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Research NoteConsuming anomie: children and global commercial cultureLaTrobe University, B.Langer{at}latrobe.edu.au This article locates George Herbert Mead’s account of self-formation in the context of global consumer capitalism, in which the ‘generalized other’ is constructed as a desiring consumer. It argues for a sociology of consumer childhood that, via Mead, takes children’s agency as a given and explores the implications of their interaction with the symbolic resources made available by global consumer culture as mediated by the material conditions and structures of meaning encountered in everyday life. It considers the relevance of Durkheim’s argument on anomie to understanding the social and experiential implications of children’s mobilization as consumers in a market that depends on continuous expansion, and poses the question of the point at which this mobilization undermines civic possibility. It argues that the study of consumer childhood is necessarily linked to questions about the kind of society that creates and is created by the cultural constitution of children as consuming selves.
Key Words: anomie • consumer capitalism • generalized other • global self • symbolic resources
Childhood, Vol. 12, No. 2,
259-271 (2005) This article has been cited by other articles:
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