Distinction, boundaries or bridges?: Children, inequality and the uses of consumer culture

Much existing work in the sociology of culture implicitly assumes actor motivations of status and domination. Yet this theoretical consensus attends only glancingly to the flip side of such behavior: those moments when people deploy culture, not only in a mobility project, but to connect. Based on a three-year ethnography of children’s consumer culture in three diverse communities, I find that children often use consumer culture to belong—both to connect to others, and to achieve visibility in their social worlds. I contend that children’s common desires make inequality, particularly in their access to consumer goods, a challenge to the accomplishment of the connection for which they strive. Using insights from Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, I find children use processes of facework to navigate the problems arising from their differences from others, including those stemming from discrepancies in commodity possession. Out of five facework processes that I identify, I elaborate upon two that seem to challenge the notion that children seek sameness. Children’s goals for consumer culture also differed from those of (particularly affluent) adults. I suggest scholars need to reconsider their theoretical emphasis on exclusion over inclusion, and document the circumstances under which each is particularly salient. # 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.