Abstract
David Buckingham and Vegbjørg Tingstad (eds) Childhood and Consumer Culture (Studies in Childhood and Youth) Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2010; 266 pp. £55. ISBN 9780230227835 (hbk)
This volume on childhood and consumer culture, edited by David Buckingham and Vegbjørg Tingstad, opens by addressing the often repeated argument that the dichotomous construction of childhood in consumer culture arises from an enduring tension between markets and moralities. It is a tension that continues to reproduce binary oppositions such as sacred child/profane market, innocent child/media-savvy child, exploited child/empowered child. Yet, as the editors note, it is obvious by now that it is essential to move beyond these simple dichotomies and to focus on the ways in which consumer culture shapes children and childhood, and is shaped by them. As Buckingham and Tingstad put it: ‘We need to address how consumption practices are carried out in these different settings [i.e. family, peer group, school], and how they are implicated in the management of power, time and space’ (p. 6).
While the edited volume tackles these issues, it also makes it obvious that studies of children’s consumption are not a unified field of study that shares disciplinary ambitions. The book is a selection of the best papers presented at the third international conference on Child and Teen Consumption held in 2008 at the Norwegian Centre for Child Research in Trondheim. The contributors, who comprise both well-established and younger scholars, come from different fields, including history, sociology, childhood studies, marketing and education. This multidisciplinarity is reflected in the various choices of theories, methods and approaches utilized in the volume. The only thing that the scholars seem to have in common is that they address issues of childhood and consumer culture. The lack of intertextuality means that the compilation as a whole makes a less substantial contribution to the study of children and consumer culture than it might otherwise have done.
That said, the articles are of great interest, on an individual basis, to scholars researching children and consumption. The historical studies that are included demonstrate continuities, discontinuities and local variations in consumer culture. Here Tora Korsvald offers an informative case study of a Norwegian toy company, Proper Toys, when demonstrating in detail how desired notions of childhood, parenting and education become embedded in company practices and toy offerings: fashion dolls and war toys are, for instance, defined as improper and therefore non-saleable. Korsvald does, however, suggest that ideas and values relating to the protection of children promoted by the company ‘are perhaps distinctive to Nordic culture’ (p. 43).
Theoretical treatments in the volume open with Daniel Cook’s well-grounded critique of the concept of consumer socialization. His work has repeatedly demonstrated the fact that children do not ‘enter’ consumer culture at some point of their socialization, but that they are always embedded in market relations. Cook argues that a better way to explore consumer culture is to focus on the notion of ‘commercial enculturation’ that places emphasis on webs of meanings that precede any individual child. Commercial culture is part of children becoming who they are; children form social relationships with, and through, consumer goods and practices in ways that reflect widely shared and desired value projects.
Barbro Johansson draws theoretical inspiration from Bruno Latour, Deleuze and Guattari and builds on the important work by childhood scholar Nick Lee. Johansson suggests that as consumers we are not autonomous agents, but connected to others. The concept of ‘extension’ allows us to study relations to others, including other humans, artefacts, texts and technology. Children seek autonomy as consumers by adopting adult ideals of rational, wise and moderate consumption: it is a way ‘to empower oneself, to create an individual space of consumer agency’ (p. 88). This does not, however, mean that children or their parents are in fact rational or moderate consumers. For Johansson consumption is not composed of ‘consumer beings’ or ‘entities’, but of various kinds of relationalities. She argues for the deconstruction of notions of childhood and an analytical focus on flows and connections between humans, objects, techniques and structures.
The volume also includes sections focusing on practices of contemporary marketers, contexts of consumption and childhood identities. The discussions move from marketers’ attempts to involve children in virtual worlds to fashion choices among young immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel. Together the articles underline the importance of temporal and reproductive dimensions of consumption that push analysis in the field away from an exclusively present tense, from the construction of consumer desires and identities in the here-and-now. The chapter by Lydia Martens, for instance, focuses on how the cultural production of the new parent in Britain ties in with the production of the young child as cute and precious. For Chinese parents, on the other hand, as Randi Wærdahl describes, childhood is valuable as time that should be devoted to striving for excellence. Consumer choices by parents reflect a larger educational project that prepares children for the fierce competition ‘in an increasingly meritocratic system’ (p. 192).
Childhood and Consumer Culture makes evident the vibrancy of studies in this field, but in order to become more influential within consumption theory at large, more theoretical and methodological rigour is undoubtedly required. Studies of childhood can, for instance, demonstrate in detail the ways in which consumer objects and practices support meaningful social relations, and by doing so become part of knowledge about the production of human beings as persons. Consumption is always subordinate to such production, but it is still an exceptionally powerful means of reproducing generational relations and making us who we are. This means that childhood cannot be defined once and for all, but needs to be retained as an open category in order that researchers may remain alert to the multifaceted aspects of commercial culture and the creative involvements of children within it. Neither consumer practices, nor the trajectories of consuming children should be taken for granted.
National Consumer Research Centre, Finland