Children making sense of economic insecurity: Facework,fairness and belonging

Abstract

This article contributes to our understanding of how children cope with economic insecurity in affluent nations. Based on research with children and adults in regional Australia, it argues for the importance of cultural narratives in making sense of children’s strategies to cope with financial hardship. Drawing on Goffman’s concept of ‘facework’, and recent analysis by Pugh, it analyses the complex forms of facework that children use to manage situations of economic insecurity and shows how such practices may be anchored in cultural narratives of ‘fairness’. Goffman’s ‘facework’ refers to the expressive order required to save face, a term used to signify how we participate in a social regime, particularly when we perform unexpected feelings. In this article, the author develops a theoretical framework to analyse three types of facework used by children from low-income families in this Australian context, and coins these practices ‘going without’, ‘cutting down’, and ‘staying within’. Through such facework, children sought to maintain inclusion and uphold dignity, practices which were increasingly difficult amidst rising inequality. This raised contradictions in belonging and acceptance among others, particularly for children from refugee backgrounds.

Keywords

Childhood culture inequality ethnography Australia

Research on children’s strategies for coping with economic insecurity in post-industrial countries recognizes the crucial agenda of children being able to join in with others in order to sustain feelings of belonging. It is not economic uncertainty itself which usually impacts on children, but the experiences of exclusion which arise as a result (Skattebol et al., 2012). In such circumstances, children’s strategies to belong depend on a range of factors, from differences in class, race, gender and family relationships, to innate personalities and existing resources (Pugh, 2009; Ridge, 2002; Skattebol et al., 2012; Van der Hoek, 2005). Just as important to these strategies, I argue, are the cultural narratives through which children learn to interpret experiences of economic insecurity. This paper draws on 18 months of qualitative research in a regional city of Victoria, Australia, to discuss a series of social and emotional practices undertaken by children in low-income families to cope with experiences of economic insecurity. Drawing on the social theory of Goffman, notably his notion of ‘facework’ (1959, 1967), as well as analysis by Pugh (2009) and Bourdieu (1984, 1985), it highlights the cultural construction of ‘fairness’ in shaping these behaviours in this Australia context. The article shows how children developed and adapted facework practices to cultural narratives of fairness in order to engender and maintain feelings of belonging. This analysis highlights how researchers need to prioritize the role of cultural narratives more broadly when examining the social and emotional strategies that children develop to make sense of economic insecurity in different cultural contexts.

Researching children’s economic insecurity in affluent countries

Australia’s sustained economic growth between 2001 and 2010 had little impact on the estimated proportion of people who were experiencing relative income poverty over this time, which ranged between 12 and 14% (McLachlan et al., 2013: 10). Results from the nation’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) survey indicate that in 2008, over one in eight children (13.2%) were living in households below the poverty line. This proportion has steadily increased each year since 2001, when approximately one in nine children (11%) were living in such circumstances. The risk of children experiencing poverty in 2008 was also over three times higher if they lived in a lone-parent family than if they lived with both parents. These statistics also show that such experiences for children are neither rare nor necessarily short term (Wilkins et al., 2011 in Skattebol et al., 2012: 1).

Capturing children’s own understanding of poverty and economic insecurity is crucial for being able to support young people in their families and communities, and a growing body of qualitative research has sought to determine children’s perception of economic adversity in affluent nations (Ridge, 2002, 2011; Sutton et al., 2007; Redmond, 2008; Thorne, 2008; Walker et al., 2008; Mason and Danby, 2011; Skattebol et al., 2012; Roets et al., 2013; Kwon, 2014). Such studies have particularly focused on the complex nature of disadvantage and the different contexts which frame young people’s experiences of economic insecurity (Skattebol et al., 2012), how such occurrences impact on children’s relationships (Redmond, 2008), how family incomes affect children at the micro-level and the meanings that children attribute to the social situations that arise through economic adversity (Skattebol et al., 2012). This agenda prioritizes children’s own experiences, now standard in child-focused research, which emphasizes the importance of using children’s viewpoints in making decisions that affect them (James and Prout, 1990; Qvorturp et al., 1994; James et al., 1998; James, 2007; Mason and Danby, 2011).

It is well established that not all young people are economically and socially disadvantaged in a similar sense. Nor do children experience the emotional burdens of family financial problems in the same way (Skattebol et al., 2012). Factors such as age, gender, class and language acquisition (Backett-Milburn et al., 2003; Lareau, 2003), innate personality, peer groups and existing relationships may all impact on how children are affected by and respond to such experiences (Van der Hoek, 2005: 16, 36). Research based on a social exclusion framework has also shown that children in low-income families are well aware of the opportunities and acquisitions of their peers. Economic adversity in affluent nations is most often a problem of relativity – having less, in material terms, of that which is considered adequate according to community criteria (Redmond, 2008: 4).

