
no longer unproblematically assigned to individuals or social groups; rather,
through consumption, individuals have greater capacity to decide ‘who they
want to be’ and narrate their identity by appropriating styles of consumption.
The proliferation of goods and styles available within global markets
means that those with similar economic resources are presented with a
range of lifestyles from which to choose. Consumption becomes not simply
a choice about goods and services, but a choice about a style of life, about
who we are and how we wish to be perceived by others in particular social
settings (Bauman, 1988; Featherstone, 1991; Giddens, 1991).
In this perspective on late or postmodern society, the ‘adult’ world of
consumption is presented as one of ‘freedom’ (Bauman, 1988). However,
this freedom is precarious, individuals have a responsibility to create their
own identity and therefore have ‘no choice but to consume’(Giddens,1991:
81). Lacking the normative bonds provided by collective identities (such as
class and family) and the corresponding certainties attached to senses of
belonging (Warde, 1994), anxiety is generated concerning making correct
decisions. The market provides guidance through advertising, the media and
consumer ‘experts’, who all provide information on how to construct and
implement a given ‘identity image’. However, only the individual can order
their consumption choices into a meaningful style (which, for the purposes
of coherence, must take account of past, present and potential anticipated
or imagined future lifestyles) by utilizing the symbolic capacities of
consumption to construct a reflexive biographic project of self: 11
Self-identity . . . is not something that is just given . . . but
something that has to be routinely created and sustained in the
reflexive activities of the individual. . . . It is the self as reflexively
understood by the person in terms of her or his biography. (Giddens,
1991: 52–3, emphasis in original)
Such theoretical explanations have been particularly influential in
public understandings of consumption and in terms of supporting ideas of
the individual autonomous consumer as a heroic figure of contemporary
society (Featherstone, 1997). Empirical attention to children’s consumption
again offers scope for theoretical clarification regarding the degree of
agency exhibited by both adults and children in consumption, in addition
to offering insights into many contemporary anxieties of everyday life.
Children must play a significant role in their parents’ reflexive narration of
self-identity and capacities to freely adopt different lifestyles or even
multiple identities. The financial costs of raising children are well
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documented. 12 Perhaps more interesting are empirical accounts of the difficulties
parents face in distributing their time between paid and unpaid work
and their children (Daly, 1996, 2001; Hochschild, 1997). Daly, in particular,
describes the apparent desire or need in contemporary households to
generate ‘family time’, which represents a major constraint on lifestyle and
identity formation because generating family time is not simply a case of
reducing the time available to pursue specific lifestyle interests, but is also
about creating personal schedules that offer significant flexibility for ‘being
there’ at the ‘right time’ (Southerton, 2003; Thompson, 1996). In this latter
sense, being a parent engulfs lifestyle rather than represents one element of
it. The presence of children also changes the materiality of living space,
with household organization, style and design all being compromised by
the presence of kids’ stuff and the functional requirements of (especially
young) children. Such objective constraints are, arguably, of less significance
than subjective constraints. As Luke (1994) explains, conceptualizing the
consumer as an individual making choices that will affect him/her as an
individual becomes more complex when considered in relation to children.
As the guardians of children’s consumption, parents are held responsible for
the competency and appropriateness of their children’s consumption:
‘Fisher-Price toy ads . . . “responsibly” mark their toys with guidelines on
the kinds of psycho-motor skills a particular toy claims to develop. And it
is up to the informed consumer, most commonly mothers, to make the
appropriate product choices’ (1994: 294).
Yet, while the individual might be the bearer of anxiety in this version
of consumer culture, it must ultimately be the collective social valuing and
discursive formation of ‘competent parenting’ that underlie any anxieties
about consumption. As Warde (1994) argues in relation to the anxiety of
making choices about ‘adult’ consumption, parents can only be anxious
about making the ‘right’ choices if there are social consequences (for them
as parents and for their children) in making ‘wrong’ choices; from this it
must follow that normative expectations regarding competent conduct are
a source of anxiety. Being a competent parent thus represents a set of
subjective constraints surrounding lifestyle possibilities. Here, the relationship
between parents, children, consumption and anxiety is ambivalent.
