Situating Child Consumption: Rethinking Values & Notions About Children, Childhood & Consumption - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9185509701 ISBN 13: 9789185509706

Publisher: Nordic Academic Press, 2012

Synopsis

How do children understand issues of work, marketing, money and scarcity? In Situating Child Consumption the contributors offer a provocative stance rethinking values and notions of children, childhood and consumption. The authors investigate and exemplify how consumption is situated in practices of everyday life, politics, history and the markets. They address the complexities and contradictions in the ways consumption negotiates values in social relations, laws and state intervention as well as material culture. The articles examine topics such as children's use of money, advertising, tweens, sexuality, violent toys, amusement parks and historical documents. The anthology includes established scholars and a young cohort of researchers, combining consumer studies with perspectives from childhood sociology and the history of childhood. Situating Child Consumption makes indispensable reading for anyone interested in child studies and consumption.

About this title

About the Author

Anna Sparrman is an associate professor at the interdisciplinary department of thematic studies at Linköping University. She is currently the research leader for the research project “Culture for and by Children,” studying amusement parks, children’s museums, theme parks, and science centers.

Bengt Sandin is a professor specializing in child studies in the department of thematic studies at Linköping University, Sweden. He is the author of Neither Fish Nor Fowl and Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Context.

Johanna Sjöberg is a PhD candidate in the department of thematic studies at Linköping University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Situating Child Consumption

Rethinking Values and Notions of Children, Childhood and Consumption

By Anna Sparrman, Bengt Sandin, Johanna Sjöberg

Nordic Academic Press

Copyright © 2012 Nordic Academic Press and the authors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-91-85509-70-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Situated child consumption An introduction Anna Sparrman & Bengt Sandin, 
1. Ontological child consumption Steve Woolgar, 
2. Pricing the Priceless Child – a wonderful problematic Daniel Thomas Cook, 
3. More children of better quality Pricing the child in the welfare state Bengt Sandin, 
4. A grown-up priceless child Viviana A. Zelizer, 
5. Not all about the money Children, work, and consumption Tobias Samuelsson, 
6. 'Consider the fact that I am considerate' Parent–teen bargaining Shosh Davidson, 
7. Enacting money at an amusement park David Cardell & Anna Sparrman, 
8. Fatherhood through direct marketing Johanna Sjöberg, 
9. 'I do like them but I don't watch them' Preschoolers' use of age as an accounting device in product evaluations Olivia Freeman, 
10. Tweens as a commercial target group Children and Disney filling the category Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen, 
11. Fashioning girls Sue Jackson & Tiina Vares, 
12. Children, 'sexualization', and consumer culture Sara Bragg, David Buckingham, Rachel Russell & Rebekah Willett, 
13. 'The Littlest Arms Race'? War toys and the boy consumer in Eighties' Canada Braden P.L. Hutchinson, 
14. Nobody panicked! The Fifties' debate on children's comics consumption Helle Strandgaard Jensen, 
About the authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Ontological child consumption

Steve Woolgar

As a newcomer to the field of child studies and child consumption, I am struck first by the intensity of the debates and feelings about questions of consumption associated with children, and, second, by the strength of the assumptions about the nature and identity of the key actors at the heart of these debates, and especially, of course, the child. Notions of what is right for children fuel debates in policy, academia, the media, and popular culture; debates that seem to gain much of their momentum from entrenched assumptions about what is good for children, what children need, what is in children's best interests – in short what, after all, a child is.

This way of capturing the situation bears an interesting resonance with key features of a seemingly far-removed academic field: science and technology studies (STS). For, in its more enlivening manifestations, STS is precisely about challenging deeply entrenched assumptions. It has, (in)famously, courted much controversy in overturning long-held epistemological assumptions about facticity and scientific knowledge. In particular, it has stressed the importance of objects and materiality in the genesis and use of science and technology. Most recently, STS has challenged us to rethink our assumptions at the level of ontology. What are our fundamental predispositions about the status of entities in the world, and how do these organize our thinking and practice? To what extent is the entrenchment of basic assumptions about objects and entities responsible for moral positioning? Authors such as Daniel Thomas Cook (2004, 2008) have shown that some of the main difficulties in the study of child consumption stem from adopting particular assumptions about what a child is. This essay widens the discussion by considering the child as part of a nexus of objects and entities about which we make consequential assumptions. It sets out to explore whether – and if so, to what extent – some of the ontological challenges recently explored by STS in relation to objects, agency, and materiality might usefully be applied to the figure of the child in consumption.

I begin by outlining some recent developments in STS, emphasizing the STS sensibilities that are useful for challenging deeply entrenched assumptions. The second section of the essay draws on these to propose a simple typology of contrasting theoretical approaches to consumption. In relation to the particular problem of child consumption, this section emphasizes the difference between studies which treat such notions as child and object 'in context', and those which explore 'the enactment' of these entities. The third section works through some specific examples of consumption in order to illustrate the difference between the in-context and enactment approaches, and considers their relative benefits.

What is STS?