In their research with young people aged 11–17 from diverse backgrounds in Australia, Skattebol et al. (2012: 33–4) emphasize that youth are at risk of being excluded when the resources and capabilities to which they have access fall well below community norms. These researchers outline complex ways that young people use their agency to accommodate for what they lack in different social contexts, such as adjusting their behaviour to reduce demands on family budgets. Children used such strategies to protect themselves from the pain of missing out, and to protect their parents from the negative emotions that came with having to say ‘no’ (Skattebol et al., 2012: 33–4). Young people may also attempt to protect their caregivers from the reality of poverty by supporting these adults’ engagements in the labour market. In her research with Korean-American, working-class migrant children in Los Angeles, Kwon (2014) examined the great lengths to which children went to support their parents’ working lives. These young people drew on resources of class, race and language to undertake this work, and saw themselves to be fulfilling ‘family responsibilities’ that were necessary to help their parents establish permanent settlement.

Kwon’s findings parallel those of research in the UK, which has shown that children from low-income families may go to considerable lengths to support their parents’ participation in the market. This may include actions such as volunteering not to attend school trips, and not asking parents for new clothes or money (Ridge, 2008a in Redmond, 2008: 1). In their Australia-based research, Skattebol et al. (2012: 35) likewise detail how young people take on different levels of self-responsibility with regard to their daily routines and schedules in order to ease financial pressures on the family. In all such research, focusing on children as individuals prioritizes their agency (White and Wyn, 1998), and shows that while economic disadvantages constrain social engagement, many children adapt to, and strive to manage such difficulties (Ridge, 2002; Redmond, 2008; Skattebol et al., 2012).

Children’s economic insecurity and social relationships

As this research makes clear, in most cases it is not economic adversity per se that children worry about, but the experience of exclusion which is its frequent accompaniment (Skattebol et al., 2012: 4). Children experience financial hardship in terms of social relationships, as the place in which inequalities can be located (Backett-Milburn et al., 2003). The most significant impact on children resulting from financial hardship is not being able to ‘join in’ with others, and being denied the dignity that this affords (Pugh, 2009). The subsequent work that children undertake to maintain belonging focuses on the social relationships in their immediate lives (Skattebol et al., 2012: 169).

Pugh extends this argument when she perceives that ‘joining in’ comes not only from having the material goods required to belong. It also stems from having the language, or what Pugh calls the ‘scrip’, and knowing what the ‘tokens of dignity’ are that matter. The distinctiveness of some forms of scrip over others in children’s social lives, Pugh argues, establishes their users as members of the same community. This enables children to draw dignity from particular experiences, and to shore up dignity among those with whom it matters (Pugh, 2009: 59). Pugh calls this system an ‘economy of dignity’, showing how children collect or confer dignity among themselves according to their shifting agreement about the objects or experiences that are supposed to count for it. She then threads this argument via children’s consumer practices, as these act as a symbolic language through which children make connections to others. Young people pick up the symbols of commercial culture throughout daily life, and this provides them with a social currency that they interpret, rework and use in varied ways to connect and disconnect with their peers (Pugh, 2009: 15–16, 59–64). Using such symbols in the correct manner thus relies on children possessing and knowing how to use the appropriate ‘cultural capital’ in a given social context (Bourdieu, 1984: 107, 165), and their ability to convert specific advantages into different social settings (Bourdieu, 1985: 730–1).

Pugh’s work makes clear that central to understanding how children in affluent countries make sense of economic insecurity is recognizing that economic restructuring has pushed children to the centre of the market. Consumption is today a defining practice of young people’s lives, and one through which children attempt to forge connections with others, regardless of their economic circumstances (Pugh, 2009: 50). Children must effectively incorporate commodities and knowledge into their personal, collective and local interpretations (Cole and Durham, 2007). This theoretical attention to children’s consumption emphasizes its importance over production, whereby products derive their social value from the diversity of social uses to which they are put (Bourdieu, 1984: 13). Children’s interpretations of their own consumption are not simply idiosyncratic, but, as Pugh continues (2009: 16–17), are ‘grounded in social locations and fraught social implications’. Furthermore, Pugh asserts (2009: 7, 51–3), when children, be they low-income or affluent, find themselves without what they need to belong, they perform what Goffman (1959, 1967) called ‘facework’ to make up for this omission and maintain their dignity.

Children using ‘facework’: Goffman’s theory of connection

Goffman first coined the term ‘facework’ to signify how we participate in a social regime, particularly when we perform unexpected feelings in front of an audience. Goffman advocated that in social encounters, we tend to act out ‘a line’. This is a pattern of verbal and non-verbal acts through which we express both our view of a situation, and our evaluation of participants as well as ourselves. Goffman was keen to stress that such actions incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of society – by undertaking such work, we highlight the common values of society because these everyday rituals ‘do honour’ to what is socially important (Goffman, 1959: 45, 1967: 5–7, 13). We undertake such behaviour on a daily basis to sustain and protect that which can be conveyed about ourselves through our social relationships (Goffman, 1981: 20–1). This includes the practice of ‘facework’, the expressive order required to save face, which has become ‘itself a sacred thing’ (Goffman, 1967: 19, 22). Looking at how people ‘save face’, Goffman elaborates, can tell us much about how a broader culture works. Yet the particular set of practices within acts of facework, stressed by particular persons or groups, seem to be drawn from a single, logically coherent framework of possible practices. ‘It is as if face,’ Goffman continues, ‘by its very nature, can be saved only in a certain number of ways, and as if each social grouping must make its selections from this single matrix of possibilities’ (1967: 13).

