Test Question

SHORT ANSWERS

QUESTION 1

Using your sociological imagination and the course content to date discuss the causes of poverty and how this impact childhood. Please note that your discussions must be inclusive of local/global, ideology, media, social, political and economic circumstances.

QUESTION 2

According to Singh (2000) three features of Political Economy are: …. list these and succinctly interconnect to childhood and society. Please include movies: Merchants of Cool, The Myth of the Liberal Media and course readings in your answer.

QUESTION 3

Leena Alanen (1988). “Rethinking Childhood” and Henry Jenkins (2008). “The Innocent Child and Other Modern Myths” offered several, similar insights into the absence/presence of children/childhood in the political and academic spheres. Please list 2 of these insights and critically analyze using the course material.

QUESTION 4

The four modes of production (Primitive Communism, Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism) are characterized by four specific modes of production relations. Modes of production – the significance of class: classless and class societies, band and tribal societies belong to Primitive Communism: these are classless societies, while the rest are class societies. Discuss the impact of classless and class stratification in society on childhood

QUESTION 5

What is childhood? Using the course framework, (this must be directly referenced) readings and movies critically analyzes this question/concept “What is childhood?”

QUESTION 6

What is ideology? How is it produce? Provide an example of an ideology that is prevalent about childhood.

The Sociological Imagination
Chapter One: The Promise
C. Wright Mills (1959)
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within
their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often
quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by
the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up
scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain
spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats
which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of
continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and
the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a
worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person
is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new
heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a
store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without
understanding both.

Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and
institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups
and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between
the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually
know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of
history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential
to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural
transformations that usually lie behind them.

Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many people been so totally exposed at so fast a
pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes
as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly
becoming ‘merely history.’ The history that now affects every individual is world history. Within
this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind is
transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful.
Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Revolutions
occur; people feel the intimate grip of new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are
smashed to bits – or succeed fabulously. After two centuries of ascendancy, capitalism is shown
up as only one way to make society into an industrial apparatus. After two centuries of hope,
even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind. Everywhere in the
underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become urgent
demands. Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and of violence
become total in scope and bureaucratic in form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the super-

nation at either pole concentrating its most coordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation
of World War Three.

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of people to orient themselves in
accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, people often
sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are
ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary people feel they cannot
cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot
understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That – in defense of selfhood – they
become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private individuals? Is it any wonder that
they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?

It is not only information that they need – in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their
attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that
they need – although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy.

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use
information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in
the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to
contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to
expect of what may be called the sociological imagination.

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in
terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It
enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often
become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern
society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are
formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit
troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.

The first fruit of this imagination – and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it – is
the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by
locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming
aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in
many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans capacities for supreme
effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of
reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of ‘human nature’ are frighteningly
broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in
some society; that he lives out a biography, and lives it out within some historical sequence. By
the fact of this living, he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the
course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between
the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is
the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer – turgid, polysyllabic,
comprehensive; of E. A. Ross – graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile

Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is the quality of all that is intellectually
excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen’s brilliant and ironic insight, to Joseph
Schumpeter’s many-sided constructions of reality; it is the basis of the psychological sweep of
W. E. H. Lecky no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber. And it is the signal of
what is best in contemporary studies of people and society.

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their
intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific
problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social
reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their
work have consistently asked three sorts of questions:

(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components,
and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order?
Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?

(2) Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is
changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole?
How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical
period in which it moves? And this period – what are its essential features? How does it differ
from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making?

(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what
varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and
repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of `human nature’ are revealed in the conduct
and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for ‘human
nature’ of each and every feature of the society we are examining?

Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a
creed – these are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the
intellectual pivots of classic studies of individuals in society – and they are the questions
inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is
the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological;
from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the
world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil
industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal
and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the
relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and
historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which she has her quality
and her being.

That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and women now
hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves
as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part,
contemporary humanity’s self-conscious view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent
stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power

of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By
its use people whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if
suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar.
Correctly or incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with
adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that
once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity
for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a
transvaluation of values: in a word, by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the
cultural meaning of the social sciences.

Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between
‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure.’ This distinction is an
essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science.

Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her
immediate relations with others; they have to do with one’s self and with those limited areas of
social life of which one is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the
resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the
scope of one’s immediate milieu – the social setting that is directly open to her personal
experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished
by an individual are felt by her to be threatened.

Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the
range of her inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the
institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap
and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public
matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about
what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without
focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it
cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary
people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it
involves what Marxists call ‘contradictions’ or ‘antagonisms.’

In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is unemployed,
that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the individual,
his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15
million people are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within
the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has
collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require
us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal
situation and character of a scatter of individuals.

Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to
die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the
military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war’s termination. In short, according to one’s
values, to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one’s death in it

meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of people
it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and religious
institutions, with the unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.

Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but
when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts,
this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the
family and other institutions that bear upon them.

Or consider the metropolis – the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the great city.
For many members of the upperclass the personal solution to ‘the problem of the city’ is to have
an apartment with private garage under it in the heart of the city and forty miles out, a house by
Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled
environments – with a small staff at each end and a private helicopter connection – most people
could solve many of the problems of personal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this,
however splendid, does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses. What
should be done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units, combining
residence and work? Refurbish it as it stands? Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and build new
cities according to new plans in new places? What should those plans be? And who is to decide
and to accomplish whatever choice is made? These are structural issues; to confront them and to
solve them requires us to consider political and economic issues that affect innumerable milieux.

In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment
becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as war is inherent in the nation-state system
and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in her restricted milieu
will be powerless – with or without psychiatric aid – to solve the troubles this system or lack of
system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little
slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory
marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped
megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped
society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth.

What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural
changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to
look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the
institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with
one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be
capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to
possess the sociological imagination.

KEYCONCEPTS/.ASSL~ONS IN POL mc.u.ECONO}.lY

How human society bcgius: the primacy of pmdUaioo pmce:ss.

In OMer ro survive. human beings IDU$t procJua;

Production = modification of narure;
‘Nothing is mOle unnatucaI t.bm natun: in its natual foun’

Product:ioo Process by human beings – two features:

a) Use of tools fa necessity due ro the mcxphoIogial cbaracteristics/limitatioas ofbuman beings];

human beings. not only the tool usgs. but also the tooI”makers.

b) production is not an individual. but a cooperative exme

Cooperation;

Coopctation requires communication;

which gives tise to language;

moreover, cooperation requUes noJ:lJlS to regulate intecpe:tsonal relations and social bonds.

Three Features of Political Economy

iJ Materialism: in Poltial Economy, when we talk of society, we include not only human beings in

relation to one another. but human beings and their ‘matcs:W conditions’.

Material conditions = Natural environment and tools.

It’s not that Sociology is UDaw:m: of ~e significance of the material conditions, but its conceptual

scheme to define social strucrure and change does not include the material conditions [acepting technology in a

limited sense).

In Political Economy, the Dl3terial conditions and hWJWl relations ate intrinsically connected – hence

the name matcriaJism.

1

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iI] Dialetics: another signi6C:mt feature P~Political Economy dialectics [wbich is an apptoach).

DiaJectiaI approach bas three assumptions:

. a] The ~”S[em [i.e.. social stmcture] msas as a Ewk;

b] Th~ ::ystem is COQstUJdr mann
c] The chilQ~ in the $ptem is cat!$ed primaribr by tbeiiumw factors, ie, the principal source of

c:lwlge.is fowltl in the intemal COntIadictioDS [of the System).

iij Hb-ro.rical: because society is cOos12ntly cbmging. it can only be studied historically;

historic::d specificity – an essential dement o.fPo.Jirical Economy;

What is historical specificity? the toWity of ID2terial conditions and htlID2n relations and ideas at a given

point of time in a giVen place; .

Hence; in Political Economy, there’s no.thing like ‘human society’ [in genetaIJ as such, 12ther, a ‘§pt;Ci6c’

~ [specific in teons of time and space].

Now, if you combine the al»ve three features, you get a proper view of Political Econmy, i.e.,

Dialectical and HistoriCil Materialism.

MODE OF PRODUCTION

The [analyticaIJ tam used in Political Econo.my to. deno.te the to.tality of material Co.nditions and human

relatio.ns and- ideas at a particular point o.f time and place is not society o.r social structme, but a Mode of

Production.

Mode o.fProduction consists of a) the base [InfrastIUcnlfe] and, b] the supetstructw:e..

A) Base: it consists o.f two. elements:

ij the means of production – natutal resow:ces and technology.

ill the relations of productio.n consist of the relationship with the means o.f production. that i…. the

system of OWDeIShip and control [access to.] the means of

production;

2

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anti the !eIatioos among human beings that an: deta:mined by their ftI:atioDsbip with the means of

plOducti()o.

Thus. in a society where the means of production ate owned and contmDed commuoaUy” aQowing

r:vet:y member of the community an equal a~ the rd2tions among members of the o>mmunity wiD be equal

On the contr.uy. in a society with differential access to the mcaris of production. the members of the society will

be divided into unequal groups – those who own and control the means of production, and others who -do ouL

BJ Superstructure:: it consists of the political relations. social’ institutions (eg. &may. neighbowhoodJ.

and ideology;

PRIMACY OF TIlE RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION IN A MODE OFPRODUCIlON:

Between the means of production and the relations of production, relations of production are primary;

a particular mode of productioo is chancterized primarily in teans of the ~ relations of

production;

thus, the four modes production (primitive Communism. Slavery, Feudalism. Capitalism] are

characterized by four specific fonDS of production relations.

MODES OF PRODUCTION AND 1HE SIGNIFICANCE OF a..ASS: CLASSLESS AND a..ASS

SOCIETIES

Band and Tribal societies belong to Primitive Communism. it; they are classless societies, while the rest

are class societies.

[More about class later 00 – when we discuss the stratification in band societies].

A WORD ABour IDEOLOGY [TIlE SYS1EM OF IDEAS]

3

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Ideas or coosciousncss – DOt independent of the material conditions;

ideru; do Qotpro(Juce human beings, ather. hUDWl beings produce their~

they produce .ideas the.~ w::ay they produce linen/steel; in other wonls, ideas :are not independent of

the general process of production.
.’

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International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 16, No. 2, Winter 2002 ( C© 2002)

Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis

Robert J. Lieber∗,‡ and Ruth E. Weisberg†

Culture in its various forms now serves as a primary carrier of globalization
and modern values, and constitutes an important arena of contestation for
national, religious, and ethnic identity. Although reactions in Europe, Japan,
and other societies where modern values prevail, tend to be symbolic, in areas
of the developing world, especially in Muslim countries where traditional
values and radically different notions of identity and society predominate,
reactions tend to be very intense and redirected at external targets through
forms of transference and scapegoating. Ultimately, this is not so much a
clash between civilizations as a clash within civilizations.

KEY WORDS: culture; globalization; identity; transference; backlash.

GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE

Globalization and its discontents has taken on huge significance in the
aftermath of September 11th. Driven by the end of the Cold War, a dramatic
surge in international trade, investment and finance, and the onset of the
information revolution, the subject had attracted growing attention for more
than a decade. However, the traumatic events of 9/11, the nihilistic rage
evident in the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the issues that
have arisen in its aftermath provide an enormous new impetus.

Until very recently, analyses of globalization have emphasized eco-
nomics and politics rather than culture. Definitions of globalization abound,

∗Professor of Government & Foreign Service, Department of Government, Georgetown Uni-
versity, Washington, DC.
†Dean, School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, Watt Hall 103, Los Angeles, CA
90089-0292.
‡Correspondence should be directed to Robert J. Lieber, Professor of Government & Foreign
Service, Department of Government, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057-1034;
e-mail: lieberr@georgetown.edu.

273

0891-4486/02/1200-0273/0 C© 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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274 Lieber and Weisberg

but for our purposes it can be described as the increasing global integra-
tion of economies, information technology, the spread of global popular
culture, and other forms of human interaction.1 In the polarized discus-
sion of the subject, one side has tended to be relentlessly optimistic and,
at least until the September attacks, enthusiasm about globalization as a
whole was sometimes accompanied by an almost blissful naivete about the
information revolution as an unalloyed blessing. In the words of Bill Clinton
shortly before leaving the presidency, “In the new century, liberty will be
spread by cell phone and cable modem.”2 On the other side, globaliza-
tion inspires dire warnings about its disruptions or dangers as well as or-
ganized protests, editorials and marches against its perceived inequities and
abuses.

As an artist and a political scientist, our contribution to this discussion
is to probe the intersection of culture and politics. The effect is synergis-
tic, in that by doing so we gain insights that neither a focus on culture nor
politics alone can provide. An apt analogy exists with the study of political
economy, which explores the interplay of politics and economics in shaping
international affairs. Often, examining events through a combination of two
disciplines provides texture and understanding in ways that an exclusive dis-
ciplinary view does not allow.3 As a result, the combination of perspectives
from culture and politics can offer comparably rich insights. While others
have made reference to culture, they have tended to privilege politics and
economics. One author who has emphasized culture is Samuel Huntington.
In his writing on the “Clash of Civilizations,”4 he has argued that with the end
of the Cold War and its contest of ideologies, and as a result of disruptions
brought by modernization, urbanization and mass communications, the fun-
damental source of international conflict will not be primarily ideological or
economic but cultural. However, our own view of culture is broader than
that of Huntington and encompasses folk and high culture as well as pop-
ular culture. Moreover in our judgment, the ultimate clash is less between
civilizations than within them.

