Commercial Enculturation: Moving Beyond Consumer Socialization

The scholarly attention paid to children’s commercial lives and the consumer culture of childhood in recent years belies some of the slippages and disjunctions that remain between the fields of childhood studies and consumer studies. On the one hand, as I have argued elsewhere (Cook 2004b, 2008), those writing in and for a specifically “childhood studies” audience tend to ignore or marginalize the material and commercial aspects of children’s existence, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Zelizer 2002; Marsh 2005). This indifference occurs perhaps because the hallmark of childhood studies — the active, agentive child — is also central to marketers’, advertisers’ and retailers’ constructions of the child consumer. This coincidence of similarly imagined children does not fit well with the liberatory posture and agenda of many in childhood studies: the knowing, meaning-making child resembles rather too closely the marketer’s dream. On the other hand, a good deal of mainstream social-cultural “consumption theory” and studies of consumer society either ignore children and childhood completely or see children as appendages or adjuncts to the central claims, preoccupations and problems of this field of study (Cook 2008).