‘Facework’ thus refers to the art of impression management that involves the presentation of an honourable self (Pugh, 2009: 7–8, 53). Goffman was writing about adults in this analysis, however, as Pugh argues, children also perform facework in front of interested others. The adult-centred social environments described by Goffman are particularly conducive to examining the small face-to-face interactions that comprise children’s social worlds, and the ways in which small groups create and recreate social order (Pugh, 2009: 7–8; see Fine and Harrington, 2004). However, as Pugh stresses, children’s facework is more about joining in, rather than maintaining a situation in the ways asserted by Goffman. In her observations of children in California in the US, Pugh finds young people to be less concerned with satisfying the expectations they perceive, than they are with gaining the standing to take part in their social worlds in the first place (Pugh, 2009: 7–8, 52–3, 232).

Drawing on this analysis of facework by Goffman and Pugh, and to a lesser extent Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, this article, based on qualitative research with children in regional Australia, argues that children in this cultural environment also work with one another in specific ways to ‘join in’ when their connections are jeopardized by financial adversity. However, as will be discussed, this facework cannot be adequately understood without recognizing the central role of cultural narratives in children’s lives. In this cultural context, children’s facework draws on popular cultural narratives around ‘fairness’, which itself acts as a form of ‘scrip’. Such narratives are strongly socialized within low-income regional childhoods, and are reinterpreted by children themselves in advantageous ways to cope with social impacts that arise through experiences of economic insecurity.

Cultural narratives of fairness

As moral accounts of social life, cultural narratives play a profound role in how we locate ourselves in the world. They are a central means by which we learn about who we are, and how we think about who we should or will become, within our culturally distinct environments (Campbell and Rew, 1999: 18–19; Grieg et al., 2003: 10; Liechty, 2003: 24). Although cultural narratives may emanate from formal myths and origin stories, they effectively become a part of our everyday practices and expressions, and are the means through which we learn of, and retell, the specific social and cultural order within which we live (Campbell and Rew, 1999: 18–19).

In Australia, cultural narratives of fairness, replete within colloquial Australian-English, stem significantly from the nation’s regulation of the country’s labour relations and the centralized wage fixing and award system (Grieg et al., 2003: 11, 168). Since ‘fairness’ was enshrined in the country’s industrial relations system, there has been a social expectation that everyone will have ‘a fair go’. This has implied that upward social mobility will be possible, and that the state will moderate income distribution (Pusey, 2003: 3, 48, 149). ‘Fairness’ has been considered to proclaim something fundamental about Australian cultural attitudes and future wage-earning expectations, regardless of the deeply classed, racialized and gendered constructions implicit in this narrative (Pusey, 2003: 48, 149; Stilwell, 2000: 86–9), or the corporatist foundations upon which this system was designed (Mitropoulos, 1999: 82). Significant remnants of ‘fairness’ remain in the myth of Australia’s egalitarian society in the present day, as well as in many people’s attitudes and expectations for the future (Grieg et al., 2003: 5, 10, 167; Pusey, 2003: 163). This is also despite its interpretation taking on very different meanings in diverse political and social fields.

This is evident in the substantial political and practical role that ‘fairness’ has in the social imaginary of the present nation state, from political language and policy development to advertising. For example, the Australian Labor government’s 2013 national disability insurance scheme, DisabilityCare Australia, promoted the policy as being ‘Stronger. Smarter. Fairer’, while asserting that ‘Labor is for fairness’.¹ In the Coalition’s 2013 Policy to Improve the Fair Work Laws, among the stated goals was an aim to ‘Guarantee workers have the right to access fair flexibility’ (my emphasis).²

Just as governments continue to use ‘fairness’ to frame their policy, the language remains in public discourse. A brief sweep of Australian metropolitan news titles makes this abundantly clear, e.g. ‘Land of the fair go takes refuge from the helpless’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 October 2012), ‘We’re just doing this for fairness: Rinehart son’ (The West Australian, 17 March 2012), ‘No fair go at school: Gonski’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 9 September 2012), and ‘Virgin boss calls for a fair go’ (SBS News, 28 February 2014). As these policy document summaries and newspaper headlines show, remnants of this ideology sit among other compellingly shared discourses in the lives of adults, adeptly encapsulated in ‘fair flexibility’.

These examples reveal not only that debates over ‘fairness’ sit at the forefront of today’s economic politics (Farnsworth, 2011 in Deeming, 2014: 595), but that social attitudes towards fairness persist in various Australian cultural narratives. Just as these ideas remain significant in different public cultural forms among adults, I argue, they also play a key role in the social lives of children. Young people adapt such narratives to their social needs and make them self-serving in the process.

Children adapting narratives of fairness to belong

Children’s social worlds and childhoods are not separate from the influences of modern life. Nor do they sit apart from the everyday economy of labour and value through which the adults around them live (Pugh, 2009; Chin, 2001; Faulkner, 2010). Everyday discourse and practice has fundamental socializing implications between children and their parents and caregivers (Bourdieu, 1984; Miller et al., 1996), as children acquire, discover, construct and reconstruct collectively shared norms and rules of their social environment through repeated interaction with adults (Fung, 1999). While children are strikingly adept at acquiring adult culture, they are also less obviously adept at creating their own (Hirschfield, 2002: 611–13), and in the earlier years of childhood this takes place particularly through play, where young people try out, reproduce and manipulate the social norms of adult culture (Thorne, 1993; Larkins, 2004).