The impact of globalization on culture has been viewed primarily as
a side effect. Nonetheless, for those absorbed with the subject, reactions
tend to be deeply divided. For example, one observer has asserted that,
“. . . globalization promotes integration and the removal not only of cultural
barriers but many of the negative dimensions of culture. Globalization is a
vital step toward both a more stable world and better lives for the people
within it.”5 Others, however, have treated globalization of culture as an evil
because of their fears of the pervasive power and duplicity of multinational
corporations or international institutions such as the International Monetary
Fund (IMF). In recent years, this reaction has been manifest in sometimes
violent demonstrations when the leaders of the world’s richest countries

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 275

(e.g., the G-8, the European Union) have held their meetings—as evident
in the streets of Seattle, Washington, Genoa and Barcelona.

And who among us would not be disturbed by, for example, the echo
of rap music in an old Barcelona neighborhood, the demise of local food
products and neighborhood shops, or the proliferation of the same brands
and chain stores from San Francisco to Santiago to Shanghai? Yet beyond
unwarranted optimism or equally exaggerated negativity there is an under-
lying dynamic. We seek to explicate the deeper reasons for these strong but
often oppositional reactions that people have to the effects of globalization
on what they identify as their culture. By integrating perspectives from both
culture and politics, we find that in an increasingly globalized world, culture
has become a central arena of contestation. Culture takes on this pivotal
position not only because of its intrinsic significance, but precisely because
it has become so bound up with the most fundamental questions of human
identity in its many dimensions: personal, ethnic, religious, social and na-
tional. As a result, controversies about culture often have less to do with
surface level phenomena: McDonalds, American tastes in music, language,
art and lifestyle, than with deeper forms of alienation that owe more to
the changes and disruptions brought by modernization and globalization. In
some cultures, especially in parts of the Middle East, South Asia and Africa,
there is an important added dimension of existential rage against corrupt and
authoritarian regimes that, with the breakdown of older traditional social,
political and economic relationships, have failed to meet the needs of their
own societies. In these regions, resentments expressed about modernity, the
West or America are often a sublimation of rage against more deep rooted
problems of identity.

In the western world and in more prosperous regions of East Asia and
Latin America, where domestic problems of acculturation are much less
acute, cultural alienation tends to be based primarily on an uneasiness about
the ubiquity of American culture and influence as well as on U.S. primacy
more generally. These resentments often are less the preoccupation of the
general public than of intellectual elites, who react against cultural intrusions
into their own established realms and prerogatives. At times, such reactions
can approach self-parody, as in the assertion that “resistance to the hege-
monic pretenses of hamburgers is, above all, a cultural imperative.”6 Specific
criticisms thus can have more to do with what the U.S., seems to symbol-
ize than with any specific characteristic of American culture or policy in
itself.

We begin this essay by analyzing the impact of a virtually unprece-
dented degree of American cultural primacy. We next consider culture as an
arena of contestation, noting the contradictory impulses of both attraction
and repulsion as well as the phenomena of differentiation and assimilation.

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276 Lieber and Weisberg

These reactions can be observed across the range of mass culture, folk cul-
ture and high culture. We then examine culture as a problem of identity
in an era of globalization. We find that although both globalization and
American primacy evoke cultural backlash, the reaction takes very dif-
ferent forms in modern societies than elsewhere. We explore two distinct
causes of cultural anxiety and turmoil. One of these, the material effects
of globalization and modernity, including the consumer economy, the in-
formation revolution and the mass media, provides both a window to the
wider world and a challenge to traditional ways of doing things. The other,
Western values, is often more profound in its impact, even though more
intangible.

Cultural reactions to globalization in Europe, Japan and elsewhere
where modern values prevail, tend to be more symbolic and less extreme
and often have more to do with status resentments than with disagreements
about fundamental values. But in large areas of the developing world and
especially in many Muslim countries, reactions to globalization and to the
U.S. as the embodiment of capitalism, modernity and mass culture tend to
be much more intense. We posit that in these societies, radically different
notions of values and identity are played out in the cultural realm, with much
of the impetus stemming from rage at corrupt regimes and failed societies,
which is then redirected at external targets through forms of transference. By
transference we are referring to the process by which group fears or resent-
ments are shifted onto other entities or groups. Intense cultural resentments
thus come to be focused upon actors, especially the U.S., the West and Israel,
that bear little relationship to the problems at hand yet provide convenient
scapegoats.

CULTURE AND AMERICAN PRIMACY

In the 21st century, the United States enjoys a degree of international
preponderance that has rarely been seen in any era. Historians, strate-
gists, journalists and cultural observers have called attention to the phe-
nomenon in increasingly hyperbolic terms. In the words of one recent ob-
server, “We dominate every field of human endeavor from fashion to film
to finance. We rule the world culturally, economically, diplomatically and
militarily as no one has since the Roman Empire.”7 The United States,
with less than 5% of the world’s population, accounts for at least one-
fourth of its economic activity. It leads in the information revolution. It
accounts for some 75% of the Nobel prizewinners in science, medicine and
economics.8 It predominates in business and banking and in the number and
quality of its research universities. Its defense budget is larger than those

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 277

of the next fifteen countries combined. And there are few signs that any
other international actor will soon become a true competitor of the United
States.

This American primacy is the product of the country’s own attributes
(population, economic strength, technology, military preponderance, social
dynamism), as well as of the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. With the
collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. no longer faces
any country possessing even remotely comparable power. For much of the
period since at least the mid-17th century, international politics had been
characterized by balance of power rivalry involving competition among a
number of great powers (typically France, Britain, Russia, Spain, Austria,
Prussia and later Germany.) After World War II, world politics became
bipolar with the onset of the Cold War and the superpower confrontation
between the US and USSR. Since the early 1990s, however, the United
States has occupied a unique position, and its degree of primacy has grown
rather than diminished with time. Moreover, the very scale of America’s
relative power compared to other countries tends to discourage challenges
from other would-be world powers.9

Influence in the cultural arena is more difficult to gauge than in the
economic or military realms. Although many of the criteria are less specific
and more subjective, here too American preponderance is evident. An astute
German diplomat, Karsten Voight, long acquainted with the United States,
has aptly characterized the pervasiveness of this influence in the cultural
realm:

The USA has long been setting standards on a worldwide basis, not just for the
general populace, but has been leading the field in the classic cultural spheres, for
example in research and teaching, or film and modern art. Its global role is rooted in
a hitherto unknown blend of economic power, the ability to set the global cultural
agenda and military superiority.10

Moreover, this influence is evident not only in what Voight refers to as the
classic cultural spheres, but is even more pronounced in mass culture, where
American popular music, casual clothing, movies, advertising media, fast
food and sports (notably basketball) have become pervasive.

A particularly ubiquitous feature that confers enormous influence is
the spread of American English as an international lingua franca. A century
ago, French was the language of diplomacy and German was the leading sci-
entific language as well as extensively used in Central and Eastern Europe.
By the mid 20th century, Russian was the predominant second language
throughout the Soviet sphere in Central Asia and in Eastern Europe. Now,
however, it is English that prevails. For example, at the United Nations,
120 countries specify English as the language in which correspondence to
their missions should be addressed. By contrast some forty countries (mostly

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278 Lieber and Weisberg

former French colonies) choose French, while twenty designate Spanish.11

In much of the world, English has become widely used and is by far the
leading choice for those who aspire to communicate outside their own local-
ity. English is the language shared by the different communities of India
(or at least by their educated, commercial or political elites), it is over-
whelmingly the second language in China and is often taught as a required
subject in primary or secondary schools throughout Europe and Asia. Sto-
ries abound of bilateral meetings of foreign leaders who are not fluent in
each other’s languages, conversing in English which they share as a second
tongue.

The inroads made by American English have been growing with glob-
alization and as a consequence of America’s power and influence.
Approximately 380 million people use English as their first language and
another 250 million as their second language. A billion people are learning
English, and approximately one-third of the world’s population have some
exposure to it. English is the predominant language of the European Union,
and more than 85% of international organizations employ it as one of their
official languages.12 To the intense irritation of French cultural and political
elites and despite annual expenditures of some $1 billion per year to promote
that country’s language and culture, French is now ranked only ninth among
the world’s most widely spoken languages. And four of France’s most im-
portant and dynamic international businesses, Alcatel, Total-FinaElf, Airbus
and Vivendi, have made English their official language.13

Entertainment is another cultural realm in which American influence
is pervasive. This takes various forms. Hollywood films capture more than
70% of the Western European audience and have a huge market share
elsewhere, in some cases as much as 90%.14 Here too, France has sought
to stem the tide through regulations and subsidies. Paris has ardently as-
serted a “cultural exception” in trade negotiations, and under prevailing
international agreements the countries of the European Union can impose
quotas on imported American music and television programs as well as
movies. France requires that at least 40% of TV and radio programs be
made domestically and maintains an elaborate system for subsidizing its
movie industry.15

The results, however, are modest. In 2001, only four of the top ten films
at the French box office were French, led by the light comedy “Amelie.”16 Yet
this was an improvement on the previous year, when only one out of twenty
French-made films was a hit and Hollywood swept 91% of the country’s film
revenues among summer audiences.17 The heyday of French cinema in the
1930s and again in the late 1950s and the 1960s, when its directors, actors
and films were a significant presence in world cinema, is a fading memory.
When French films have been at all competitive, this is mostly a result of

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 279

Table 1. Western European Film Statistics (1999)

Host country American market share

Germany 76.0%
Spain 64.2
France 54.1
Italy 53.6
U.K. 86.0∗
Denmark 58.7
∗Data for UK for 1998.
SOURCE: Media Sales, Milan Italy, www.mediasalles.it, adapted
from tabular data in Tyler Cowen, “Why Hollywood Rules the
World (and Should We Care?)” in Correspondence, Summer/Fall
2001, p. 7.

embracing those features for which Hollywood has been criticized. In the
words of one French critic:

French cinema is allowing itself everything American cinema used to be blamed
for: sex, violence, epic-scale historical reconstruction. All that distinguishes France’s
biggest hits of 2000 from some American B-movie is that the car chase is happening in
Marseille, not Los Angeles, among Peugeots, not Chryslers. And the repetitiveness
we once condemned in such hit film series as Rocky, Rambo, and Halloween, is
becoming a more French practice too . . .18

Elsewhere in Europe, the pervasiveness of American films is even more
evident. For example in Berlin, following the opening of a huge business and
entertainment complex at the Potsdammer Platz, a multiplex cinema there
featured Hollywood films on eight of its nine screens. The sole exception
was a German action film with an English title, “Crazy,” clearly comparable
in content to the French movies cited above in their embrace of Hollywood
clichés.19 Overall, in five leading countries of the EU, the U.S. market share
of the cinema audience has ranged from just under 54% in Italy to 76% in
Germany and 86% in the United Kingdom. (See Table 1.)

CULTURE AS AN ARENA OF CONTESTATION

As we have previously suggested, culture understood as popular, folk
or high art has become a major arena of contestation as conflicts of national-
ism and ethnicity are played out in the cultural realm. Certain concepts are
especially illuminating in the analysis of cultural conflict and change. First,
attraction and toleration as contrasted to repulsion and suppression of cul-
tural expression; and second, the sometimes simultaneous impulses toward
differentiation and assimilation.

In regard to the first dynamic, in the spring of 2001, the world learned of
the deliberate demolition of two 5th to 7th century giant cliff side carvings

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280 Lieber and Weisberg

of the Buddha. Although these artifacts had been designated a World His-
toric Monument by the UN, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers and other Is-
lamic militants used artillery and explosives to demolish them. They also
destroyed with sledgehammers much of the Buddhist patrimony stored or
displayed in Afghan museums. This was especially shocking for contempo-
rary Westerners, who tend to value cultural artifacts very highly and who
generally neutralize the ideology or beliefs inherent in sculpture or painting
by redefining it as belonging to the category of art, where it tends to acquire
great secular and monetary value. However, 20th century Western history
also includes haunting episodes of the symbolic destruction of culture, most
notably in the Nazi book burnings.