Consumption might be a source of anxiety in terms of making the right
choices on behalf of children, but a competent grasp of the norms that
govern parents’ and children’s consumption is the means to both alleviating
that anxiety and to achieving the desired ends – which is that parents
and children gain a sense of acceptance and belonging within their desired
social group.
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Despite scepticism about the extent to which parents autonomously
engage in consumption, the notion of reflexivity remains instructive with
respect to biography. As Thompson (1996) suggests, parents (especially
mothers) are fully aware that through their consumption they are generating
future memories of childhood for their children. In their accounts of
how to juggle lifestyles (fitting in work, consumption, leisure and the
family), mothers employed memories of their own childhood, and their
recollections of exclusion due to an incapacity to consume were one of
many justifications for their need to engage in paid labour. This fits with
Jackson’s (1998) findings that the stories that parents tell about their own
childhood are ‘worked over’ in order to bring them into congruence with
their understanding of present parenting practices and anticipations of
contemporary childhoods. Both accounts show that by evoking their own
childhood experiences to make sense of their children’s childhood, parents
demonstrate a form of reflexivity surrounding ‘processes’ of the life
course. 13 This raises a whole set of questions regarding how parents engage
in children’s consumption to make sense of their own identity and whether
they adopt conscious strategies, in response to their reflexive engagement
with ‘biography’, to influence their children’s future (reflexive) identity
formations in particular ways.
The parent–child relationship clearly has implications for the way adults
consume and the degree of autonomy that they have in making consumption
‘choices’. Whether children are autonomous in their consumption is
another debate. On the one hand, children are not autonomous because
adults, who also act as gatekeepers and guardians to many consumption
practices, control most ‘purchases’ of goods and services (McKendrick et
al., 2000). Moreover, the normative constraints faced by parents and
children as they negotiate the anxieties of childhood also mitigate against
the degree of autonomy that consumption is said to bring to individuals in
late modern societies (Scott et al., 2000). And yet, on the other hand, the
reflexivity of parents about their own and their children’s childhoods,
coupled with the need to negotiate the many styles of consumption available
to them (for example, as parents who reject branded goods or as
children who desire to join their friends in wearing the latest branded
clothing), suggest that children’s consumption is fertile ground for investigating
empirically the theoretical tensions surrounding notions of autonomous
individual consumption, lifestyle and identity formation.
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Engagements with material culture
One of the criticisms of the ‘production of consumption’ and some other
perspectives in the sociology of consumption 14 is their overemphasis on the
market and commodities, although this is not to deny their increasing
significance. Notable here is the work of Alan Warde (1992) and Daniel
Miller (1987). Warde argues that, in addition to the market, goods and
services are provided by the state, the community and the domestic sphere.
This is of considerable interest in relation to children’s consumption, as it
allows us to focus on the multiple ways in which children’s needs are met.
Education and medical care in the UK are still primarily catered for by
state-funded and organized institutions 15 and, if it were not for the fact that
parents put in a considerable amount of household labour to restore
children’s clothes, concoct meals and help brush teeth, many of the physical
and emotional needs of children would not be met. Communal provision
may be more or less important in the satisfaction of children’s needs, but
some children and parents will benefit from the hand-me-downs of neighbours
and friends and may have expensive items bought for them by those
close to them. It is worthwhile discovering to what extent these practices
occur and what their social and cultural significance might be in different
social contexts.
One of Miller’s contributions to consumption studies is the reformulation
of consumption towards a focus on human engagement with material
culture or the relationship between people and things. Of particular
importance is what happens to commodities after purchase, in what he
terms the second phase of consumption, which ‘is the start of a long and
complex process, by which the consumer works upon the object purchased
and recontextualizes it, until it is often no longer recognizable as having
any relation to the world of the abstract’ (Miller, 1987: 190). Close to
Miller’s ideas is Kopytoff ’s (1986) notion of singularization, which stands
for the processes whereby people personalize goods and, in doing so, distinguish
their meaning in relation to identical commodities as being ‘beyond
the market’ (for example, anecdotes of how children desire only their
favourite teddy bear – an identical replacement just ‘won’t do’).