Children’s culture is thus loosely based on the majority adult environment within which it exists, however young people adapt this adult culture to their own local purposes (Harris, 1998 in Hirschfield, 2002: 615). As such, young people also rework the dominant stories and myths that saturate their upbringing. In this process, they make these stories more forceful, accountable and relative, and into something that serves locally in the given moment (Meyer, 2010 in Marsh, 2012: 513). In doing so, children make sense of new experiences through their collective behaviours, in that they do most of their own culture making in their lives with other children (Hirschfield, 2002: 614). Children collectively experience the world as they perceive, interpret, form opinions and act in concert with their peers (Adler and Adler, 1998 in Pugh, 2011), and this is the point in which dominant cultural narratives of ‘fairness’ take on such significance in children’s lives. As I will show, children work with one another to lend, adapt and shape these moral stories to manage social experiences which result from economic insecurity.

Research method

The data presented in this article stems from 18 months of qualitative research undertaken with children and their families in two school communities in a regional city I have called ‘Avoca’ in Victoria between 2010 and 2012. This research consisted of ongoing participant-observations in two public primary schools, ‘Inner North’ and ‘Redfield’. It included formal and informal observations and conversations, and semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 109 family participants.³ This consisted of interviews with 63 children between the ages of 8 and 13, and 46 parents. I also interviewed several teachers from both school sites.⁴

Interviews with children were informal chats that occurred in schools and homes and lasted between 10 and 30 minutes. I interviewed children after I had spent time in their class or with their family, and when they had become familiar with my presence. I kept these interviews light-hearted, friendly and semi-structured. Most children said they enjoyed the interviews, some visibly so, others relegating it to a mediocre school task. Some children also declined to do an interview, or changed their minds. I reminded children and their parents throughout the research that they could pull out from the project at any time. Interviews with parents took place in their homes, workplaces, cafes and school grounds. These were in-depth and lasted between one and two hours.

To supplement this data, I undertook ongoing participant-observations of children at school, during which time I sat in classrooms, joined in with games, listened to informal conversations and attended school excursions. I also initiated group discussions and asked children to take photographs of their lives and draw pictures of what was important to them. Where permitted by children themselves, I read their school work, school journal entries and creative stories. I further undertook home observations with several families and took part in activities such as shopping, attending children’s birthday parties and accompanying families to Saturday sport.

I recorded patterns from interview data and ethnographic notes on children’s behaviours in relation to how they handled the social impacts of economic adversity across different social environments and among different people. I focused not only on what children said, but how what they said played out in their relationships with peers and adults, while also prioritizing the centrality of family in children’s identity formations (Bluebond-Langer and Korbin, 2007: 143; Wyn et al., 2011). Through this research process, I examined the facework undertaken by children and the ways in which these young people drew on cultural narratives of fairness to maintain dignity and belonging in group situations. As I will show, these forms of social evaluation, as well as shared values and a sense of community in social interactions (Jackson, 1996: 40), sustained this narrative in various usages, both emotive and moral, at the micro-level of these children’s daily lives.

Findings

The frequent use of ‘fairness’ in children’s everyday language, and strong social attitudes towards this concept in their social environments, underpinned three types of facework practices that children in Avoca used to negotiate social impacts of economic insecurity. I have coined the following terms for these facework practices: ‘going without’, ‘cutting down’ and ‘staying within’. As I will show, children undertook such practices to maintain feelings of belonging and to uphold dignity in social contexts when economic insecurity threatened their immediate group inclusion.

Going without

Children in Avoca often evaluated whether their own, and one another’s behaviours and possessions were deemed ‘fair’ in a given context. This was not only evident in the frequent use of the words ‘fair’ and ‘fairness’, but in practices alongside them. For instance, children often used ‘fair’ and ‘a fair go’ to communicate feelings of injustice, particularly in this public school setting, one in which the commitment in education to equity is also couched by teachers to students in the language of ‘fairness’ rather than ‘equality’ or ‘egalitarianism’ (see Forsey, 2004). For example, when a class debated a proposed Australian-Malaysia asylum seeker deal, Bronwyn, an Anglo-Australian 12-year-old, called out ‘I don’t think it’s fair Malaysia gets to send their people here!’ Another day, when students were asked to write evaluations of their classroom experiences, one Anglo-Australian 10-year-old boy wrote: ‘Some kids try to tease those who have been given a fair go on the couch, kids are out to upset other kids on purpose.’

Children in Avoca also closely monitored, discussed and judged the financial and consumer acquisitions of others, and it appeared to be acceptable to question other children and adults on the topic. For example, when Tyson, a 10-year-old Anglo-Australian boy, observed his teacher unpacking four new digital cameras, he asked her ‘Are you rich? How do you have so many cameras? Where do you get your money from?’ Likewise, it was important to be open about money and how one acquired it. This could partly explain why 10-year-old Maddison, an Anglo-Australian girl whose family was struggling financially, wrote in her school journal, ‘I hate it when rich kids pretend they don’t have money.’