The destruction of the ancient Buddhas is a dramatic and appalling
episode of cultural suppression. Indeed it has been referred to as “a cultural
and historical Hiroshima” in a Washington Post article. The same story quotes
notes from a meeting between Taliban officials and Islamic militants: “The
Taliban authorities agreed the destruction of [the statues] is an Islamic act
that would make the Islamic world happy.”20

The spectrum of responses to cultural phenomena is very broad. It
ranges, at one end, from the extreme just cited, through hostility to toleration
and attraction at the other end. Most interestingly, attraction and repression
can happen simultaneously. Human beings seem to respond to a number of
siren songs in this area: enforced rarity, the exotic, the transgressive and the
forbidden among others. Dick Hebdige’s book about the way subcultures
affect the dominant culture, especially in regard to the cycling of styles and
artifacts of subcultures into the mainstream, is pertinent here.21 There are
many historical examples. For instance, in 18th century Spain, the colorful
world of the Maja, with its brigands and courtesans, influenced the high cul-
ture of the court in the time of Goya. In the late 19th century, the demimonde
in Paris made a huge imprint on popular culture and the Impressionist and
Post-Impressionist art movements as well, particularly in the works of Degas
and Toulouse-Lautrec. A dynamic of attraction/repulsion between high cul-
ture and associated elites and transgressive outsiders is a phenomenon that
periodically emerges. The popularity of movies about gangsters and outlaws
is no accident.

What is the mechanism at work here? Reason may argue for one set
of choices, and emotion or a deep-seated sense of attraction or identity
may press for another. Samuel Huntington has written that “cultural char-
acteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compro-
mised and resolved than political and economic ones.”22 This may help ex-
plain why nations, and ethnic and religious groups as well as individuals
sometimes make choices that appear so irrational and against their best
interests.

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 281

The other pair of often simultaneous tendencies that characterize the
reception of culture involves impulses toward differentiation and assimila-
tion. Both tendencies are dynamic. We are constantly borrowing, imitating
and incorporating just as we are distinguishing and differentiating ourselves
by innovative, exclusive or singular expressions.

When culture is discussed in relation to globalization, it is most of-
ten American popular or mass culture that is the referent, and the rhetoric
about it is highly charged. For example, Louis Hebron and John F. Stack
describe the negative view of the globalization of mass culture in this way:
“This foreign invasion and assimilation of cosmopolitan consumerism with
its materialistic orientation, indulgent values, moral bankruptcy and frater-
nizing of nationalities is a prescription of cultural genocide because of the
process’ potential to vulgarize and/or destroy the rich diversity of human
civilizations.”23

This is similar to the argument of antiglobalization advocates alleging
the destruction of biodiversity by American corporate interests. In the view
of these critics, part of the richness of human culture is its variety, its trueness
to its own cultural roots, but global popular culture dominated by American
products and ideas destroys this diversity of cultural production. So there
is fear and backlash against what is viewed as a leveling force, a sweep-
ing homogeneity or Disneyfication of culture. The rhetoric surrounding the
globalization of culture, sometimes compares it to colonialism, as evident
for example, in the criticism by President Mohammed Khatami of Iran:

[Globalization is] a destructive force threatening dialogue between cultures. The new
world order and globalization that certain powers are trying to make us accept, in
which the culture of the entire world is ignored, looks like a kind of neocolonialism.
This imperialism threatens mutual understanding between nations and communica-
tion and dialogue between cultures.24

Rather than mounting a critique of the globalization of culture, we pro-
pose to analyze historical and political causes which make culture a major
arena of contestation for nationalism and ethnicity. Three partially overlap-
ping cultural arenas are encompassed in this analysis, first and most obvi-
ously, popular culture; second, folk or indigenous culture; and lastly, an arena
that is not often discussed in this context, high culture.

Popular culture is the most obvious realm because there is a pervasive
influence of American music, fashion, food, movies, TV, all tied to open
markets and global consumerism. This influence is in part a reflection of
what is often called “soft power.”25 The U.S. does not force anyone to use
these American products, but they have, nevertheless, enormous popularity
and consumer attraction. Although U.S. products have the advantage of well
capitalized production and distribution, as Richard Pells indicates, American
capitalism is not the only or even the most important explanation for the “soft

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282 Lieber and Weisberg

power” of the United States. In Pell’s words, “What Americans have done
more brilliantly than their competitors overseas is repackage the cultural
products we receive from abroad and then transmit them to the rest of the
planet.”26 Our history as a nation of immigrants has taught us to synthesize
and incorporate the cultural and popular expressions of a wide range of
nationalities and ethnicities. We are the consumers of foreign intellectual
and artistic influences par excellence.

“American” is as much a style as a point of origin. Many “American”
products are made elsewhere, and there is also the influence of French,
British, Japanese, and German products or imitations of them. Japan is per-
haps the most distinctive global alternative to American culture. An exam-
ple, is the “Hello Kitty” phenomenon. There are shops in malls across the
United States that have “Hello Kitty” products, which were originally de-
signed for little Japanese girls. They are by design sentimental, plastic and
pink and quite popular with little girls in the United States, many of whose
backpacks and pencil cases are part of the “Hello Kitty” line. And fascinat-
ingly, there is a subculture on the West Coast with its own flagship magazine
called Giant Robot, which comments on this and similar phenomena of re-
verse cultural influence.

Although, as noted above, American movies have a huge influence
abroad, the action films that dominate international markets represent the
reverse phenomenon. They are manifestations of a global market affecting
the production of American film making. Half or more of the gross rev-
enues for some Hollywood films come from foreign audiences. As a result,
and because younger moviegoers make up a disproportionate share of the
audience, American action movies, especially those aimed at Asian markets,
are characterized more by their violence or explosiveness (which requires
little translation) than by their dialogue. The de-emphasis on language and
the tendency toward highly demarcated good and evil is appealing across
many cultures.

Folk or indigenous culture is another arena where observers lament the
effects of globalization as damaging to indigenous cultural production. Yet
the concerned parties are often not from the cultures in question. There is
a great deal of idealization of the cultures involved, as folkways tend to be
viewed as pure, authentic and unchanging. Folk art, rather than demonstrat-
ing purity, provides an excellent case study of the dynamics of assimilation
and differentiation as it is usually a mixture of local production and aes-
thetics with outside influences. Two instances from Navajo culture illustrate
this point. The rugs we view as so characteristic of the Navajos were greatly
influenced by the late 19th century discovery on the part of the Navajos
of German aniline dyes. If we examined the rugs made before the Navajos
adopted the use of these dyes, they would not seem to us to be Navajo rugs

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 283

because of their subdued appearance, a consequence of the more limited
color range obtained by dying the wool with vegetable matter. Another ex-
ample is the great bifurcation of design in Navajo jewelry which was heavily
influenced by native aesthetics on one hand and tourist preferences on the
other. What they did for themselves tended to be very heavy and bold be-
cause they were designing jewelry emblematic of power. The more delicate,
graceful, somewhat subdued jewelry was geared to tourist preferences. The
Navajos were quite willing to create two modes of production geared to two
different audiences, which is a sophisticated marketing technique. These
are clear examples of cultural output influenced by foreign technology and
tourist preferences. Among other things, we thus ought to view folk culture
as more complex and more calculated than it is generally conceived.

While popular culture dominates the public discourse about global-
ization, high culture also acts as an arena of contestation. An additional
reason for focusing on high culture is its connection to the governing elites
in any country. A smaller number of influential people involved in interna-
tional or global dynamics can weigh more than a larger number involved in
popular culture. There are numerous focal points for international cultural
presentation, exchange and collaboration. They include biennials, festivals,
architectural competitions and the internet. One of the most visible sites for
global high culture is the museum, which has traditionally been seen as an
aid to civic, national, or ethnic identity. Typically, museums came into being
through the secularization of royal, court or church collections, which were
made public in national or municipal forums.

The history of the Museum Bilbao in the Basque region of northern
Spain illustrates a number of the issues we are addressing, such as identity
formation and assimilation versus differentiation. In the late 19th century,
the elites of Bilbao were in intellectual ferment, characteristic of that era,
concerning what they viewed as a choice between their local folkloric legacy
and the cosmopolitan culture of the late 19th century. Very similar tensions
developed in different locales around the world. Nations were becoming
much more aware of their folkloric heritage and the field of ethnography
was expanding. In Germany, where the subject had already become well
established as an aspect of the Romantic movement of the 1830s, people
increasingly collected and valued folk material as a source of local or ethnic
pride. At the same time, because of a number of different phenomena in-
cluding world fairs, there was a growing sense of positive identification with
national cultural production. And beyond the nation-state, a cosmopoli-
tan art world was coming into being. One result of this more international
awareness and diffusion of information was the rapid spread, for instance, of
French Impressionism as it came to influence American, Spanish and Italian
art by the last decade of the 19th century.

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284 Lieber and Weisberg

Note that there are at least three related terms pertinent to this dis-
cussion that seem to overlap in meaning but have different valences and
connotations. These are the words cosmopolitan, international, and global.
They can all be applied to culture and they all carry different baggage. The
term cosmopolitan, arising in the second half of the 19th century, had a
worldly, urbane, sophisticated sense to it. It was associated with high culture
and particularly with things French. Cosmopolitanism in Iran, Russia and
the United States in the 19th century embodied French cultural dominance.
In the 20th century, that mutated into a negative connotation, especially
within the Communist world, as in “rootless cosmopolitan,” while lately it
seems back in favor as a term of approbation. Internationalism, while iden-
tified with Western culture, is not dominated by one particular country. It is
also a word more applicable to the 20th century. In the art world, it referred
to the elite style of a period, although it also had an idealistic connota-
tion. In architecture, the “international style” was a manifestation of 20th
century modernism, and in the realm of painting, abstract expressionism
exemplified internationalism in the immediate post-World War Two period.
Globalization, in turn, has recently acquired more negative connotations
and is less strictly tied to high culture, as it has come to be identified with
consumerism and Disneyfication.

The Basques, with their distinctive culture and language, were, and still
are, a particular blend of ethnicity, cosmopolitanism, anti-Spanish, and anti-
Madrid sentiments. In the late 19th century, their choice was between a strong
ethnic identity and a more cosmopolitan one, and oscillation between those
two poles has characterized their situation throughout the 20th and into
the 21st century. In the 1990s, a group of industrial and civic leaders from
the region decided that internationalism was the best choice for Bilbao,
and became very interested in having their city become the site for a new
European Guggenheim Museum. To quote Selma Holo’s Beyond the Prado:

It would enable the civic leaders, with the assistance of a small group of advocates to
convince enough of the elite population of the city that rejection of the Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao, would be tantamount to scuttling any chance for Bilbao to assume a
modern identity or protect the regional identity. These new institutions were meant
to prove that the intent of the politicians to support internationalism would not
preclude their aggressive support for Basque cultural identity reinforcement.27

So Basque identity and a modern identity became linked: the Museum
would solve both problems. As in the 19th Century, much of this attitude was
fueled by a rejection of Central Spain and Spanish identity. Ironically, Basque
elites traded off centralist Spain for centralist New York. In the end the
Guggenheim Bilbao adopted an internationalist program for the museum,
and regional artists of some quality were not shown there. The idea that
Basque cultural identity would be promoted and supported was forgotten

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 285

once the spectacular building designed by Frank Gehry became a
reality.

However, the payoff for Bilbao has been an extraordinary surge in cul-
tural tourism. Bilbao provides a perfect illustration of the late 20th-early
21st century importance of museums as branding a city through a cultural
attraction and, in the case of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, giving it a global
presence. The Guggenheim with its various branches worldwide had approx-
imately three million visitors in 2001, which compares favorably with giants
like the Louvre with some six million visitors.

Biennials, music festivals, international architectural competitions, and
cultural tourism are among the many ways nations or cities project them-
selves into the international art world. In contrast to the jockeying for po-
sition among cultural elites of many nations, there are more radical forms
of contestation. As noted above, the Taliban banned culture altogether and
severely punished transgressors, destroying an estimated 80% of Afghan cul-
tural artifacts in the process. They burned more than 1000 reels of Afghan
films, and a prominent musician who was caught playing his instrument
was warned that if he were caught again, they would cut off his hands.28

Afghanistan is an extreme case, but it shows how virulent cultural contesta-
tion can become.