With some exceptions, 16 work on material culture and singularization
has in general not been applied to children’s consumption. Yet, such
perspectives are ultimately very relevant. Babies and very young children
have, for example, no notion of our cultural understandings of markets and
commodities. Their first encounters are with material culture involving
‘anything’ 17 that is put in front of them, which, after the first few months
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of existence, will be explored with great interest: what does it feel, taste,
sound, smell and look like and what happens when it is moved about?
Babies and young children are tabulae rasae concerning cultural scripts
for the appropriate engagement with the material world. Their engagement
with things, which adults fondly call play, initially takes place without set
ideas about how things ‘ought to be used’ or treated. Even when these
things are toys, the latter are not immediately used in ways recognizable by
older children and adults. An example is the ease with which young
children break toys and other things around them, as they have not yet
developed a sense of the value of objects and the losses accrued through
their destructive actions. Consequently, very young children may be interesting
to observe, as they represent the cultural stranger whose actions allow
the observer to identify the familiar through the jarring of their actions. A
child grabbing objects on the lower shelves of the local supermarket would
happily walk out with those objects, treating them perhaps in the same
manner as objects at home; that is, at their disposal. In the same way that
mothers who correct their children’s conduct display knowledge of the
cultural rules of material and commercial culture, so too will observation
of such actions point to these rules.
Another dispute confronting the scholar of children’s consumer culture
is the point at which children display ‘enough’ agency to make their participation
as research subjects meaningful. While the value of including young
children in research has been acknowledged in the sociology of childhood
(Holloway and Valentine, 2000; James and Prout, 1997), the same cannot
yet be said for the sociology of consumption. Cook (1999) rightly suggests
that children are not principal players when considering the scripting of
cultural and historical understandings of the notion of childhood. Even so,
the ethnographic study by Chin (1999) and Messner’s analysis of a ‘highly
salient gendered moment of group life among four- and five-year-old
children at a youth soccer opening ceremony’ (2000: 765) offer clear illustrations
of the worth of including children as young as four as research
subjects in an examination of the workings of consumer culture. Chin’s
study, in particular, is an example of the ways in which Afro-American girls
in the neighbourhood that she studied personalized or ‘queered’ 18 white
Barbie dolls by working on their hair to make it look like their own. The
‘queering’ that young children get up to is about not being steeped in
culture, which inevitably means freedom in terms of what to do with
things. For older children, ‘queering’ moves into the realm of challenging
or reacting against the conduct expected of them by the scripting of
particular objects or the cultural rules displayed in the actions of adults and
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other/older children. Children’s early encounters with the material world
are useful for understanding the processes through which that world
becomes a meaningful part of culture and, in turn, how that meaning is
shaped by the properties of material goods and the social worlds (such as
the world of the family, friends or school) in which they are put to use.
CONCLUSION
This article has set about the task of identifying a theoretically informed
empirical agenda for the further study of children and consumption. This
is important given that the majority of empirical research and theoretical
endeavour addressing children and consumption falls within the restrictive
explanatory scope of what can be called ‘production of consumption’
approaches. Valuable insights, particularly in relation to the construction of
childhood as a social category and critical analysis of markets for children’s
goods, have been developed. However, much scope remains for further
analysis by taking account of other key theoretical approaches that have
emerged from the sociology and anthropology of consumption. Production
of consumption approaches fail to capture how children’s consumption
is experienced ‘in practice’, nor do they recognize, beyond symbolic
value and discursive (re)construction of cultural categories, the processes
through which consumption becomes meaningful in the conduct and
presentation of those practices within everyday life.
By analysing three key theoretical approaches in the sociology of
consumption (mode of consumption, lifestyle and identity, and engagement
in material culture), we have identified a set of themes that further understandings
of contemporary childhoods and of processes of consumption.