Children also frequently promoted their families’ financial difficulties to justify actions and decisions. For example, when 10-year-old Dakota and her friends, Anglo-Australian sixth graders, discussed what they had given their mums for Mother’s Day, Dakota told us all that she and her mum had planned to get toe spas. ‘But then we just bought a toe spa and brought it home,’ she explained, ‘cause it was too expensive to get them done in the shop.’ Such statements were common, and at face value were a part of growing up in low-income environments. As Lareau (2003) has shown, child-rearing strategies in low-income families instil in children a greater awareness of how economic resources structure children’s opportunities. Practices such as teaching children how to make budgets last and how to buy ‘correctly’ are inculcated into children’s relationships with money (Zelizer, 1994). Indeed, many parents in my research went to extensive efforts to instil in their children an appreciation of money as the key to life’s opportunities. This was a significant theme among both working-class and lower-middle-class parents, and was anchored in a strong ‘work and save’ ethic, which, it was hoped, would serve children well in adulthood. As one Anglo-Australian, single mother of three boys under 13 explained to me, ‘I tell them how much money I make each week, how much the bills and food and stuff costs, then how much what they’re asking for costs, and then I say, “Add it up, see for yourself,” and then they see I just can’t afford it.’

However, there was more at work here than instilling this financial ethic in home or school. Rather, having less, or what I call ‘going without’, was equated with strength of character. For example, parents frequently and loudly denied and criticized their children’s requests for money, food or toys under the watchful gaze of others in the school playground, during Saturday morning sport or at the shops. This was a strong form of ‘boundary work’, which, as Lamont and Fourier (1992) argue, reaffirms people’s social positions while shedding light on deeper insecurities. Through such shaming practices, parents sought to instil moral boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types of people. Children’s own assertion of ‘going without’, I argue, was an attempt to embed money and objects in a similar system of social relations (Zelizer, 1994: 5, 11, 18). Promoting financial hardship, or ‘going without’ something, thus served a moral purpose.

Another boy, Evan, made this clear one day when he and some classmates were unable to take a netbook home from school. Evan’s teacher had handed out netbooks to 6 of her 24 students, explaining ‘Only the ones who’ve paid all the money get to take a netbook home. You can’t pay just for the netbook and not the school fees, you have to pay both.’ Evan, an Anglo-Australian 10-year-old boy who lived in a single-parent household, called out loudly ‘My mum can’t afford $125!’ This was followed by murmers of agreement from two classmates. Yet only that morning, Evan had described to me a new dirt bike he wanted his mum to buy him. The contrast of both comments was insightful. In private, Evan boasted of his hope to acquire the ‘right’ things and projected a future desired self. In the public classroom, he had enacted the facework of ‘going without’ to address the indignity that came with the unfairness of missing out. This facework, as Goffman (1959: 15, 26–7) argues, enabled Evan to control the situation by influencing its definition. In doing so, he connected with his friends while detaching himself from the school as the cause of this unfairness.

The strength of ‘fairness’ as a pervading cultural narrative here meant that there was something else out there – the threads of a deeper and more powerful story – on which children could draw in such moments when financial disparity threatened to exclude them from an immediate social context. Children could bring public attention to their financial hardship because of the unfairness that would result from their inability to take part. This was a form of ‘scrip’, with the experience of ‘going without’ something being a recognizable ‘token of dignity’ (Pugh, 2009). Performing facework around this scrip enabled children to draw dignity from this experience as it impacted on their belonging in specific social contexts.

Cutting down

A second form of facework that children used to manage social experiences which resulted from economic insecurity was ‘cutting down’ others. This practice was demonstrated by adults and reinterpreted and adopted by children in their social lives, and it affected how children learnt to associate certain feelings with specific situations. Children who undertook facework to ‘cut down’ others did not refer to their own lack directly, as they did through their emphasis on ‘going without’ something. Rather, such children drew attention to what others had, or claimed to have. ‘Cutting down’ someone for their claim to entitlement was performed by children to realign themselves within their immediate community. It drew directly on cultural narratives around fairness and was part of a larger cultural repertoire premised on the rhetoric of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’.

The ‘tall poppy’ phenomenon, commonly referenced in ‘public cultural representations’ (Ortner 1998) in Australia, refers to the social practice of levelling off the status claims of others in specific cultural contexts (see Baker, 2010). What has been called a ‘modernism for envy’ (Mouly and Sankaran, 2002), the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ draws on degrees of cultural legitimacy around dismissing those whose individual aspirations or acquisitions rise too high above those of the collectivity. In Australia, this practice is often equated with the concept of ‘fairness’, and the moral implications of not being given ‘a fair go’. At its core, it can be seen as a profound shaming device in that it is what Sayer (2005: 152) would call an ‘important mechanism of social integration’. Shame essentially makes individuals conform to external judgements and norms, yet at the same time is a private and reflexive emotion that involves an evaluation of the self by the self (Sayer, 2005: 152; Scheff, 2003).