CULTURE AS A PROBLEM OF IDENTITY IN AN ERA
OF GLOBALIZATION

Both globalization and American primacy evoke cultural backlash. But
the character and magnitude of this reaction differ greatly depending on
the societies in which they occur. Moreover, this reaction takes very differ-
ent forms in the West and in other modern societies than in the developing
world and especially in Muslim countries. The reason is that cultural anxiety
and turmoil are a consequence of two related but distinct phenomena. First,
there are the material and economic effects of globalization and moder-
nity. Among these are urbanization, the appearance of modern consumer
goods, and the impact of the mass media, including satellite television, movie
cassettes and the internet. These provide a window to—and sometimes dis-
torted impressions of—the outside world. A second element, western values,
is more intangible but often more profound in its impact. These values in-
clude, among others, scientific reasoning, secularism, religious toleration, in-
dividualism, freedom of expression, political pluralism, the rule of law, equal
rights for women and minorities, and openness to change. As one widely re-
spected observer has commented, the result for much of the Islamic world is
an “intractable confrontation between a theistic, land-based and traditional

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286 Lieber and Weisberg

culture, in places little different from the Europe of the Middle Ages, and
the secular material values of the Enlightenment.”29

In Europe, Canada, Japan and other societies, where modern values
prevail, cultural reactions to globalization and to American predominance
tend to be more nuanced. Intellectual, literary, artistic and political elites
often seek ways to define or reassert their own identities and importance
and their national cultures by confronting the policies and the material and
cultural influences of the United States. In part, these reactions have less to
do with Washington’s policies than with the inbalance of power and influence
between their own countries and the United States. However, there are
indications that the European public as a whole may not share these views to
the same degree, and public opinion polls in France, whose intellectuals and
officials are among Europe’s most strident critics, indicate possibly as little
as 10% of the public is anti-American.30 The critiques can become heated,
but they remain largely symbolic and are often ephemeral. Indeed, in their
use of hyperbole, they can approach caricature, at least in the case of the
French, where they can take on the appearance of an elaborate verbal and
aesthetic game, for example, in denunciations of Eurodisney as a “cultural
Chernobyl.”31

Among the different forms of cultural reaction, scapegoating and trans-
ference are especially evident, whereby cultural and economic resentments
are deflected from the original systemic causes such as globalization, mod-
ernization, urbanization, and economic rationalization, onto convenient
symbolic targets. In France these phenomena have been evident in the highly
publicized exploits of Jose Bove, an antiglobalization activist who learned his
tactics while a foreign student at the University of California at Berkeley, and
who in 1999 drove a tractor into a McDonald’s restaurant in the provincial
town of Millau. However, the presence of more than 700 of these fast food
restaurants in the country suggests that French consumers in large numbers
find their own reasons to patronize the franchise.

While Europe and the United States share many cultural values and
have a rich history of cross-fertilization, a contrasting component of Euro-
pean cultural reaction is evident in distrust of other facets of modernity. In
Britain and France, as a result of deadly medical fiascos in the 1980s and
1990s, a degree of cynicism and suspicion has developed toward experts
in modern science and technology. In the French case, the reaction stems
from the government’s deliberate delay in licensing an American test for
the HIV/AIDS virus in donated blood in order to await a French-made
product. As a consequence, hundreds of people who received transfusions
during this period became infected with the deadly virus. In Britain, public
distrust reflects the “Mad Cow” disease experience in 1996, when public
health officials mistakenly assured the public that there was no danger in

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 287

eating beef from diseased animals. The backlash has recently been apparent
in the refusal of many British parents to have their infants inoculated for
measles, mumps and rubella, not because of scientific evidence, but due to
the speculation of a single doctor that the vaccine might cause autism.32 Re-
actions of this kind are also manifest, for example, in a European consumer
backlash against genetically modified (GM) crops. Evidence of harm from
products available to the public has never been documented. Nonetheless,
without any scientific confirmation, the European Union has halted approval
of new GM crops for use or import into the EU.33

In the United States, globalization has had notable effects on basic
values and beliefs. Paul Cantor, in his book Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture
in the Age of Globalization,34 explores four television series over the course
of four decades (Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek, The Simpsons, and The X-
Files) to demonstrate how globalization has undermined traditional attitudes
concerning power, authority and the role of the state.35 Cantor argues that
the traditional importance of the state and of other national institutions has
given way in the consciousness of most people (as represented, e.g., in The
Simpsons) to focus on the family, neighbors and the marketplace. Indeed,
Cantor maintains that as a result of the economic and cultural effects of
globalization, together with the impact of mass media such as cable TV, the
centrality of the nation-state in American life may be giving way to the family
and other basic social units.

Whether this trend will persist is another matter. In part, it reflects the
effects of a post-Cold War decade in which the absence of an external threat
on the scale of World War Two or the Cold War, coupled with the impact of
the information revolution and an extraordinary period of economic growth
and lavish consumer spending caused Americans and the media to focus
on ephemeral domestic stories about celebrities, life style, crime, and the
sexual peccadillos of prominent personalities. The focus, magnified by cable
television (all-Monica-all-the-time) on the sordid Clinton scandals, the O.J.
Simpson trial, the lifestyles of dot.com billionaires, and celebrity gossip were
among the most prominent cultural symbols of the 1990s. However, this
absorption, together with waning public confidence in government, was the
product of an era in which the role of the state at home and abroad seemed
less essential.

In the aftermath of the September 11th terror attacks, the persistence
of these trends is much less certain. The unprecedented nature and scope
of the assault on the U.S. homeland, the mass murder of 3000 Americans,
the very real threat from terror and weapons of mass destruction, and the
effect on the U.S. economy have impacted the lives of ordinary Americans
and may have transformative effects. The cultural impact of 9/11 can be
gauged in many ways, big and small. One is the outpouring of unabashed

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patriotic sentiment in response to the destruction of the World Trade Cen-
ter and the bravery of passengers who fought with their hijackers on the
doomed American Airlines flight #93. Other measures can be found in
increased volunteerism, the broad-based and unselfconscious display of the
flag, and in dramatic changes in public opinion. For example, trust in govern-
ment and confidence in national institutions, including the presidency and
Congress, has surged—at least temporarily—to the highest levels since the
mid-1960s.36 There has also been a perceptible shift in media tastes and in
magazines and books. One straw in the wind is the collapse of Talk mag-
azine, the brain child of celebrity editor Tina Brown.37 Another was evi-
dent in the list of nonfiction best sellers. Illustratively, six months after the
September 11th attacks, six of the top ten books were traditional or culturally
conservative works. The list included, at #1 Tom Clancy’s Shadow Warriors
(U.S. special-operations forces); #2 Bernard Goldberg’s Bias (liberal bias in
news media); David Vise’s, The Bureau and the Mole (Soviet spy Robert
Hanssen); #6 David McCullough’s John Adams (biography of the second
president); #7 Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong (failures of the Islamic
world); #8 One Nation (photos and essays on September 11th by the editors
of Life); and #10 Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West (a warning about threats
to western civilization by a right-wing columnist.)38

The impact of globalization on American culture and the United States
more broadly has had a number of contradictory effects. Until recently, glob-
alization, along with the end of the Cold War, the information revolution
and an economic boom fostered the kind of shifts described by Cantor. But
especially since September 11, 2001, Americans have discovered that key
components of globalization (technology, openness, cell phones, the Inter-
net, financial flows, modern air travel) could be used to murderous effect
against modern society, and public attitudes have shown signs of shifting in
the direction of more traditional cultural values.

Reaction to globalization and America’s role as the symbol of capital-
ism, modernity and mass culture takes a very different and more intense
form in large areas of the developing world and especially in Muslim coun-
tries. Here, the intrusion of modern western values combined with the crisis
of traditional societies in coping with economic and social change fosters a
sometimes bitter backlash and periodically virulent forms of transference
and scapegoating. Often, the forces of both attraction and repulsion are ev-
ident at the same time. This outlook, a kind of “cultural schizophrenia,” is
vividly evident in the television viewing habits of Middle Eastern youths, as
described by a close observer:

Young people in particular . . . are simultaneously seduced and repelled by Ameri-
can culture. The most popular show on MBC [the most popular Arab satellite TV
channel] is Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The same youths who shout ‘death to

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 289

America’ go home to read contraband copies of Hollywood magazines. What the
Iranian philosopher Daryush Shayegan refers to as Islam’s ‘cultural schizophrenia’—
the struggle between tradition and Western secular modernity, between fundamen-
talism and globalization—haunts the soul of many Muslims . . .”39

As another example, on September 11th, patrons at a trendy Beirut coffee
house applauded the televised pictures of the World Trade Center’s destruc-
tion, while dressed in American style clothing and gathering in an establish-
ment that would have fit within any upscale American neighborhood.40

Major conflicts that ultimately concern radically different visions of so-
ciety and identity are thus played out in the cultural realm. Though a great
deal of comment has been devoted to these reactions as stemming from
problems of poverty, environmental degradation, or in response to Ameri-
can policies, the root causes lie elsewhere. The most intense resentment of
the United States is expressed by proponents of militant Islam. The words
of Osama bin Laden are chilling in their unabashed hatred, as expressed,
for example, in his February 1998 fatwa proclaiming, “The killing of Amer-
icans and their civilian and military allies is a religious duty for each and
every Muslim to be carried out in whichever country they are found.”41

But, as Fouad Ajami has observed, what really motivates bin Laden and his
followers is rage over their inability to overthrow the existing Arab ruling
order, which they redirect at America. Ajami captures both the paradoxical
attraction and repulsion toward the United States and the bitter resent-
ment of Arabs at their own broken societies and corrupt and authoritarian
regimes:

Nothing grows in the middle between an authoritarian political order and populations
given to perennial flings with dictators, abandoned to their most malignant hatreds.
Something is amiss in an Arab world that besieges American embassies for visas and
at the same time celebrates America’s calamities.42

This rage embodies both an historical and a modern component. There
is frustration at the loss of grandeur for a civilization that once far outpaced
Europe in its achievements but has in recent centuries fallen into anger and
despair. There is a flavor of this in a bin Laden video aired in October 2001,
which revels in the destruction of the World Trade Center and calls upon
Muslims to wage war against America. The Al Qaeda leader invokes the
memory of past Arab indignities:

What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have
tasted for scores of years. Our nation [the Islamic world] has been tasting this humil-
iation and this degradation for more than 80 years.43

The reference to “80 years” would be obscure for most western audiences
but readily understood in the Arab world. The year, 1921, marked the col-
lapse of the Ottoman Empire, and thus the ultimate demise of the

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Caliphate—Muslim civil and religious rule by the successors of Muhammad,
which had lasted, at least symbolically, for nearly 1300 years. Documents
found at sites in Afghanistan abandoned by Al Qaeda fighters contained
even more explicit reference to the Caliphate, as in the words of one of the
recovered texts:

[The Caliphate] is the only and best solution to the predicaments and problems from
which Muslims suffer today and indubitable cure to the turbulence and internal
struggles that plague them. It will remedy the economic underdevelopment which
bequeathed upon us a political dependence on an atheist East and infidel West.44

What is revealing about reference to the Caliphate is not only its irrele-
vance to the “predicaments and problems from which Muslims suffer today,”
but also the notion that reestablishment of the Caliphate could somehow
solve contemporary problems of economic development. Moreover, while
bin Laden’s October video laments the carving up of the Middle East into a
series of separate states that have largely failed to cope with the challenges
of modernity, it ignores the fact that the United States had little to do with
the Ottoman breakup and the drawing of borders. That legacy is shared by
France and Britain, as the prevailing colonial powers of the day. Moreover,
the events took place a quarter-century before the United States became a
superpower in the aftermath of World War Two, and long before the cre-
ation of the state of Israel in 1948. But bin Laden’s focus upon America is
evidence of how this rage has been redirected at the United States as the
most powerful symbol of western values and modern economic, military and
cultural influence.45

Ultimately, the resentment and hostility is driven far less by poverty
than by issues of identity, and its proponents are mostly from the university-
educated professional and middle classes who comprise an embittered
counter-elite within their own societies. Martin Kramer observes how this
resentment is embodied by militant Islam:

[It is] the vehicle of counter-elites, people who, by virtue of education and/or in-
come, are potential members of the elite, but who for some reason or another get
excluded. Their education may lack some crucial prestige-conferring element; the
sources of their wealth may be a bit tainted. Or they may just come from the wrong
background. So while they are educated and wealthy, they have a grievance: their
ambition is blocked, they cannot translate their socio-economic assets into political
clout. Islamism is particularly useful to these people, in part because by its careful
manipulation, it is possible to recruit a following among the poor, who make valuable
foot-soldiers.46

This is not an entirely new development. Some two decades ago, an Egyptian
study found that jailed Islamists in that country were mostly of middle class
origins, highly motivated, and often educated in engineering or science. In-
deed, fifteen of the nineteen September 11th hijackers came from Saudi

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 291

Arabia, one of the Muslim world’s wealthiest countries. Moreover, the two
top leaders of Al Qaeda are bin Laden, the son of a Saudi billionaire, and
Ayman al-Zawahiri, a wealthy Egyptian doctor. Indeed, militant Islam’s
ability to attract such competent, well motivated and ambitious people re-
sembles that of fascism and Marxism-Leninism in their day.47

Not only are these traits of Islamic extremists evident in their own coun-
tries, but they are also apparent among some Islamic and Arab emigres in
Europe. For example, Mohamed Atta, the Saudi who piloted the hijacked
airliner that slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and
is believed to be the ringleader of the hijackers, had lived with several of the
terrorists in Germany and appears to have become increasingly alienated
by his inability to find a place and purpose in that society despite his gradu-
ate education in urban planning. As Fouad Ajami has eloquently observed,
“The modern world unsettled Atta . . . The magnetic power of the American
imperium had fallen across his country. He arrived here with a presumption
and a claim. We had intruded into his world; he would shatter the peace of
ours. The glamorized world couldn’t be fully had; it might as well be humbled
and taken down.”48

In essence, an indigenous rage stemming from social disruption, oppres-
sion and alienation becomes transferred or redirected onto targets that have
little to do with the sources of discontent. In its most nihilistic expressions,
it takes the form of delusional conspiracy theories directed at the United
States, the West, or Israel. As evidence, a Gallup survey of public opinion in
nine Muslim countries found only 18% of respondents believe that Arabs
carried out the September 11th attacks.49 More blatantly, Arab and Muslim
media disseminated conspiracy theories claiming a Jewish or Israeli hand
behind the attack on the World Trade Center, and leading Saudi, Egyp-
tian and Syrian papers have carried crude anti-Semitic stories—essentially a
form of political pornography—including the old Czarist forgery, “The Pro-
tocols of the Elders of Zion” and the ancient libel that Jews use the blood
of non-Jewish children in food prepared for Purim or Passover.50

CONCLUSION

In an increasingly globalized world, culture has emerged as a central
arena of contestation. Other issues on the globalization agenda, especially
economic problems of trade, aid, investment and poverty, are more read-
ily subject to negotiation and compromise. But precisely because culture
has become a signifier for other more deep-seated and intractable issues, the
problems it poses are harder to resolve. Culture in its various forms serves as
a primary carrier of globalization and modern values, and cultural issues are

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292 Lieber and Weisberg

so fraught precisely because of their impact on both individual and national
identity.