STS is a vast multidiscipline comprising contributions from, and to, at least: anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, philosophy, legal studies, communications, and media studies. STS draws upon and contributes to a wide range of intellectual currents including relativism, scepticism, (social) constructivism, actor network theory, anti- and post-essentialism, and feminist and post-feminist studies. In the course of its roughly thirty-year history, STS has enjoyed widespread influence and has been taken up in many, often unexpected, places (Woolgar et al. 2009). In particular, it turns out that STS has major implications for many key aspects of social theory and social philosophy, well beyond its original substantive focus on science and technology. In many of its manifestations STS is controversial and contentious, yet an important characteristic of the field as a whole is that there is no consensus about which are its central methods and procedures. It is a field in which there are fairly frequent disagreements and disputes: a multidiscipline that is productively at ontological child consumption war with itself. Indeed, over the course of thirty years, many of its practitioners have modified or changed their positions.

It is thus problematic simply to describe the distinguishing features of work in STS, let alone nominate the single best examples of its practice. Nonetheless, it is possible to point to three key STS sensibilities, which, while often playing out in quite different ways, capture some of the main points of the general perspective.

The first and main sensibility is a commitment to deflating grandiose theoretical concepts, abstractions, and claims – and even some ordinary ones. This is especially the case in relation to concepts and abstractions associated with science and technology. Thus, notions such as knowledge, objectivity, natural order, mathematics, experiment, and measurement are all targets for demystification. As Michael Lynch (2006) sees it, the best work in STS has successfully transformed 'knowledge' into a set of pluralized and situated practices; it has dissolved objectivity into historical usage; and it has respecified the notion of mathematics as a form of number work. However, the scope of deflation spreads well beyond the focus on honorific 'philosophical' topics. STS also challenges some of the central concepts beloved of social sciences, such as social, natural, modern, market, globalization, and governance. Thus, for example, globalization is shown to depend on ordinary devices and unremarkable objects and technologies (Thrift et al. forthcoming), governance is shown to depend on the articulation and enactment of mundane objects and practices (Woolgar & Neyland forthcoming), and so on.

The general thrust of these STS deflationary moves is to point out the considerable and significant work that goes into generating and sustaining these abstractions. This then undermines claims about their obvious, taken-for-granted, accepted nature. Thus, for example, Bruno Latour (1994) declares that we have never been 'modern', meaning that the very idea of modernity should be understood as an abstract myth bearing little relation to practical action. In this same vein, neither have we ever been 'social', 'natural', part of a 'market', nor engaged in 'consumption'. The full range of potential deflation and demystification is extensive, even unlimited, or perhaps only limited by the researcher's skill and imagination. In other words, the working principle of STS is that for any apparently self-evident, obvious, entrenched, taken-for-granted situation or state of affairs, it could be otherwise.

How does STS demonstrate that it could be otherwise? A second sensibility is the commitment to do so by working through difficult theoretical and conceptual issues in relation to specific empirical cases. In general, STS practitioners accept that a persuasive means of illustrating and examining the work that goes into sustaining otherwise abstract claims and theories is by showing their instantiation using real-life examples.

A third sensibility is to pursue the 'it could be otherwise' clause by drawing on a range of theoretical and practical resources in order to convert revered and standardized ideas and concepts into objects of analysis. One can emphasize the historical contingency of a concept by reverting to a time when it was not established nor taken for granted, showing that in the past it was once otherwise. Alternatively, one can emphasize the concept's cultural specificity by identifying a cultural context in which the concept has a different meaning, showing that it is otherwise in situations other than those with which we are familiar. This approach is underscored by 'ethnographizing' the target concept – that is, by adding '-ography' to the target concept. This helps to recover the strangeness and to interrogate the cultural specificity of such concepts as scale by undertaking study in the mode of 'scalography', while the cultural relativity of the idea of ontology can be articulated by committing to an investigation which can be termed 'ontography', and so on. Or, again, it is possible to emphasize the complex processes and practices involved in the becoming and sustaining of a target concept by 'gerundizing' it, where the active practices constitutive of the target concept can be emphasized by adding the suffix '-ing'. Thus, for example, instead of governance one can speak of 'governancing'; rather than ethics one can examine the practices of ethicizing; and so on. In short, the third sensibility works to demonstrate how the target concept 'could be otherwise' by drawing on resources from history, anthropology, and even literary imagination.

So, if STS offers the resources to challenge entrenched essentialisms, what are the appropriate targets in the field of child consumption? Taking the key identities that populate child consumption studies, ontological child consumption to the extent that the literature on child consumption treats notions like 'child', 'consumption', and 'object' as reified conceptual entities, it is the strength of their entrenchment that generates the moral fervour in all quarters. So how better to theorize these entities? Is it possible to think of 'child', 'consumption', and 'object' as analogous to notions such as 'social', 'natural,' or 'modern'? As STS emphasizes, these are not givens. Instead, considerable work goes into making and sustaining these abstractions. By analogy, how to understand the considerable work that goes into making and sustaining abstractions such as 'child', 'consumption', and 'object'?

