Childhood and Consumer Culture

In recent years, children have become an increasingly important consumer market, and there is growing concern about the 'commercialisation' of childhood. This book, now in paperback, sheds fresh light on these debates, offering new empirical data and challenging critical perspectives on children's engagement with consumer culture from a wide range of international settings. The contributions are written both by well-known scholars and emerging researchers, and include studies of the history of children's consumption in the USA and in Europe; discussions of new theoretical and methodological approaches to studying children's consumer culture; critical analyses of the practices and strategies of contemporary marketers; sociological accounts of the contexts of children's consumption in the family and the peer group; and culturally-informed analyses of the role of consumption in children's identity formation. Taken together, these studies outline a productive new agenda for research in this field, and provide ways of moving beyond established theories and approaches. -- Back cover.