The idea that modernization often proves disruptive to traditional soci-
eties and that this can cause revolutionary turmoil is not new. In the mid-19th
century, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that rage and political upheaval
stemmed not from poverty and deprivation or from the exercise of power
itself, but from more symbolic causes including rising expectations, feelings
of humiliation, and reactions against a ruler considered “illegitimate . . . and
oppressive.”51 A century later, a leading social scientist, Seymour Martin
Lipset, identified relative deprivation as a source of upheaval and found
that disruptions caused by economic and social modernization could radi-
calize sections of the middle and professional classes and cause them to be
attracted to extremist movements.52 But what is increasingly evident today
is the key role played by culture, for it serves as the transmission belt by
which so much of the impact of globalization and modern values is con-
veyed to foreign audiences, and through which identities are so profoundly
challenged.

The animus directed against the United States is by no means uniform.
And, as we have observed, expressions of it in Europe are much more mod-
est and symbolic because globalization there (and in other regions where
modern values prevail) does not dictate a profound cultural clash with pre-
modern values. Moreover, in the post 9/11 world, basic European solidarity
with the United States has been reinforced, along with a sense that Europe
continues to require close links with America as insurance in a dangerous
world.

Elsewhere, although American policies and practices can be a source of
resentment, and primacy can readily translate into bruised feelings about the
exercise of American power, the predominant sources of anti-Americanism
are deep-seated and structural and only secondarily due to specific policies.
This was especially evident in the aftermath of September 11th. A statement
by sixty leading American scholars makes a telling point when it observes
the way bin Laden and the attackers directed their hatred against the United
States itself rather than make any specific policy demands:

. . . the killing was done for its own sake. The leader of Al Qaeda described the
“blessed strikes” of September 11 as blows against America, “the head of world
infidelity.” Clearly, then, our attackers despise not just our government, but our
overall society, our entire way of living. Fundamentally, their grievance concerns not
only what our leaders do, but also who we are.53

The transference of deep-seated rage about turmoil and humiliation
within their own societies into bitter attacks upon the United States can be
understood in many ways, but above all it represents a sublimation of anger

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 293

and its redirection toward a source that has little to do with the problem
in the first place. Deliberate scapegoating is increasingly evident too. The
author Salman Rushdie, himself a target of a fatwa calling for his death
as punishment for supposed blasphemy, captures this phenomenon when
he writes that even if a Middle East peace settlement were achieved, anti-
Americanism would be likely to continue unabated:

It has become too useful a smokescreen for Muslim nations’ many defects—their cor-
ruption, their incompetence, their oppression of their citizens, their economic, scien-
tific and cultural stagnation. America-hating has become a badge of identify, making
possible a chest-beating, flag-burning rhetoric of word and deed that makes men
feel good. It contains a strong streak of hypocrisy, hating most what it desires most,
and elements of self-loathing. (‘We hate America because it has made of itself what
we cannot make of ourselves.’) What America is accused of—closed-mindedness,
stereotyping, ignorance—is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a
mirror.54

This transference is driven by several mechanisms: the desire of au-
thoritarian regimes to deflect criticism away from their own corrupt rule,
the agendas of virulently antimodernist movements which can now, para-
doxically, utilize television and the Internet to disseminate their views, and
widespread frustration and alienation. Yet Islamic radicalism is by no means
dominant, and it remains contested within these societies, not least (as
Afghanistan under Taliban rule demonstrated) because its antirational, theo-
cratic and misogynist values do not provide a viable option for successfully
confronting the tasks of modernization. Moreover, hostility to the U.S. is not
universal and successful exercise of power can actually discourage opposi-
tion. For example, demonstrations against the initial American intervention
in Afghanistan quickly subsided as U.S. and anti-Taliban forces gained the
upper hand and it became evident that much of the Afghan population was
celebrating its liberation from an oppressive regime.

In important parts of the Muslim world in the aftermath of
September 11th and the defeat of the Taliban, moderate views have surfaced
to contest the radical Islamist vision. In at least some cases, journalists, intel-
lectuals and government leaders have condemned the 9/11 attacks, spoken
out against extremism and the search for scapegoats, and have challenged
the notion that returning to practices of the distant past can solve practical
problems of society and economy. Thus, as a former Libyan Prime Minister
has observed, “Perhaps most of the things we complain of . . . stem from our
own flaws.”55

Ultimately, the causes of fanaticism and cultural backlash lie not within
the United States and the West, but inside the troubled societies themselves.
In these situations, culture is a mode of self and group expression and a source
of upheaval and contestation. There is less a “clash of civilizations” than a

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294 Lieber and Weisberg

clash within civilizations. Outsiders can take steps to encourage moderate
elements within these societies, but much more depends on developments
inside the countries concerned. The outcome of this competition may ulti-
mately determine whether globalization itself continues or instead is vio-
lently overturned—much as the guns of August 1914 touched off a World
War and reversed a century of increasing openness, integration and
interdependence.

ENDNOTES

1. Among other definitions of globalization, Thomas Friedman describes it as, “. . . the inte-
gration of everything with everything else” He adds that, “Globalization enables each of
us, wherever we live, to reach around the world farther, faster and cheaper than ever before
and at the same time allows the world to reach into each of us farther, faster, deeper, and
cheaper than ever before.” See Friedman, “Techno Logic,” Foreign Policy, March/April
2002, p. 64. Also see Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

2. Quoted by Fouad Ajami, “The New Faith,” Saisphere, Alumni Magazine of Johns Hopkins
University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC 2000, p. 13.

3. Robert Gilpin makes this point well in observing that political scientists tend to overlook
the role of markets, while economists often neglect the political context of events and the
important role of power. See U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political
Economy of Direct Foreign Investment (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 4–5.

4. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (NY:
Simon & Schuster, 1996.)

5. David Rothkopf, “In Praise of Cultural Imperialism?” Foreign Policy, No. 107 (Summer
1997): 38–53, at 39. A more ambivalent treatment is that of Benjamin Barber, Jihad Versus
McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995), who emphasizes the tensions between global
and parochial values as increasingly central to world affairs.

6. Quotation from Le Monde, cited in Sophie Meunier, “The French Exception,” Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 79, No. 4 (July/August 2000):104–116 at 107.

7. Charles Krauthammer, “Who Needs Gold Medals?” Washington Post, February 20, 2002.
8. Paul Kennedy, “The Eagle Has Landed,” Financial Times (London), February 1, 2002.
9. See especially William Wohlforth “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Se-

curity, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Summer 1999): 5–41. Also see Lieber, Eagle Rules?, Chapter One,
“Foreign Policy and American Primacy,” pp. 1–15.

10. Karsten Voight, a German foreign ministry official and influential figure in the Social
Democratic Party, speaking in Washington on March 8, 2000, quoted in Peter Rodman,
Uneasy Giant: The Challenges to American Predominance (Washington, DC: The Nixon
Center, June 2000), p. 1.

11. Barbara Crosssette, “At the U.N. French Slips and English Stands Tall,” New York Times,
March 25, 2001.

12. Data from “A World Empire By Other Means,” The Economist (London), December 22,
2001, pp. 65–67.

13. David Ignatius, “France’s Constructive Critic,” Washington Post, February 22, 2002.
14. “Globalization and Cinema,” in Correspondence: An International Review of Culture and

Society (New York: The Committee on Intellectual Correspondence, published by the
Council on Foreign Relations), No. 8, Summer/Fall, 2001, p. 1.

15. Keith Richburg, “Vive le Cinema! France Looks to Protect Its Film Industry’s ‘Cultural
Exception,’” Washington Post, January 28, 2002.

16. Richburg, Washington Post, January 28, 2002.

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Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis 295

17. New York Times, September 1, 2000.
18. Guy Konopnicki, “French Cinema’s American Obsession,” abridged from Marianne,

March 5–11, 2001, reprinted in Correspondence, Summer/Fall 2001, p. 9.
19. Film titles on display at the Sony multiplex at Potsdammer Platz, June 17, 2000.
20. Marc Kaufman, “Afghanistan’s Monument of Rubble,” Washington Post, March 6, 2002.
21. Subculture: the meaning of style (London & NY: Routledge, 1979).
22. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3

(Summer 1973): 22–49, at 27.
23. Louis Hebron and John F. Stack, Jr., “The Globalization Process: Debunking the Myths.”

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago,
IL., 20–24 February, 2001.

24. Hebron & Stack, Loc cit.
25. The term is that of Joseph Nye, in Bound To Lead: The Changing Nature of American

Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990.) Also see Nye, The Paradox of American Power:
Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (NY: Oxford UP, 2002.)

26. Richard Pells, “American Culture Goes Global, or Does It?” The Chronicle of Higher
Education, April 12, 2002.

27. Selma Reuben Holo, Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), p. 149.

28. Andrew Solomon, An Awakening After the Taliban,” New York Times, March 10, 2002.
After the ouster of the Taliban, the new minister of information and culture, Said
Makhtoum Rahim, estimated that the Taliban had destroyed “about 80% of our cultural
identity.”

29. Michael Howard, “What’s in a Name? How to Fight Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81,
No. 1 (January/February 2002): 8–13, at 13.

30. The 10% figure was used by French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, cited in David
Ignatius, “France’s Constructive Critic,” Washington Post, February 22, 2002. However,
different polling questions provide a range of numbers. One poll taken during the spring
2002 Presidential election found 31% of respondents identifying the U.S. in response
to the question, “Who are the principal adversaries of France?” See Le Figaro, “Suivi
Presidentielle 2002: Place de la France dans le monde. Sondage IFOP,” Le Figaro (Paris),
April 2, 2002.

31. The term is quoted in William Drodziak, “L’Etat C’est Mouse,” Washington Post, March
2, 1992.

32. T.R. Reid, “After Shaky Start, London Bridge Reopens,” Washington Post, February 23,
2002.

33. Robert Paarlberg, “The Global Food Fight,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 79, No. 3 (May/June
2000): 24–38. Paarlberg’s analysis of this issue is compelling, and he also notes that the
de facto ban has blocked corn imports from the United States worth roughly $200 million
annually to U.S. farmers.

34. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
35. David Brooks summarizes these ideas in his thoughtful review of Cantor’s book. See

“Farewell to Greatness: America from Gilligan’s Island to the X-Files,” The Weekly Stan-
dard, September 17, 2001, pp. 31–35.

36. Data in Jeffrey M. Jones, “Ratings of Government and Bush Remain High,” Gallup News
Service, October 31, 2001, www.gallup.com/poll/Releases/pr011031f.asp.

37. See Larry Kudlow, “Closing the Book on Tina,” townhall.com, February 1, 2002. Kudlow
makes a strong case for the post 9/11 cultural shift described above.

38. Source: hardcover nonfiction bestseller list, New York Times Book Review, March 3, 2002,
p. 18.

39. David Hoffman, “Beyond Public Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 2 (March/April
2002), p. 89

40. Elisabetta Burba “How Lebanon Reacted to the News,” Wall Street Journal Europe,
September 19, 2001. As yet another example, Osama bin Laden in his video denunci-
ations of the United States seems to be wearing a Timex Ironman Triathlon watch. See

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296 Lieber and Weisberg

Edward Rothstein. “Damning (Yet Desiring) Mickey and the Big Mac: It Isn’t Imperialism
but Freedom That Makes Pop Culture So Appealing Even Among America’s Enemies,”
New York Times, March 2, 2002.

41. Quoted in “British Detail bin Laden Tie to U.S. Attacks,” New York Times, October 5,
2001. Also see text of report issued by British government, “Responsibility for the Terrorist
Atrocities in the United States, 11 September, 2001,” reprinted in the same issue.

42. Fouad Ajami, “Arabs Have Nobody to Blame but Themselves,” Wall Street Journal,
October 16, 2001. Also see Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey
(New York: Pantheon, 1998.)

43. Text of bin Laden Remarks. “Hypocrisy Rears Its Ugly Head,” as broadcast by al-Jazeera
television on October 7, 2001. Washington Post, October 8, 2001.