In Avoca, ‘cutting down’ was frequently demonstrated by teachers and adults and performed by children in their own social worlds in ways which served their local purposes. This could be seen in the class of Mrs Allen, an Anglo-Australian teacher at Redfield Primary. During a spelling lesson, as Mrs Allen dictated the words to her students, she placed each word in a sentence, many of which were also value statements about consumption and status. For example, ‘Fashion: Some people have to have the latest fashion. Mansion: People who have lots of money like to show their wealth by building a very large mansion.’ Her students laughed out loud at this last sentence. It was a common practice to mock forms of self-promotion in Mrs Allen’s class. Such as when 9-year-old Mitchell, who was wearing a new pair of Nikes, spoke rudely to a classmate, and Mrs Allen announced ‘Mitchell’s new shoes have gone to his head!’ Again, her students laughed loudly, and Mitchell looked down at his page subdued. Like parents in my research, Mrs Allen frequently used ‘cutting down’ techniques to coerce children, through shame, back into line with the group. She made it clear to her students that it was culturally suitable to ‘cut down’ another person who positioned their self-interests above those of the collective. Children in this context were thus encouraged to interpret unjustified claims (in this case, those not earned through study or sport) not as a claim to dignity, but as unjustified entitlements to the self.

For example, in the playground at Inner North, 10-year-old Leah and her cousin Jacinta, both Indigenous-Australian girls, discussed how they would acquire money for the school camp. Leah explained that her sister had earned ‘$50, for looking after ten kids’. Jacinta then gave an elaborate explanation of how she would acquire spending money. ‘I’ll get to go to the mall and then I’ll keep the money my mum gives me to go shopping at the mall,’ she detailed. Kayla, an Anglo-Australian 10-year-old girl, who by this time was sitting next to them, told Jacinta flatly ‘That won’t work for many reasons,’ and Jacinta fell silent. Another morning before school at Inner North, Dakota divulged excitedly that her family had a new car. She described its ‘soft seats, automatic windows and air-conditioning’. We were standing in the playground, and her family car, a big blue shiny Commodore, was parked just beyond the school gates. Dakota then spoke of a second and much older car which her family still owned, but which they had had ‘for seven years’. Her friend Tina, who was also with us and who regularly played at Dakota’s house after school, replied coolly, ‘I can’t see the difference between them’. Dakota, subdued, said nothing in response.

Through many such social responses to one another, children re-appropriated practices of ‘cutting down’ which they gleaned from the social practices of adults. This drew on cultural narratives around fairness, experienced here as a ‘scrip’ (Pugh 2009) which children used to connect and disconnect with one another in specific social situations. In doing so, their facework incorporated and exemplified officially accredited values in their social world, and paid heed to that which was considered to be socially important (Goffman, 1959: 45, 1967: 5–7, 13).

Staying within

Not all children could shore up dignity and maintain belonging with their peers in this way. The imperative of fairness, as enforced by ‘cutting down’ and ‘going without’, made for particularly subtle cultural terrain for newcomers like refugees to master. Children from refugee backgrounds lacked the social recognition and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) required to ‘go without’ or ‘cut down’ others by drawing on cultural narratives of fairness. Such children appeared far more inclined to associate ‘going without’ something that was valued by their peers with experiences of exclusion and shame.

Bourdieu’s work is relevant here to help uncoil the power dynamics that take place in children’s different social environments, and the various kinds of cultural capital available to children from refugee backgrounds compared to their local peers. Children socialize within diverse social contexts, or what Bourdieu calls ‘fields’ or the ‘social space’, in which they can activate various forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984: 107, 165). Certain traits, Bourdieu argues, seen to be valuable in one social arena, may have ‘limited conversion’ in another, and can therefore not be adapted into advantages in a different setting (Huppatz, 2009: 60–1). The specific logic of each field determines ‘the credibility of values’ that one possesses, and the validity of these values in each field or ‘social space’ (Bourdieu, 1985: 730–1). As Lareau (2003: 277) has demonstrated elsewhere, Bourdieu’s concept of ‘social space’ can help to show efforts by children to ‘activate capital’ in certain social environments, the skill with which they do so, and responses by individuals, groups and institutions to these behaviours. This concept provides a way to conceive of the different spaces within which children manage economic insecurity, as children’s strategies of belonging in different social environments will depend on what Bourdieu (1985: 730-1) describes as their ‘fluctuating positions’ in the different fields they inhabit.

Children in Avoca who were from refugee backgrounds were far less likely to possess cultural knowledge around ‘fairness’ and know how to use it to their advantage. Unable to traffic in such ‘tokens of dignity’ (Pugh, 2009), these young people undertook facework to ‘stay within’ their immediate social context. This was evident in the lengths to which such children went to obscure their poverty from their peers rather than promote it, despite their economic and social disadvantages being far greater. As I have discussed, ‘going without’ was a strategy that children undertook to change the power dynamics of a group situation. It was a way for children to re-position themselves into a valued social position when economic insecurity threatened their inclusion. For children from refugee backgrounds, a lack of knowledge of these narratives combined with pressing experiences of poverty impeded their full access to this form of facework. Aisha, a 12-year-old Afghani-Australian girl, made this evident when she disclosed, away from her classmates, that she was unable to play sport on the weekends as it cost money. Like other children from refugee backgrounds I observed whose families faced severe economic disadvantage, Aisha remained silent or changed the subject when money was discussed among her peers. As a result, she missed out on many social activities outside of school.