Hence a key question prompted by a consideration of STS sensibilities is how to resist the key essentialisms wrapped up in the notion of child consumption? Is it possible to generate coherent accounts and persuasive stories about 'children' and their interaction with 'objects'? How to deconstruct our too-willing acceptance of these and cognate terms such as 'decision', 'rational', 'assessment', and 'healthy food'?

Theorizing consumption

The diverse field of child and teen consumption comprises many disciplinary backgrounds and intellectual traditions, and an equally wide variety of issues. These are to do with such questions as how children become consumers, children's responses to television programmes construed as a form of consumption, the role of the media in children's identity formation, the effects of advertising, the cultural meaning of shopping, playing with toys, children online, children and food, and so on. In all this, we can ask some simple questions about the key identities and practices involved. What is a consumer? What is a child? What is being consumed and by whom? How do we know when consumption is happening, and what does it entail? In other words, how do our assumptions about these identities and practices shape our understanding of child consumption?

As a way of tackling these questions, I propose a threefold typology of perspectives on consumption. The axis of variation between perspectives is the treatment of the key identities involved. In a first perspective, which can be termed naive consumption, consumption is held to comprise certain forms of straightforward relationship between objects (or services) and actors. Schematically, the relationship here is that A consumes B, where the point is that both A and B are presumed to be stable, fixed and given entities. For example, the child plays with a toy soldier, where the nature of the child and the toy are taken as given. Questions duly ensue about whether or not the act of consumption is rational or appropriate. Should a young child be playing with a toy that embodies war and violence? Given the nature of the child and the nature of the toy, is this an appropriate engagement between them?

A second perspective, which can be called consumption in context, similarly construes consumption as a relation between objects and actors, but also goes on to consider the 'context' in which this occurs. Consumption here is not just about the relation between A and B, but also takes into account some of a wide variety of prevailing circumstances – human, social, organizational, cultural, and so on. The invocation of these circumstances draws attention to the contingency of the relation between A and B. For example, a child may no longer be seen as simply playing with a toy soldier, but might be seen to do so in the charge of parents who show little concern for the child's well-being and education. In other words, the focus on the appropriateness of the relationship in the first perspective gives way to an emphasis on the effects of the prevailing circumstances in the second.

Notably, however, this second perspective retains a degree of stability with respect to the identities of the key players. The (consuming) child and the (consumed) object are still fairly fixed, as the characteristics and capacities of each are taken as more or less given. The focus of attention is the effects of prevailing circumstances on the relation between the two. Are parents a positive or negative influence in determining whether or not the child should play with toy soldiers?

In a third perspective, by contrast, consumption is viewed as ontological enactment; that is, the practices of consumption themselves entail the enactment, or bringing into being, of the key entities involved. Enactment is a general term for all those processes variously described as constituting, constructing, creating, or performing, so ontological child consumption that ontological enactment brings into being the nature and existence of relevant objects and entities. In this case, the entities can include the child and the toy. In some STS usages, ontological enactment refers to an extended process over time. For example, Charis Thompson (2005) speaks of 'ontological choreography' as a way of describing the myriad organizational and institutional procedures of agencies involved in artificial inception, the gradual process of bringing into being a new biological life. In a similar vein, the term 'ontological politics' (Mol 1998, 2000) refers to the struggles that are sometimes involved in the process of bringing entities into being. In other usages, ontological enactment refers to the achievement of entity status in the course of interaction, rather than to the process of stabilization of an entity's status over a period of time. The key point in both usages is that the identities and characteristics of the entities involved are neither given nor fixed. Thus in the example of the child playing with a toy soldier, the notion of ontological enactment suggests that the entity playing with the toy is constituted (enacted) as childlike at the same time as the toy is constituted as a thing with violent or warlike properties. In this perspective, the existence, identity, and status of the entities involved, whether they be children or objects, emerge in the course of consumption rather than simply preceding consumption.

This third perspective can seem unsettling because it disturbs our common reliance on the accepted character of key entities at the heart of the debate, and, in so disturbing these assumptions, it seems to lessen our ability to make straightforward evaluations of the situation. Yet, as I wish to argue, the unsettling of what we take for granted about the key entities is important if we are to get to grips with the current ways of understanding child consumption. In particular, the third perspective – consumption as ontological enactment – shifts the emphasis from consumption as traditionally construed (where entities consume each other) to consumption as a relationship (where entities enact each other). For our particular purposes, this third perspective suggests that consumption involves the mutual implication of entities, among them objects, technologies, and the child.

So, what is involved in enactment? What kinds of processes give rise to and sustain it? The key STS notion here is 'ontological politics', the term used by Annemarie Mol (2000) for the practices and processes by which entities are brought into being and sustained. In her discussion of atherosclerosis, she describes how this entity is very different in the outpatient clinic compared to in the pathology laboratory. The practices of the clinic and laboratory are quite different, and these practices differentially enact the disease. She emphasizes that diseases are never isolated from their practices: there is no such thing as the transcendental disease. Mol's is a strong argument that the practices enact identities.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9185509701
• ISBN 13: 9789185509706
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Sjöberg Johanna