44. David Rhode and C. J. Chivers, “Qaeda’s Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing,” New York
Times, March 17, 2002, p. 18.

45. On this point, see Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Approaches to the Modern History
of the Middle East (NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.)

46. Quoted in Daniel Pipes, “God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?” The
National Interest, No. 66 (Winter 2001/02), pp. 14–21 at p. 17.

47. The Egyptian study was conducted in 1980 by a respected Egyptian scholar, Said Eddin
Ibrahim, and is cited in Pipes, p. 16. It should be noted that in the late 1990s, Ibrahim himself
was jailed as a result of his vigorous efforts to promote democratic freedoms within Egypt.
Daniel Pipes makes a compelling argument that militant Islam is not a response to poverty
and has often surged in countries experiencing rapid economic growth. He concludes that
militant Islam has far more to do with issues of identity than with economics. P. 14.

48. Fouad Ajami, “Nowhere Man,” New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2001.
49. These data, in a survey done by Gallup for USA Today and CNN, should be regarded

with some caution. Although Gallup polled nearly 10,000 respondents in nine countries
(Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia),
the percentages reported may not be reliable. Summary data for the entire group were
not weighted by size of population, non-citizens were included, and the political cultures
in most of the countries would make respondents wary of expressing their views candidly.
See, Richard Morin and Claudia Dean, “The Poll That Didn’t Add Up: Spin on Data
Blurs Findings From Gallup’s Muslim Survey, Washington Post, March 23, 2002. Also see
CNN.com, “Poll: Muslims Call U.S. ‘Ruthless, Arrogant’,” February 26, 2001.

50. An appalling example appeared in a Saudi newspaper, the government daily, Al-Riyadh. In
a two part series, a columnist, Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faysal University
in Al-Damman, wrote on the “Jewish Holiday of Purim,” stating that, “For this holiday,
the Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday
pastries.” The article is translated in MEMRI, Middle East research Institute, Special
Dispatch—Saudi Arabia/Anti-Semitism, 3.13.02, No. 354, www.memri.org. The blood libel
has also appeared in the Egyptian government dailies, Al-Ahram (October 28, 2000) and
Al-Akhbar (October 20, 2000 and March 25, 2001), see MEMRI’s Special Dispatches #150
and 201.

51. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (NY: Harper & Row, 1967), Author’s In-
troduction, p. 14. Also see The Old Regime and the Revolution; ed. Francois Furet and
Francoise Melonio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Originally published,
(NY: Harper & Brothers, 1856).

52. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 131ff.
53. “What We’re Fighting For: A Letter From America,” Text of statement from a group

of American scholars, Chronicle of Higher Education, posted February 12, 2002: http://
chronicle.com/weekly/documents/v48/i24/4824sep 11 letter.htm

54. Salman Rushdie, “America and the Anti-Americans,” New York Times, February 4, 2002.
55. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Bakkoush, “The U.S. and the Complexities of the Arab Mind,” Al-

Hayat (London), February 12, 2002. Quoted in MEMRI, 2/22/02, No. 348, February 22,
2002. www.memri.org.

“THE INNOCENT CHILD AND OTHER MODERN MYTHS”
by Henry Jenkins

INTRODUCTION

In the Summer of 1996, the Democratic Party held its
presidential nominating convention in Chicago and the
Republican Party held its convention in San Diego. Both
gatherings focused as much on childhood and the family as
on tax cuts or other traditional issues. The Republicans
wanted to overcome the gender gap, while the Democrats
wanted to show they still felt our pain after Clinton’s support
for devastating welfare cutbacks. Neither could resist the
attractions of the innocent child. Both conventions offered
classic stagings of parental concern.

Susan Molinari, Congresswoman from Queens, presented the
Republican keynote address, speaking as a misty-eyed and
perky young “mom” about how her daughter’s recent birth
had refocused her political priorities. Network camera crews
dutifully provided close-ups of her husband and her father
hugging the newborn. After the speech, they brought the
baby, Susan Ruby, to the podium for her mother to hold
before the cheering crowds.

The cameras were equally obliging when the first lady, Hillary
Clinton, addressed the Democratic convention several weeks
later. Hillary and her handlers hoped to shift public attention
from her controversial role in shaping health care policy onto
her more traditional concern for America’s children. When she
spoke about the nation as a “family,” the camera consistently
showed the first daughter, Chelsea as visible proof of Hillary
and Bill’s success as parents.

These close-ups of Susan Ruby and Chelsea rendered explicit
the implicit politics of these occasions, giving us concrete
images to anchor more abstract claims about childhood and
the family. Both Susan and Hillary gained authority from their
status as “moms” and both supported their agendas by
referencing their children. While their political visions were
dramatically different, the images of children they evoked,
and the rhetorical purposes they served, were remarkably
similar. Both Molinari and Clinton tapped into an established
mythology of childhood innocence in the late 20th century.

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The myth of childhood innocence, as James Kincaid notes,
“empties” the child of its own political agency, so that it may
more perfectly fulfill the symbolic demands we make upon it.
The innocent child wants nothing, desires nothing, and
demands nothing — except, perhaps, its own innocence.
Kincaid critiques the idea that childhood innocence is
something pre-existing – an “eternal” condition — which must
be “protected.” Rather, childhood innocence is a cultural
myth that must be “inculcated and enforced” upon children.

This dominant conception of childhood innocence presumes
that children exist in a space beyond, above, outside of the
political; we imagine them to be noncombatants who we
protect from the harsh realities of the adult world, including
the mud-splattering of partisan politics. Yet, in reality, almost
every major political battle of the 20th century has been
fought on the backs of our children, from the economic
reforms of the Progressive Era (which sought to protect
immigrant children from the sweat-shop owners) and the
social readjustments of the Civil Rights Era (which often
circulated around the images of black and white children
playing together) to contemporary anxieties about the digital
revolution (which often depicts the wide-eyed child as subject
to the corruptions of cybersex and porn websites). The
innocent child carries the rhetorical force of such arguments;
we are constantly urged to take action to protect our
children. Children also have suffered the material
consequences of our decisions; children are the ones on the
front lines of school integration, the ones who pay the price
of welfare reform. We opportunistically evoke the figure of
the innocent child as a “human shield” against criticism.

Until recently, cultural studies has said little about the politics
of the child. Like everyone else, we have a lot invested in
seeing childhood as banal and transparent, as without any
concealed meanings of the sort that ideological critics might
excavate, as without any political agency of the kinds that
ethnographers of subcultures document, as without any
sexuality that queer and feminist critics might investigate.
Carey Bazalgette and David Buckingham identify a “division of
labor” within academic research, which subjects youth culture
to intense sociological scrutiny while seeing childhood as a fit
subject only for developmental psychology. Children are
understood as “asocial or perhaps, pre-social,” resulting in an
emphasis on their “inadequacies,” “immaturity” and
“irrationality,” on their need for protection and nurturing.
Because developmental psychology focuses on defining and
encouraging “normative” development, it does not provide us
tools for critiquing the cultural power invested in childhood

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innocence. Sociological critics focus on the “deviance” and
“destructiveness” of youth cultures, their “irresponsibility” or
the “rituals” of their subcultural “resistance.” While we often
celebrate the “resistant” behaviors of youth cultures as
subversive, the “misbehavior” of children is almost never
understood in similar terms. This historic split has started to
break down over the past five or six years, as more and more
cultural scholars examine childhood.

This marginalization effects not only how we understand the
child, its social agency, its cultural contexts, and its relations
to powerful institutions but also how we understand adult
politics, adult culture, and adult society, which often circles
around the specter of the innocent child. The Children’s
Culture Reader is intended to both explore what the figure of
the child means to adults and offer a more complex account
of children’s own cultural lives.

Given the wealth of material about childhood which has
emerged in sociology, anthropology, pedagogical theory,
social and cultural history, women’s studies, literary criticism,
and media studies in recent years, it seems important to
identify what this collection won’t do. It will not be a
collection of essays centered primarily around issues of
motherhood, fatherhood, adult identities, pedagogy,
schooling, advertising, media reform, mass marketing,
computers, public policy and the like, though all of these
topics will be explored in so far as they impact contemporary
and historical understandings of childhood. A surprising
number of the essays written about children’s media,
children’s literature, or education manage not to talk about
children or childhood at all. The essays in The Children’s
Culture Reader, on the other hand, will be centrally about
childhood, about how our culture defines what it means to be
a child, how adult institutions impact on children’s lives, and
how children construct their cultural and social identities.

This book is not intended as a guidebook for media and social
reformers, not a series of attacks on the corrupting force of
mass culture on children’s lives. Rather, it will challenge some
key assumptions behind those reform movements, rejecting
the myth of childhood innocence in order to better map the
power relations between children and adults. This book
avoids texts that see children primarily as victims in favor of
works that recognize and respect their social and political
agency.

Some may question the “political stakes” in studying the
child, especially in moving beyond powerful old binarisms
about adult corruption and victimized children. Such myths

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have survived because they are useful, useful for the left as
well as for conservative and patriarchal agendas. At a time
when Republican crime bills would try children as adults and
toss them into federal prisons or when we want to motivate
state action against child abuse, images of innocent and
victimized children are our most powerful weapon. Yet, the
right increasingly draws on a vocabulary of child protection as
the bulwark of their campaign against multiculturalism,
feminism, Internet expression and queer politics. Any
meaningful political response to this conservative agenda
must reassess childhood innocence.

In this introductory essay, I outline work on children’s culture
across a range of disciplines and suggest some of this
research’s implications for thinking about contemporary
cultural politics. In doing so, I will identify what I see as three
major strands in recent writings about childhood: (1)the
examination of the meanings which children carry for adults;
(2)historical research into our shifting understanding of the
relations between children and adults; and (3)studies of
children as cultural and social agents. Each of the next three
sections of this introduction takes one of those strands as its
central focus. In the closing section, I return to the question
of the politics of childhood and outline some of the
implications of this research.

Too often, our culture imagines childhood as a utopian space,
separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality,
outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive
world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of
imagination, beyond historical change, more just, pure, and
innocent, and in the end, waiting to be corrupted or protected
by adults. Such a conception of the child dips freely in the
politics of nostalgia. As Susan Stewart suggests, nostalgia is
the desire to recreate something that has never existed
before, to return to some place we’ve never been, and to
reclaim a lost object we never possessed. In short, nostalgia
takes us to never-never-land.

This book assumes that childhood is not timeless, but rather
subject to the same historical shifts and institutional factors
that shape all human experience. Children’s culture is not the
result of purely top-down forces of ideological and
institutional control, nor is it a free space of individual
expression. Children’s culture is a site of conflicting values,
goals, and expectations. As Henry Giroux has argued:

“Children’s culture is a sphere where entertainment,
advocacy and pleasure meet to construct
conceptions of what it means to be a child

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occupying a combination of gender, racial and class
positions in society.”

Children, no less than adults, are active participants in that
process of defining their identities, though they join those
interactions from positions of unequal power. When children
struggle to reclaim dignity in the face of a schoolyard taunt or
confront inequalities in their parents’ incomes, they are
engaged with politics just as surely as adults are when they
fight back against homophobia or join a labor union. Our
grownup fantasies of childhood as a simple space crumbles
when we recognize the complexity of the forces shaping our
children’s lives and defining who they will be, how they will
behave, and how they will understand their place in the
world.

PART ONE
THE “FORT” AND THE “VILLAGE”: THE POLITICS OF FAMILY VALUES

“The child was there waiting…defenseless and
alluring, with no substance, no threatening history,
no independent insistences. As a category created
but not occupied, the child could be a repository of
cultural needs or fears not adequately disposed of
elsewhere…. The child carries for us things we
somehow cannot carry for ourselves, sometimes
anxieties we want to be divorced from and
sometimes pleasures so great we would not,
without the child, know how to contain them.”
— James Kincaid.

In this section, I will examine the convention speeches of
Molinari and Clinton as embodying different ideological
strategies for mobilizing the figure of the innocent child. For
Hillary Clinton, the child represents our “bridge to the 21st
century,” the catalyst transforming uncontrollable change into
meaningful progress, while for Susan Molinari, the child
represents our link to the past, carrying forth family tradition
and “the American Dream” in a troubled world. For Clinton,
the child is a figure of the utopian imagination, enabling her
to conceive of a better world — a new “village” — that must
be built in the present. For Molinari, the child is a figure of
nostalgic remorse, whose violated innocence demands that
parents “hold down the fort” against contemporary culture.
But, both women, in Kincaid’s sense, use their children to
“carry things.” As Kincaid acknowledges, the very
impermanence of childhood, its status as a transitional (and
fragile) moment in our life cycle, enables many different
symbolic uses: “Any meaning would stick but no meaning
would stick for long.” Often, in our rhetoric, the child

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embodies change, its threat and its potential. The child, both
literally and metaphorically, is always in the process of
becoming something else. As Kincaid writes:

“If the child had a wicked heart from birth, that
heart could be ripped out and a new one planted
there in no time. If the child was ignorant, that
wouldn’t last long; if disobedient, there was always
the whipping cure; if angelic, death would take him
or, more likely, her; if loved or loving, that too
would pass.”

