Ontological child consumption

Steve Woolgar

As a newcomer to the field of child studies and child consumption, I am struck first by the intensity of the debates and feelings about questions of consumption associated with children, and, second, by the strength of the assumptions about the nature and identity of the key actors at the heart of these debates, and especially, of course, the child. Notions of what is right for children fuel debates in policy, academia, the media, and popular culture; debates that seem to gain much of their momentum from entrenched assumptions about what is good for children, what children need, what is in children's best interests – in short what, after all, a child is.

This way of capturing the situation bears an interesting resonance with key features of a seemingly far-removed academic field: science and technology studies (STS). For, in its more enlivening manifestations, STS is precisely about challenging deeply entrenched assumptions. It has, (in)famously, courted much controversy in overturning long-held epistemological assumptions about facticity and scientific knowledge. In particular, it has stressed the importance of objects and materiality in the genesis and use of science and technology. Most recently, STS has challenged us to rethink our assumptions at the level of ontology. What are our fundamental predispositions about the status of entities in the world, and how do these organize our thinking and practice? To what extent is the entrenchment of basic assumptions about objects and entities responsible for moral positioning? Authors such as Daniel Thomas Cook (2004, 2008) have shown that some of the main difficulties in the study of child consumption stem from adopting particular assumptions about what a child is. This essay widens the discussion by considering the child as part of a nexus of objects and entities about which we make consequential assumptions. It sets out to explore whether – and if so, to what extent – some of the ontological challenges recently explored by STS in relation to objects, agency, and materiality might usefully be applied to the figure of the child in consumption.

I begin by outlining some recent developments in STS, emphasizing the STS sensibilities that are useful for challenging deeply entrenched assumptions. The second section of the essay draws on these to propose a simple typology of contrasting theoretical approaches to consumption. In relation to the particular problem of child consumption, this section emphasizes the difference between studies which treat such notions as child and object 'in context', and those which explore 'the enactment' of these entities. The third section works through some specific examples of consumption in order to illustrate the difference between the in-context and enactment approaches, and considers their relative benefits.

What is STS?

STS is a vast multidiscipline comprising contributions from, and to, at least: anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, philosophy, legal studies, communications, and media studies. STS draws upon and contributes to a wide range of intellectual currents including relativism, scepticism, (social) constructivism, actor network theory, anti- and post-essentialism, and feminist and post-feminist studies. In the course of its roughly thirty-year history, STS has enjoyed widespread influence and has been taken up in many, often unexpected, places (Woolgar et al. 2009). In particular, it turns out that STS has major implications for many key aspects of social theory and social philosophy, well beyond its original substantive focus on science and technology. In many of its manifestations STS is controversial and contentious, yet an important characteristic of the field as a whole is that there is no consensus about which are its central methods and procedures. It is a field in which there are fairly frequent disagreements and disputes: a multidiscipline that is productively at ontological child consumption war with itself. Indeed, over the course of thirty years, many of its practitioners have modified or changed their positions.

It is thus problematic simply to describe the distinguishing features of work in STS, let alone nominate the single best examples of its practice. Nonetheless, it is possible to point to three key STS sensibilities, which, while often playing out in quite different ways, capture some of the main points of the general perspective.

The first and main sensibility is a commitment to deflating grandiose theoretical concepts, abstractions, and claims – and even some ordinary ones. This is especially the case in relation to concepts and abstractions associated with science and technology. Thus, notions such as knowledge, objectivity, natural order, mathematics, experiment, and measurement are all targets for demystification. As Michael Lynch (2006) sees it, the best work in STS has successfully transformed 'knowledge' into a set of pluralized and situated practices; it has dissolved objectivity into historical usage; and it has respecified the notion of mathematics as a form of number work. However, the scope of deflation spreads well beyond the focus on honorific 'philosophical' topics. STS also challenges some of the central concepts beloved of social sciences, such as social, natural, modern, market, globalization, and governance. Thus, for example, globalization is shown to depend on ordinary devices and unremarkable objects and technologies (Thrift et al. forthcoming), governance is shown to depend on the articulation and enactment of mundane objects and practices (Woolgar & Neyland forthcoming), and so on.

The general thrust of these STS deflationary moves is to point out the considerable and significant work that goes into generating and sustaining these abstractions. This then...