The first relates to ‘learning to consume’ and highlights the significance of
objective (economic, cultural and social capital) and subjective (identifications
through shared ‘orientations’ towards consumption as embedded in
habitus) constraints in shaping what and how different social groups
consume. This theme raises questions regarding how such ‘constraints’ are
transmitted between generations in ways that could reproduce social
relations through consumption. Not only is it unclear as to what combinations
of ‘capital’ might be important for children in their identifications
with, and distinctions from, others (as opposed to what might be significant
for adults), but it is important to understand what aspects or skills
associated with resources such as cultural capital can be transferred between
generations. Tastes are dynamic and, presumably, what counts as valuable
knowledge or skills in the cultural capital of today’s parents will be significantly
different when their children are adults. Yet, it could be argued that
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resources like cultural capital relate to more transposable orientations that
remain the basis for social differentiation, even if tastes in cultural practices
change beyond recognition. Consequently, understanding how children
learn to consume is instructive for understanding contemporary childhoods
and for generating insights into the role of consumption in social change,
in terms of what ‘combinations of capital’ matter at different stages in the
life course, and in terms of social reproduction.
The second theme relates to lifestyle and identity formation, with
attention paid to theories of individual autonomous consumers. These are
important because ‘production of consumption’ and ‘mode of consumption’
approaches can be criticized for denying consumer agency. Based on
contested claims regarding the declining significance of traditional social
constraints related to class, the family, gender and age, theories of ‘elective’
lifestyles advance understandings of the critical role that consumption plays
in the reflexive formation of adult identities. However, a consideration of
children highlights a range of objective and normative constraints that
impinge on parents’ freedoms to consume desired lifestyles. Here, the anxieties
of parenting are revealed as an important empirical probe into the
relationship between consumption, children and identity; indeed, parents’
reflexivity of their childhood, of their role in constructing their children’s
experiences of childhood (and its significance in their future identity
formations) and on abstract social constructions of ‘childhood’ can be
revealed through analysis of the anxieties surrounding children’s consumption.
Such an enquiry offers insights into the degree of autonomy that
parents (and children) have when it comes to children’s consumption, into
the ambivalences of consumption and the scope for reflexive engagement
in the many practices of consumption.
The third theme identified for empirical investigation is how young
children engage in material culture. The relationship between children and
things, how children personalize objects, and the work that both they and
their parents put into the act of consuming are of particular interest, for it
is by engaging in material culture that distinctions between self and object
are generated and made meaningful. How children engage with objects is
also instructive for revealing how the norms and conventions surrounding
material culture are constructed and negotiated between social actants and
in terms of how objects script practices during the process of consuming.
Finally,this discussion of children’s consumption underlines the centrality
of the parent–child relationship for understanding how notions of childhood
are constructed and this stage of life experienced. A concentrated
focus on the production of consumption to the exclusion of other
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approaches to consumption contains the danger of losing from sight the
fact that children’s consumption is intimately connected to parents’
consumption, particularly as parents often consume on behalf of their
children. 19 How children ‘learn’ to consume, the lifestyles of their parents,
the way that their parents reflexively engage with memories of their own
childhood (or biography) and parental readings of material culture all lie at
the heart of what can be understood as children’s consumption. This is
certainly not to suggest that children’s consumption can be ‘read off ’ from
theories that explain adult consumption; indeed, one of our arguments has
been that understandings of the processes connected to adult consumption
have been imposed on children. Rather, this is to argue that any investigation
of the processes through which children consume and of the way
that children experience and understand practices of consumption cannot
occur without a consideration of their parents’ consumption orientations
and of the influence of other adult and child actors within the networks
that make up their daily life.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Alan Warde for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of
this article. Thanks also to two anonymous referees and the special issue editor Dan
Cook for many helpful suggestions and perceptive observations.
Notes
1. We take childhood to have three meanings: first, childhood as the biographic
experiences of an individual; second, a process in which parents actively engage in
the construction of their child’s childhood; and, third, childhood as an abstract
cultural and political notion that is the binary opposition of adulthood (Scott et
al., 2000).
2. A concomitant argument has been made for the hidden character of mothers as
female consumers (Cook, 1995).
3. Buckingham (2000) offers a detailed critique of the shortcomings of this
approach to children’s consumer culture.
4. Another quotation further on supports this one: ‘Corporate visions of
“childhood”,“gender”,“parenthood”, or “family” saturate the symbolic, spatial,
material and social environment to such an extent that, increasingly, we fail to
take much note of them’ (1994: 293).
5. Indeed, the publications by Best and Buckingham are evidence of the longevity
of the influence of negative conceptualizations of children’s consumer culture.