Hakim, a 10-year-old Iraqi-Australian boy, was at a different stage of settlement to children like Aisha who had arrived in the country more recently. Hakim had been in Australia almost six years and was aware of the important currency of fairness as a ‘scrip’ (Pugh, 2009) among his peers. He knew that things needed to be publicly ‘fair’ to be acceptable, and evidently felt compelled to match this creed of fairness and public accountability among his peers to feel included. This was demonstrated in how Hakim presented his family’s financial situation to his close friends. For money, Hakim received small amounts of pocket money as needed, and he did not make large requests. In my first interview with his mother, when I asked if Hakim did jobs for this allowance, she replied ‘No’. The next time we met, however, Hakim’s mother changed her answer, explaining ‘now he tells me that he wants to do it like this, where you work and you get money’. The reason for this change, she continued, was that Hakim had found himself excluded when he and his friends, all from low-income families, had compared how they acquired their money. Whereas his friends talked about the work they did, Hakim stated honestly that he didn’t ‘work’ his for money, it was just given to him. His friends were highly critical of this ‘unfair’ transaction, and Hakim found himself on the outside. Hakim came home and announced that from now on he would ‘work’ for his pocket money, and reported this back to his friends. As his mother relayed to me in our second interview, Hakim was satisfied with his friends’ reaction and had since continued to insist on working for his allowance. The issue was considered resolved within the family and Hakim’s facework here was evidently about forging and upholding strong bonds that resonated with the cultural narratives of his friendship group. Clearly, it was ‘fairness’ which again remained out of frame, and Hakim re-used this narrative within different social spaces of his childhood, activating the necessary cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) required to belong.

Conclusion

Children in this environment enacted specific forms of facework in order to maintain their inclusion in distinct social situations, to shift the value of a social context to favour their belonging, or to join a group altogether. However, it was the kind of facework that children permitted one another to perform in this cultural context which highlighted the importance of cultural narratives to such practices of inclusion. ‘Going without’, ‘cutting down’ and ‘staying within’ were central types of facework used by children to cope with economic insecurity, each being anchored in shared and socially sanctioned notions of ‘fairness’ that were prolific within these regional childhoods. As illustrated through these three concepts, children’s use of ‘fairness’ narratives was not a straightforward process of appropriation. Rather, young people were compelled to balance this ideal with competing demands from the market and its ethos of individualism and competition that is central to childhood in contemporary Australia. This raised contradictions around belonging and acceptance among their peers, particularly for children from refugee backgrounds.

The findings in this article support existing research into children’s experiences of economic insecurity in affluent nations, which show that in most cases, not being able to participate in important conversations, activities and shared experiences with others is the most significant negative outcome of financial adversity. This article extends this research by arguing for the crucial role that cultural narratives play in children’s own interpretation of, and responses to such circumstances. Further research with children and their families from broader demographic and geographic backgrounds in Australia would be necessary to evaluate the implications of this analysis and theory for child and family focused policy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.

Funding

This research was undertaken with the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award while the author was a PhD candidate in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University.

Notes

Biographical note

Rose Butler is a Research Associate in the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW Australia and has a PhD from the Australian National University. She undertakes qualitative and ethnographic research on the lives of children, young people and families as they adapt to changes in the economy, with a focus on class, culture, intimacy and identity.

References

Backett-Milburn

Cunningham-Burley

Davis

(2003) ‘Contrasting Lives, Contrasting Views? Understandings of Health Inequalities from Children in Differing Social Circumstances’, Social Science & Medicine 57(4): 613–23.

Baker

(2010) ‘Career Confidence and Gendered Expectations of Academic Promotion’, Journal of Sociology 46(3): 317–34.

Bluebond-Langer

Korbin

J.E.

(2007) ‘Challenges and Opportunities in the Anthropology of Childhoods: An Introduction to “Children, Childhoods and Childhood Studies”’, American Anthropology 109(2): 241–96.

Bourdieu

(1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge.

Bourdieu

(1985) ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups’, Theory and Society 14(6): 723–44.

Campbell

J.R.

Rew

(1999) ‘The Political Economy of Identity and Affect’, pp. 1–38 in Campbell

J.R.

Rew

(eds) Identity and Affect: Experiences of Identity in a Globalising World. London: Pluto Press.

Chin

(2001) Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Cole

Durham

(2007) Generations and Globalisation: Youth, Age and Family in the New World Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Deeming

(2014) ‘Social Democracy and Social Policy in Neoliberal Times’, Journal of Sociology 50(4): 577–600.

10.

Faulkner

(2010) ‘The Innocence Fetish: Commodification and Sexualisation of Children in the Media and Popular Culture’, Media International Australia 1335: 106–17.

11.

Fine

Harrington

(2004) ‘Tiny Publics: Small Groups and Civil Society’, Sociological Theory 22(3): 341–56.

12.

Forsey

(2004) ‘Equity versus Excellence: Responses to Neo-liberal Ideals in a Government High School’, Anthropological Forum 14(3): 283–96.

13.

Fung

(1999) ‘Becoming a Moral Child: The Socialization of Shame among Young Chinese Children’, Ethos 27(2): 180–209.

14.

Goffman

(1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.

15.

Goffman

(1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. London: Penguin.

16.