Childhood — a temporary state — becomes an emblem for
our anxieties about the passing of time, the destruction of
historical formations, or conversely, a vehicle for our hopes
for the future. The innocent child is caught somewhere over
the rainbow — between nostalgia and utopian optimism,
between the past and the future.

The American (Heterosexual) Dream
Within the Republican ideology of family values, the innocent
child is most often figured in relation to the past, threatened
by the prospect of unregulated change, endangered by
modernity, and denied things previous generations took for
granted. Molinari told how her grandfather had “bundled up a
young son and left Italy in search of a dream,” an “American
dream,” which “passed down” from generation to generation,
until “a seat in a Queen’s barbershop led to a seat in the U.S.
Congress.” Her “American dream” was, at core, the story of
heterosexual courtship and reproduction: “find a job, marry
your sweetheart, have children, buy a home and maybe start
a business and in the process, always build a better life for
your children.” This “American” dream has become harder to
achieve in the face of crippling taxes and other assaults upon
the family. Far from an incidental detail, the child surfaces
here both as a reward for living the right life and as a
responsibility heterosexuals bear.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s The Hearts of Men offers a somewhat
more critical account of this 1950s era version of the
“American dream.” Psychological discourse of the period
made the reproductive imperative not only a social obligation
but a test of maturation and sexual normality. Getting
married and having children became one of those things
“mature,” “normal” adult men were expected to do, while the
failure to father was seen as evidence of maladjustment,
immaturity, and often, homosexuality. Ehrenreich notes, “fear
of homosexuality kept heterosexual men in line as husbands
and breadwinners; and, at the same time, the association
with failure and immaturity made it almost impossible for

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homosexual men to assert a positive image of themselves.” If
having children became proof of mature heterosexuality,
then, it is hardly surprising that the reverse — the prospect of
homosexuals having access to children – was regarded as a
horrifying contamination.

While Ehrenreich’s book recounts the breakdown of this
formulation over the past three decades of male-female
relations, its persistence in Molinari’s speech, and in
Republican rhetoric more generally, suggests it is still a
powerful tool for enforcing normative assumptions about
gender roles and sexual identities. This common-sensical
connection between heterosexuality and childhood innocence
undergirds the exercise of homophobia in the late 20th
century. The idea that only heterosexuals can bear — or
should raise — children shapes custody decisions which deny
lesbian mothers access to their offspring. The shock that
occurs when queerness and children’s culture come together
shaped the Southern Baptist Convention’s choice of Disney as
the target of its campaign against corporations that provide
health insurance for domestic partners. The image of the
crazed pedophile threatens the employment rights of gay
teachers and led to a campaign to get Bert and Ernie banned
from Sesame Street because of their “unnatural” relations.
Molinari’s version of the “American Dream” represents a more
benign version of these arguments, one that erases — rather
than denounces — homosexuality as an aspect of American
family life.

The Politics of Motherhood
For a moment, Molinari can’t resist the tug of the myth of the
innocent child as an agent of progress. The birth of her
daughter, Molinari argues, makes her “think a little less about
how the world is and a little more about the world you’ll leave
behind for your children.” However, the conservative logic of
her argument pulls her back towards the present as a decline
from a past golden age, towards the “real pressures” which
prevent modern moms and dads from achieving their parent’s
dreams. The modern world, she suggests, is a world which
places our innocent children at risk: “Every morning they
[parents] hesitate, at the kindergarten door, even if only for a
moment, afraid to let go of that small hand clinging so tightly
onto theirs.” For a moment, Molinari hesitates, gesturing
towards feminist protests against the unreasonable
expectations placed on contemporary women, only to retreat
back towards a more traditional solution:

“I don’t know a mom today who isn’t stretched to
her limits trying to hold down a job and trying to

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hold down the fort too. How many times have we
said to ourselves that there just aren’t enough
hours in a day….Well, the Republicans can’t
promise you any more hours in your day but we
can help you spend more hours at home with your
children.”

The threat is transformed: it is no longer unequal gender
relations, poverty or unfair conditions of employment, but the
idea of working outside the home, which renders working
“moms” miserable. Her speech sees returning to the home as
the natural desire of all women and depicts women’s
professional lives as an unwanted obligation that better tax
policies would render unnecessary.

The figure of the defenseless child has been consistently
mobilized in both support of and in opposition to American
feminism. Since women have carried special responsibilities
for bearing and caring for children, their attempts to enter
political and economic life have often been framed in terms of
possible impacts on children and the family. Fatherhood is
one role among many for most men; historically, for many
women, motherhood was the role that defined their social,
economic, and political identity. Early suffrage leaders
represented their campaign for the vote in the late 19th and
early 20th century as a logical extension of their
responsibilities as mothers to shield the home from the
corruptions of the outside world. This maternal politics, or
“domestic feminism,” focused its attention on issues of
alcoholism and prostitution and on the social conditions faced
by the children of the urban poor. As one early suffrage
leader explained, “The Age of Feminism is also the age of the
child.” Yet, this maternal politics also restricted women’s
political voice to a narrow range of issues associated with
children, home and family.

Speaking as mothers gave the early feminists, who came
mostly from the upper and middle classes, a vocabulary for
linking their experiences, across class and racial divides, with
those of other women. The revitalization of American
feminism in the 1960s and 1970s often focused around issues
of abortion, daycare, child custody, and other family issues;
middle class women’s entry into identity politics emerged
from consciousness raising strategies and the recognition
that the “personal is the political.” Women could gain
economic autonomy only by shifting child-rearing burdens
within the family and only by gaining greater control over the
reproductive process. Decades later, Hillary Clinton evoked
this rhetorical tradition of sisterly solidarity through

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motherhood when she told her convention audience, “I wish
we could be sitting around a kitchen table, just us, talking
about our hopes and fears for our children’s futures.”

This tradition of maternal feminism has given urgency to
female politicians when they speak on behalf of children.
Heather Hendershot has shown, for example, that Action for
Children’s Television gained attention from the press and
from the Federal Communications Commission in the 1970s
because it could speak as a group of “mothers from Newton;”
ACT expressed impatience with the demands for traditional
media effects research and spoke with “common sense”
about the impact of media on their own children’s lives.

Yet, the heightened public discourse about maternalism has
also provided a weapon for criticizing female politicians as
“bad mothers” when they place too much attention on issues
not directly linked to childhood or the family. Hillary Clinton
was sharply criticized for the public roles she played in her
husband’s administration and for her flip remarks about not
wanting to be reduced to “baking cookies.” In her convention
speech, she made fun of the need to reposition herself as a
mother, joking that she might appear at the Democratic
convention arm in arm with “Benti the child-saving gorilla
from the Brookfield Zoo.” Dan Quayle’s 1992 attacks on
Murphy Brown’s status as an unwed mother became a major
campaign issue.

The figure of the absent mother, the neglectful mother, the
mother who abandons her children for political and economic
ambition, always shadows the use of the maternal voice in
American politics. Two of Clinton’s choices to become the first
female Attorney General of the United States were ultimately
withdrawn because of public controversy surrounding their
child-rearing arrangements, questions rarely if ever raised in
considering the confirmation of male cabinet appointments.
So, it is perhaps not surprising that when Molinari claimed
common cause with other working mothers, it was in part to
urge their return to the kitchen table. Less than a year after
she delivered the keynote address at the Republican national
convention, Molinari herself resigned from the U.S. Congress
to accept a job as a network anchorwoman, justifying her
choice on the grounds that it would allow her to spend more
time with her daughter.

The Suffering Father and the Unhappy Child
Republican formulations of the innocent child depict the home
as “a fort” where mothers and fathers must protect their
children from the chaos of modern life. Adopting
characteristically military metaphors, the former general,

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Colin Powell, spoke to the Republican convention about the
need for families to remain strong in order to:

“…withstand the assaults of contemporary
life…resist the images of violence and vulgarity
which flood into our lives every day… [and] defeat
the scourge of drugs and crime and incivility that
threaten us.”

This formulation of family values uses the figure of the
innocent child to police boundaries between the family and
the outside world. It often masks class and racial
divisiveness, despite the presence of the African-American
Colin Powell as a living symbol of Republican efforts towards
becoming a “party of inclusion.” This formulation, as Eric
Freedman notes, also presupposes that the primary threat to
our children comes from outside, while most cases of
violence against children and most cases of “missing
children” can be traced back to family members. The
Republican version of “family values,” which sharpens our
fears and anxieties about outside forces, lets the family itself
off the hook.

One of the most memorable moments of the Republican
convention involved the speech of a wheelchair bound former
policeman, crippled in the line of duty and now an advocate
of tougher sentencing laws. He was attended by his young
son, who stood behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder
throughout the speech. With a slow and pained voice, he
explained:

“My son, Conner McDonald, is nine years old and
he has never seen his father move his arms or legs
but when he puts his soft hands to his father’s face
I feel the promise of America and when he looks
into my eyes I know that he can see the pride of
America.”

Few images more perfectly capture the melodramatic
qualities of this “family values” politics! One of the moment’s
most striking aspects was its embodiment of male
vulnerability and suffering. If conservative ideology has
tended to hold women responsible for nurturing and raising
the child, it sees the father as a breadwinner and as a
bulwark protecting the family against the outside world. As
Robert L. Griswold notes:

“Men’s virtual monopoly of bread winning has been
part and parcel of male dominance. The
seventeenth century patriarch has long since

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disappeared, but twentieth-century men have
profited from their status as fathers. The linkage
between fatherhood and bread winning, for
example, has helped legitimate men’s monopoly of
the most desirable jobs….So, too, insurance
policies, pension plans, retirement programs, tax
codes, mortgage and credit policies, educational
opportunities and many more practices have
bolstered men’s roles as providers.”

If women have found a politics based on motherhood a
double-edged sword, justifying both their ability to speak in
the public sphere and their continued restriction to the
domestic sphere, men have found fatherhood a win-win
situation, justifying their continued presence in public life,
which, in turn, explains their negligible role in child-rearing.
While the charge of being a negligent mother can be directed
against any woman entering into politics, the “dead-beat
dad,” only now emerging as a political category, is treated as
an aberration – a breakdown of the family wage system.
There is something unnatural, then, about this spectacle of a
father, who desperately wants to care for his son but is
unable to do so.

The wounded father, who can not wrap strong arms around
his needful son, and the wide-eyed son, who struggles to still
believe in the “pride” of his nation, intensify our horror over
the breakdown of law and order. As Mary Lynn Stevens
Heininger notes, the discourse of childhood innocence has
historically provided powerful tools for criticizing the “vicious,
materialistic, and immoral qualities of American society.” The
horrors of modernity are magnified through children’s
innocent eyes. Children serve as “soft and smiling foils to a
more grim and grownup reality.” Young Conner, his blond
hair slicked down, his blue eyes shifting nervously,
personifies suffering innocence and its rebuke against the
adult order. At the same time, as Heininger notes, the figure
of the “pristine” child has been an “indispensable element of
American optimism”: “It is precisely because the young are
untainted that the nation can willingly vest in them its best
hopes.” The father feels “the promise of America” in his son’s
touch. The speech precariously balances the image of Conner
as already damaged by a harsh world against the image of
Conner (and his unblemished innocence) as potentially
healing that world. As Heininger explains, “because simplicity
and innocence were considered to be children’s most
distinguishing characteristics, it followed that happiness
should be their natural state.”

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This ideologically powerful assumption allows us to direct
anger against any social force that makes our children
unhappy. As Kincaid argues, “an unhappy child was and is
unnatural, an indictment of somebody: parent, institution,
nation.” The figure of the endangered child surfaced
powerfully in campaigns for the Communications Decency
Act, appearing as a hypnotized young face awash in the eerie
glow of the computer terminal on the cover of Time,
rendering arguments about the First Amendment beside the
point. As one letter to Time explained, “If we lose our kids to
cyberporn, free speech won’t matter.” The innocent child was
to be protected at “all costs.”

Throughout the 1996 campaign, Bob Dole consistently
characterized liberal politics and counter-cultural “social
experiments” in terms of the threats they posed to our
children: “crime, drugs, illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication
of duty and the abandonment of children.” Higher taxes, Dole
argued, meant a grandmother might be unable to call her
grandchild or a parent might be unable to buy her child a
book. Evoking the title of Hillary Clinton’s best-selling book,
Dole proclaimed:

“After the virtual devastation of the American
family, the rock upon which this country was
founded, we are told it takes the village — that is,
the collective and thus the state — to raise a child…
I am here to tell you. It doesn’t take a village to
raise a child – it takes a family.”

Dole’s slippage between the village, the collective, and the
state is characteristic of a Republican rhetoric which reduces
the problems of children to those confronted and solved by
volunteerism and by individual families; Dole frames
government action as the threat that makes children’s lives
miserable. Of course, many Republican solutions, such as the
Communications Decency Act, depend upon the policing
power of the village!

