Childhood and Consumer Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID14897481
AuthorsA J Pugh (0000-0002-8709-0277, The University of Sydney, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume25
Issue5
Pages417-418
Publication date2011-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueChildren & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0951-0605 • E-ISSN: 1099-0860
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1099-0860.2011.00361.x
OpenAlexW1568069057
LanguageEN
Citations received5

By David Buckingham and Vebjørg Tingstad ( eds .) Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2010 ISBN 9780230227835 , 266 pp., £55.00 (hb) Social scientists studying children’s consumer culture and marketing scholars make strange bedfellows, yet both groups have met regularly together since 2004 in a biannual international conference (this collection is from the third meeting). Both groups want to understand more about how children navigate consumer society, but social scientists do so warily, often criticising the commercialisation of childhood, the consequences of materialism and the exploitation of children by corporate persuasion. Not all marketing researchers adopt the cheery tone of ‘consumer empowerment’, but surely their work is shaped by their audience, many of whom seek to sell more effectively to children and their caregivers. How do these two groups talk to each other? According to this book’s astute and rather elegant introduction, by co-editors David Buckingham and Vebjørg Tingstad, it is a conversation long overdue. As they point out, childhood scholars hold dear the still-revolutionary notion of children as knowing social actors. Yet we do not always find those sorts of children in academic studies of children’s consumption. Rather, we must turn to the work of marketers to see children as they evaluate, yearn, disdain, savour and choose — indeed, as they act, with discernment and cultural fluency. Buckingham and Tingstad suggest these two groups of scholars can help each other move beyond the simple dichotomies, to a true reckoning of the child in consumer culture. Having whetted our appetites for the fruitful collision of views and approaches, however, Childhood and Consumer Culture, like many conference volumes, is more an aggregate of distinct contributions from particular vantage points, defined by the authors’ home countries and disciplines. Gathered here are essays from psychology, sociology and marketing, from Nordic, American, Israeli and other authors. These offerings — some strong, some less so — are collected into five parts focusing on history, theory and method, marketing practices, social contexts and identities. Among the more thought-provoking contributions is Daniel Cook’s critique of ‘consumer socialisation’, a term he condemns for its adult-centric assumptions and seeks to replace with ‘commercial enculturation’. Socialisation, he argues, connotes one singular trajectory, a continuum with unknowing child on one end and fluent adult on the other. Enculturation offers a different, more complex account: ‘Children ... are not so much socialised into becoming one specific kind of consumer as they are seen as entering into social relationships with and through goods and their associations. This is a variable process that is not necessarily linear or temporally determined’ (p. 70). Cook’s innovation is a compelling recasting of a concept that is still prevalent in consumer research journals. Gary Cross’s chapter on the historical construction of children as ‘valves of desire’ is also intriguing in its sophisticated rendering of adult ambivalence about children and consumption. Another standout is the chapter on the material cultures of children of divorce, based on interviews with young adults talking about their bedrooms and favourite possessions at their mother’s and father’s households. The authors go beyond the truism that people’s spaces reflect their identities, to note that the youths involved often chose to decorate their spaces in one home and not the other. ‘Um, like all the pictures and memory stuff is over here ‘cause my life is over here’, testifies one typically poignant first-person account. A chapter on immigrant youth in Israel and how they manage the challenge of fashion — as one young person confesses: ‘at school they call me “grandma”’— is also particularly powerful for the voices of youth it includes. Also worth reading is a data-rich exploration of the connections between deprivation, materialism and self-esteem in childhood. The authors corroborate existing work showing less affluent children are more materialistic, and more materialistic children have lower self-esteem, yet they find no difference in self-esteem among affluent and low-income children. Instead, ‘materialism in children appears to work not directly on their psychological state but indirectly through their relationship with their parents’ (p. 204), and these links are more pronounced for affluent children. The authors go rather astray in their explanation — speculating that materialistic affluent children might have non-materialistic parents, making their relationship less secure. Perhaps simply the act of yearning that the authors’ measure of ‘materialism’ captures is more infuriating for the child when the parents can actually afford to satiate desire but choose not to. Nonetheless, the intriguing puzzle invites further study. Some pieces are less dazzling — a few are strikingly uncritical of corporate marketing, especially around gender issues, a number fail to situate their work adequately in existing literature, and typos consistently mar the text. Yet the aforementioned gems lend depth and clarity to the work. Childhood and consumption scholars from all corners will find some reward in perusing this book for intellectual treasure

Advertising · Buckingham · Consumer Culture · Consumerism · Epistemology · Ethos · Innocence · Materialism · Media studies · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Children's Rights and Participation · Law · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis

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