Goffman

(1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

17.

Grieg

Lewins

White

(2003) Inequality in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

18.

Hirschfield

(2002) ‘Why Don’t Anthropologists Like Children?’, American Anthropologist 104(2): 611–27.

19.

Huppatz

(2009) ‘Reworking Bourdieu’s “Capital”: Feminine and Female Capitals in the Field of Paid Caring Work’, Sociology 43(1): 45–66.

20.

Jackson

(1996) ‘Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique’, pp. 1–50 in Jackson

(ed.) Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

21.

James

(2007) ‘Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials’, American Anthropologist 109(2): 261–72.

22.

James

Prout

(1990) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. Lewes: Falmer Press.

23.

James

Jenks

Prout

(1998) Theorising Childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press.

24.

Kwon

(2014) ‘The Hidden Injury of Class in Korean-American Language Brokers’ Lives’, Childhood 21(1): 56–71.

25.

Lamont

Fourier

(1992) ‘Introduction. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality’, pp. 1–17 in Lamont

Fourier

(eds) Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

26.

Lareau

(2003) Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

27.

Larkins

(2004) ‘Enacting Children’s Citizenship: Developing Understandings of How Children Enact Themselves as Citizens through Actions and Acts of Citizenship’, Childhood 21(1): 7–21.

28.

Liechty

(2003) Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

29.

Marsh

(2012) ‘Children as Knowledge Brokers of Playground Games and Rhymes in the New Media Age’, Childhood 19(4): 508–22.

30.

Mason

Danby

(2011) ‘Children as Experts in Their Lives: Child Inclusive Research’, Child Indicators Research 4(2): 1–5.

31.

McLachlan

Gilfillan

Gordon

(2013) ‘Deep and Persistent Disadvantage in Australia’. Productivity Commission Staff Working Paper, Australian Government. Melbourne: Productivity Commission.

32.

Miller

P.J.

Fung

Mintz

(1996) ‘Self-construction through Narrative Practices: A Chinese and American Comparison of Early Socialization’, Ethos 24(2): 237–80.

33.

Mitropoulos

(1999) ‘Discipline and Labour: Sociology, Class Formation and Money in Australia at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, Journal of Sociology 35(1): 77–91.

34.

Mouly

V.S.

Sankaran

J.K.

(2002) ‘The Enactment of Envy within Organisations: Insights from a New Zealand Academic Department’, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 38(1): 36–56.

35.

Ortner

(1998) ‘Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World’, Cultural Anthropology 13(3): 414-440.

36.

Pugh

A.J.

(2009) Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

37.

Pugh

A.J.

(2011) ‘Distinction, Boundaries or Bridges? Children, Inequality, and the Uses of Consumer Culture’, Poetics 39: 1–18.

38.

Pusey

(2003) The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

39.

Qvorturp

Bardy

Sgritta

Winterberger

(1994) Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics. Avebury: Aldershot.

40.

Redmond

(2008) ‘Children’s Perspectives on Economic Adversity: A Review of the Literature’, Innocenti Discussion Paper. Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre.

41.

Ridge

(2002) Childhood Poverty and Social Exclusion: From a Child’s Perspective. Bristol: Policy Press.

42.

Ridge

(2011) ‘The Everyday Costs of Poverty in Childhood: A Review of Qualitative Research Exploring the Lives and Experiences of Low-income Children in the UK’, Children & Society 25(1): 73–84.

43.

Roets

Roose

Bouverne-De Bie

(2013) ‘Researching Child Poverty: Towards a Lifeworld Orientation’, Childhood 20(4): 535–49.

44.

Sayer

(2005) The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

45.

Scheff

(2003) ‘Shame in Self and Society’, Symbolic Interaction 26(2): 239–62.

46.

Skattebol

Saunders

Redmond

Bedford

Cass

(2012) Making a Difference: Building on Young People’s Experiences of Economic Adversity. Final Report, Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales.

47.

Stilwell

(2000) Changing Track: A New Political Economic Direction for Australia. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press.

48.

Sutton

Smith

Dearden

Middleton

(2007) A Child’s-eye View of Social Difference. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

49.

Thorne

(1993) Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

50.

Thorne

(2008) ‘“The Chinese Girls” and “The Pokémon Kids”: Children Negotiating Differences in Urban California’, pp. 73–97 in Cole

Durham

(eds) Figuring the Future: Globalisation and the Temporalities of Children and Youth. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

51.

Van der Hoek

(2005) Through Children’s Eyes: An Initial Study of Children’s Personal Experiences and Coping Strategies Growing Up Poor in an Affluent Netherlands. Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre.

52.

Walker

Crawford

Taylor

(2008) ‘Listening to Children: Gaining a Perspective of the Experiences of Poverty and Social Exclusion from Children and Young People of Single-parent Families’, Health and Social Care in the Community 16(4): 429–36.

53.

White

Wyn

(1998) ‘Youth Agency and Social Context’, Journal of Sociology 34(3): 314–27.

54.

Wyn

Lantz

Harris

(2011) ‘Beyond the “Transitions” Metaphor: Family Relations and Young People in Late Modernity’, Journal of Sociology 48(1): 3–22.

55.

Zelizer

(1994) The Social Meaning of Money. New York: HarperCollins.