1.1..-Basada en la experiencia de la industria manufacturera en el territorio mexicana

As I have stated above, traditional or mainstream research on children and consumer media culture has been dominated by consumer socialisation and effects studies.

Consumer socialisation was first named by Ward (1974) as “[the] process by which young people acquire skills, knowledge, and attitudes relevant to their functioning as consumers in the marketplace” (Ward, 1974: 2). Like general psychology’s concept of socialisation, it simply regards “the child” as passive pre-social being who moves through developmental stages. Within the theory, children learn to become sensible consumers with age and acquire appropriate consumer skills and knowledge (John,

1999; Ward, 1974), and therefore adult caretakers are the target of the research:

children’s here-and-now experiences and perspectives are not taken into account.

Effects studies are largely found in media research, and primarily focus on experimental, correlational and causal-correlational approaches, relying on surveys, content analysis and laboratory experiments (CcaM, 2014). These experimental and correlational research methods have been highly criticised by childhood researchers because children’s everyday practices are not so simple to test in an isolated laboratory room or through surveys. This effects studies approach also tends to overlook social contexts and relations of the children.

Despite the academic attention paid to children’s consumption practices and consumer culture in recent years, there are disjunctions between childhood studies and marketing/consumer studies. Buckingham (2000, 2011) critiques the binary views of children in contemporary consumer media culture and effects research, advocating that research needs to be focused on children’s own perspectives and voices, the consequences and implications of children’s activities and practices, and the dynamic processes and relationships that constitute consumer culture. His emphasis on sociological and cultural studies of children and consumption echoes my primary research framework as well as that of consumer culture theory (CCT). Like Buckingham, Cook (2008, 2009, 2010) also sees consumer media culture not as something that influences children from the outside but as implicated within their everyday lives. In order to develop this more holistic view of children’s consumer media culture and to emphasise the various means and processes by which children come to participate in commercial life, Cook (2010) proposes the concept of commercial enculturation. His criticism is explicitly directed against the notion of consumer socialisation (Ward, 1974). Cook argues that consumer socialisation research does not fit well with the notion of active, knowing child consumers and suffers from a limited view of both childhood and consumption. In Consumer Socialization Revisited, Ekström (2011) attempts to advance the scope of inquiry beyond developmentalism, arguing that consumer socialisation is a lifelong process, which varies among different sociocultural groups and involves different experiences and contexts. Yet despite her call for children’s participation and pluralism in methods and approach, Cook (2010)

sees that the foundational assumptions of consumer socialisation research cannot escape from its construction of “the child” and its normative, monolithic approach.

The concept of commercial enculturation proposed by Cook (2010) emphasises a variety of ways in which children participate in commercial life and their knowledge is used in everyday practice. As Cook argues:

The term demands no de facto static endpoint where a child becomes a

“complete” consumer and it does not require an a priori definition of the boundaries and behavioral dimensions of “consumption” and market activity.

Commercial enculturation rather places attention on the culture in consumer culture as multiple, layered and overlapping webs of meaning which precede any individual child. The focus centers on how consumption and meaning, and thus culture, cannot be separated from each other but arise together through social contexts and processes of parenting and socializing with others. Children, in this view, are not so much socialized into becoming one specific kind of consumer as they are seen as entering into social relationships with and through goods and their associations (Cook, 2010: 70 [emphasis in original]).

In contrast with consumer socialisation theory, which sets out an unambiguous endpoint, the concept of commercial enculturation leaves space for the fluidity and dynamism of children’s commercial knowledge and experiences. By addressing ‘culture’ more broadly, commercial enculturation draws attention not only to national and ethnic cultures but also to those engaged in specific localities and regions, and to social class, gender and generations. This approach allows for taking into account the varied ways in which adults and children engage with products, brands, services and advertisements as well as with people, and the constant process of meaning making, which is constructed and reconstructed through social relations.

In addition to the work of Buckingham and Cook, I also draw inspiration from Johansson’s (2003, 2007, 2010) use of actor-network theory (ANT). In this thesis, I am not directly using ANT, which entails both a complex body of theory and a set of specific methods (see Callon & Latour, 1981). Rather, I use Johansson’s approach to look at social life in terms of connections, networks and flows, where not only humans but also non-humans – in the case of this thesis, commercial goods, knowledge, meanings, even the notion of childhood – perform as actors (also see Lury, 2011). The theory assumes that a network of relations is both material and semiotic. This is also

termed ontological enactment by Woolgar – a process whereby “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” (Woolgar, 2012: 39).

In this perspective, the same object undergoes different interpretations as it moves through different settings. In order to understand young children’s peer consumer culture in preschool, researchers need to be aware that the network of social relations entails not only interactions among children, but goods available in the market, household and classroom space, as well as children’s ideas, knowledge and sense of belonging (see Chapters 6 and 7). Likewise, young children’s consumption, particularly in Japan, needs to be analysed in relation to their mothers who filter children’s consumption practices (see Chapters 3 and 5). The concept of the network thus implies that social relations only exist in processes and contexts, and through a simultaneous making and re-making of meanings.