6. Scott and Scott (2002) discuss the intergenerational transmission of cultural
capital and highlight the significance of inherited values such as ambition and
determination, values rooted in class and gendered life circumstances, compared
with ‘skills’ such as how to play the violin or knowledge of classical music in the
process of social reproduction.
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7. For younger children, such battles for acceptance and distinction through
consumption would seem less significant, although part of the logic of the ‘death of
childhood’ thesis is that such processes grip children at a progressively earlier age.
8. Support for such a claim can be found in Buckingham (2000), who discusses how
middle-class children use their cultural capital to distinguish themselves from
working-class children on the basis of critical interpretations of the media.
9. It is important to acknowledge that the economic capital that many parents have
at their disposal is limited, raising the issue of whether they can actually provide
for their children’s consumption demands. Studies by Kempson et al. (1994) and
Middleton et al. (1994) show that poor parents will direct considerable household
resources towards their children’s perceived consumption ‘needs’ in an attempt to
ensure that their children do not suffer the consequences of not being able to
‘keep up’ in relation to the consumption of their peers. This often happens to the
detriment of their own claims on household resources. Nevertheless, as Chin
(1999) and Clarke (1997) point out, children also learn to restrain their
consumption requests in line with the level of economic capital of their
households.
10. Chin’s (2001) account of working-class black children’s shopping behaviour
demonstrates how they spend money in order to cement their position within
households by buying practical items for themselves and gifts for family members.
Whether such an orientation to ‘share’ with other members of the family is a
disposition of more affluent children and what implications this might hold as
those children grow older remain important subjects for empirical enquiry.
11. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1996) refer to elective biographies, while Bauman
(1990) discusses ‘DIY identitykits’, both being concepts used to describe the
contemporary requirement of individuals to create and sustain their own identity.
12. For example, a report by the consumer magazine Which? (March 2002) calculates
that UK households spend on average £109 per week on children.
13. Interestingly, such narratives illustrate the three different meanings of the term
‘childhood’ discussed in Note 1.
14. We are thinking here in particular of work associated with ‘consumption as
aesthetics’.
15. Although the various ways in which these institutions have been required to
engage with the market to complete their service provision in recent years is
interesting.
16. Such as Alison Clarke’s (1997) account of the use of the UK mail order catalogue
Argos by a mother to direct her children’s Christmas present list.
17. In fact, an interesting question, which has really only been addressed by
Sutton-Smith (1986) and Cross (1998), is how toys have come into existence as
children’s material culture and how it has taken the forms it assumes today.
18. Chin utilizes Erica Rand’s (1995) notion of ‘queering’, as it best symbolizes the
playful transformation of their material play culture (that is, Barbie and other
dolls) accomplished by the girls, which personalizes the dolls.
19. See Cross (2002) for an interesting acknowledgement of this argument through
a conceptualization of the parent–child relationship as one of wondrous
innocence.
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Lydia Martens is Lecturer in Sociology at Durham University. Her research interests include
consumer/material culture and domestic organization. She is co-author of Eating out: Social
Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure (Cambridge University Press, 2000; with Alan
Warde). Address: Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Durham, 32 Old
Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HN, UK. [email: l.d.martens@durham.ac.uk]
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Dale Southerton is a Research Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and
Competition, University of Manchester. He specializes in the study of consumption and is
currently conducting research on consumption and: time use; kitchens, bathrooms and
domestic technologies; the diffusion of cultures of consumption; and the parent–child
relationship. Related theoretical interests include social change, innovation, sustainability, time
and space. Address: ESCR Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, Harold Hankins
Building, The University of Manchester, Booth Street West, Manchester, M13 9QH, UK. [email:
dale.southerton@man.ac.uk]
Sue Scott is Professor of Sociology and Postgraduate Dean at Durham University. Research
interests include sexuality and risk, especially regarding the ways in which these two fields
impact upon children and childhood. She was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research
Council to undertake a study entitled ‘Risk, Parental Risk Anxiety and the Everyday Worlds of
Children’. Her current research is with Stevi Jackson on sexuality in late modernity and with
Lydia Martens on risk and everyday kitchen practices. Address: Department of Sociology and
Social Policy, University of Durham, 32 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HN, UK. [email:
s.j.scott@durham.ac.uk]
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