Democratic Family Values
Reworking conservative “family values” rhetoric — and thus
“taking the issue off the table” — has been central to the
“New Democrat” strategy of the Clinton Administration. The
1992 Democratic Party convention was framed around
rethinking the concept of the family to reflect the diverse
ways Americans live in the 1990s. Clinton and the other “New
Democrats” embraced a broader range of social units,
including, at least briefly, the idea that gay and lesbian
couples might constitute viable families. Clinton and Gore
retooled ancient conceptions of the leader as a law-giving

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patriarch, adopting a post-feminist construction of the
nurturing father watching over his children’s bedside; images
of Clinton marveling over Chelsea’s birth or Gore attending
his son, after a near-fatal accident, surfaced throughout
speeches and campaign biographies. This kinder, gentler
conception of the patriarch emerges from what Robert L.
Griswold calls the discourse of “New Fatherhood” in post-war
America. While historically, fathers could gain power and
authority from their public roles as breadwinners, they could
now also get credit for their more private roles as educators
and nurturers. While Griswold sees this shift as a response to
the expanded economic role of women in the workplace and
to feminist critiques of the family, he acknowledges that this
new style of fatherhood often does not mean reciprocity of
responsibilities. “Sensitive” male politicians can freely
embrace the domestic sphere without becoming trapped
there, while Hillary Clinton’s shifts between domestic and
public sphere politics provoke controversy.

Hillary’s law review essays defending the concept of
“children’s rights” and her participation in Marian Edelman’s
Children Defense Fund were ruthlessly attacked at the 1992
Republican convention by Marilyn Quayle and Barbara Bush
as too “extremist” for a proper first lady. While she
acknowledged in her writing that “the phrase ‘children’s
rights’ is a slogan in search of definition,” Hillary Rodham
presented a powerful case for reconsidering how the courts
and other legal institutions dealt with children’s issues.
Sounding like many cultural critics of childhood innocence,
Rodham wrote:

“No other group is so totally dependent for its
well-being on choices made by others. Obviously
this dependency can be explained to a significant
degree by the physical, intellectual, and
psychological incapacities of (some) children which
render them weaker than (some) older persons.
But the phenomenon must also be seen as part of
the organization and ideology of the political
system itself. Lacking even the basic power to vote,
children are not able to exercise normal
constituency powers, articulating self-interests to
politicians and working towards specific goals.”

She stressed the need of children to have a more powerful
voice in custody disputes, insisted on an expanded
conception of their rights to free expression, and argued for
greater procedural protections for juveniles charged with
criminal violations. Republican critics felt that her arguments

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depended on state authorities to protect children’s interests
even in the face of parental opposition and thus undermined
the sovereignty of the family. Her book, It Takes a Village,
reworked some of these earlier arguments, shifting from a
discourse of children’s rights to a language of parental
responsibility. Her new approach to “family values” was
consistent with the Clinton administration’s endorsement of
school uniforms, curfews, and the V Chip. Republican critics
still found within the book’s more banal prose signs of the
state power central to her earlier formulations.

Forming the New Village
Lauren Berlant has argued that the Republican “family values”
agenda involves a “downsizing” of the public sphere, a
reduction of the role of politics in public life in favor of an
exclusive focus on individual experience — on a politics of
personal responsibilities and self-interest rather than one of
the collective good. The Clinton version of “family values”
relocates the family within a revitalized public sphere. When
Hillary speaks of the “village” and its responsibility for
children, she evokes a middle ground between “the state”
and the private, one consistent with her husband’s unstable
compromise between Republican pressures towards
de-federalization and traditional liberal conceptions of
government activism. Hillary’s village metaphor emerges from
a politics of communitarianism, in which the community
maintains a social contract to insure the well-being of its
members, a contract sometimes met by volunteerism and
sometimes by government policy: “Home can — and should –
be a bedrock for any child. Communities can — and should —
provide the eyes and enforcement to watch over them,
formally and informally. And our government can — and
should — create and uphold the laws that set standards of
safety for us all.” Her book acknowledges the breakdown of
traditional communities and the potential for new kinds of
communities emerging in responses to changing
technological and economic conditions. Rather than calling
upon the community to preserve its traditional roles in
protecting children, she calls a new community into being,
one constituted through its mutual concern for children as
much-needed agents of future progress. The village
metaphor, with its evocation of the organic communities of
small town American life, depends upon the historic linkage of
childhood innocence to pastoralism (an image that can be
traced back to Rousseau and the Romantics.)

If the Republican formulation of family values pits the
“collective” against the family, the Democratic version sees
the individual and the community as vitally and positively

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linked. In her speech to the convention, Hillary Clinton
evoked an image of a national community where:

“Right now in our biggest cities and our smallest
towns there are boys and girls being tucked gently
into their beds and there are boys and girls who
have no one to call Mom and Dad and no place to
call home.”

What unites the haves and the have-nots, according to this
account, is that all of us care about our children. Therefore,
the needs of children must somehow be removed from the
realm of the political and into a space of shared
understanding and communal action, as we work together to
create a “nation that does not just talk about family values
but acts in ways that values family.”

Her vision of a world where “we are all part of one family”
depends on state actions (such as “dedicated teachers
preparing their lessons for the new school year…or police
officers working to help kids stay out of trouble”) but also on
individual action (“volunteers tutoring and coaching
children…and of course, parents, first and foremost.”) These
community members work together against various threats:
“gang leaders and drug pushers on the corners of their
neighborhoods…a popular culture that glamorizes sex and
violence, smoking and drinking.” Their united efforts on
behalf of childhood innocence become the basis for a utopian
revitalization of the nation. This image of transformation is
explicit in the final paragraph of her book:

“Nothing is more important to our shared future
than the well-being of children. For children are at
our core — not only as vulnerable beings in need of
love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the
complexity and contentiousness of modern life. Just
as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes children
to raise up a village to become all it should be. The
village we build with them in mind will be a better
place for us all.”

For Clinton, it is not simply that children need the village, but
the future of the village depends upon its shared
commitments to children.

Race, Imperialism and the Child
At a time when the Democratic Party was actively courting
African- and Asian-Americans for their votes and their
campaign contributions, her choice of an African proverb, one
widely used in Afrocentric pedagogy, as the book’s title could

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not have been an accident. Hillary cites Marian Wright
Edelman, the African-American woman who is the founder
and head of the Children’s Defense Fund as a mentor and
friend. At the same time, she retreats from the explicit links
Edelman draws between children’s plight and racial politics.
Edelman connects present day struggles on behalf of children
with the legacy of Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement:

“We must put social and economic underpinnings
beneath the millions of African-American, Asian
American, Latino, White and Native American
children left behind when the promise of the civil
rights laws and the significant progress of the
1960s and 70s in alleviating poverty were eclipsed
by the Vietnam War, economic recession, and
changing national leadership priorities.”

Edelman had been sharply critical of Clinton’s capitulation to
the Republicans on welfare reform, a decision which she
estimated would place 5 million more children into poverty.

Edelman recognizes that suffering occurs most often to
particular children, marked by racial and class differences,
while Hillary engages in what Jacqueline Rose describes as
the “impossible fiction” of the universalized child. In our
culture, the most persistent image of the innocent child is
that of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, boy, someone like
Conner, while the markers of middle classness, whiteness,
and masculinity are read as standing for all children. It Takes
A Village adopts a multicultural variant of this universalized
child, depicting Hillary on the back cover surrounded by
children of all different racial and ethnic background, all
well-dressed, all squeaky clean, all smiling. The implications
of this “Family of Man”-style image are complex: the
photograph envisions a utopian community united despite
racial differences, while at the same time, bleaching away
Edelman’s racial and class specificity.

For several generations, progressive civil rights policies,
especially those surrounding school desegregation, have
rested on the hope that children, born without prejudice,
might escape racial boundaries. As Shari Goldin notes, school
desegregation advocates promote the image of black and
white children interacting freely together on the playgrounds
and in the schoolrooms as the advanced guard for
tomorrow’s “color blind” society. Hillary Clinton depicts
childhood as an escape from racial antagonism when she
recalls the old hymn, “Jesus Loves Me,” which finds “all the
children of the world, red, yellow, black, and white …
precious in His sight.” She wonders how “anyone who ever

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sang” this song “could dislike someone solely on for the color
of their skin.” Her cover photo mimics classic pictures of
Jesus “suffering the children.”

At the same time, segregationists — from rural Alabama to
South Boston — often posed school busing as a violation of
childhood innocence, as a cynical bureaucratic “experiment”
which turned children into “guinea pigs,” “scapegoats” and
“hostages” of a “liberal agenda.” Racism, no less than the
Civil Rights movement, has mobilized our hopes and fears for
our children. Moreover, as Ashis Nandy has suggested,
dominant ideologies of racism and colonialism have often
mapped onto racial and cultural others the image of the child
as:

“…an inferior version of the adult — as a lovable,
spontaneous, delicate being who is also
simultaneously dependent, unreliable and willful
and thus, as a being who needs to be guided,
protected and educated as a ward.”

Such paternalism framed the official politics of colonial
domination and the unofficial politics of racial bigotry; white
domination was presented as a rational (and benign)
response to the “immaturity” of nonwhite peoples. Asian and
African adults were often ascribed with the childlikeness of
good “obedient” children or the childishness of bad
“rebellious” children.

Common Ground
Both the Republican and Democratic formulations of “family
values” cast popular culture as a social problem, roughly on
the same level as crime and drugs. The same week that
Congress passed welfare reform, President Clinton met with
television executives to set up a ratings system and Bob Dole
went to Hollywood to attack movie violence. Democratic
Senator Joseph Lieberman, who backed the welfare reform
effort, has focused congressional attention on the problem of
video game violence, which he calls the “nightmare before
Christmas.” In each case, the attacks on popular culture shift
attention away from material problems effecting children and
onto the symbolic terrain.

Throughout the twentieth century, the myth of childhood
innocence has helped to erect or preserve cultural
hierarchies, dismissing popular culture in favor of
middle-brow or high cultural works viewed more appropriate
for children. As Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins write, “By
evoking the ‘threat to children,’ social reformers typically
justified their own position as cultural custodians, linking

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(either implicitly or explicitly) anxieties about violence,
sexuality and morality to mandates of good taste and artistic
merit.” Within this protectionist rhetoric, taste distinctions get
transformed into moral issues, with the desire to shelter
children’s “purity” providing a rationale for censorship and
regulation. Once the innocent child has been evoked, it
becomes difficult to pull back and examine these cultural
issues from other perspectives, thus accounting for the
bipartisan attacks against Hollywood.

Both the Republican and Democratic versions of family values
presuppose the innocent child as requiring adult protection;
they both speak for the child who is assumed to be incapable
of speaking for herself. Young Conner remains mute as his
father speaks of his own sufferings and those of his son.
Three-month old Susan Ruby was too young to talk, while the
Clintons turned down Chelsea’s request to speak at the
convention, “protecting” her from the glare of the public
spotlight.

Both the Republican and Democratic visions presume a clear
separation between childhood and adulthood, with different
rights and responsibilities ascribed to each phase of human
development. The myth of childhood innocence depends
upon our ability to locate such a break, as well as upon our
sense of nostalgic loss when we cross irreversibly into
adulthood. As the next section will suggest, this particular
conception of childhood innocence is of fairly recent historical
origins. In this next section, I will move beyond
contemporary debates between Republicans and Democrats
to frame the concept of childhood innocence in a larger
historiographic context.

PART TWO
THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE CHILD

“Members of any society carry within themselves a
working definition of childhood, its nature,
limitations and duration. They may not explicitly
discuss this definition, write about it, or even
consciously conceive of it as an issue, but they act
upon their assumptions in all of their dealings with,
fears for, and expectations of their children.”
— Karin Calvert

Our modern conception of the innocent child presumes its
universality across historical periods and across widely
divergent cultures. The pre-socialized child exists in a state of
nature. When we want to prove that something is so basic to
human nature that it can not be changed (the differences

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between the genders, for example), we point to its presence
in our children. This universalized conception of the innocent
child effaces gender, class and racial differences, even if it
holds those differences in place. This essentialized conception
of the innocent child frees it of the taint of adult sexuality,
even as we use it to police adult sexuality, and even as we
use the threat of adult sexuality to regulate children’s bodies.
This decontextualized conception of the innocent child exists
outside of culture, precisely so that we can use it to regulate
cultural hierarchies, to separate the impure influence of
popular culture from the sanctifying touch of high culture.
This historical conception of the innocent child is eternal,
even as our political rhetoric poses childhood as constantly
under threat and always on the verge of “disappearing”
altogether. In short, the innocent child is a myth, in Roland
Barthes’ sense of the word, a figure that transforms culture
into nature.

Like all myths, the innocent child has a history. In fact, one
reason it can carry so many contradictory meanings is that
our modern sense of the child is a palimpsest of ideas from
different historical contexts — one part Romantic, one part
Victorian, one part medieval and one part modern. We do not
so much discard old conceptions of the child, as accrue
additional meanings around what remains one of our most
culturally potent signifiers. In this section, I will not trace a
single lineage of the myth of the child, a task well beyond the
scope of this essay. Rather, I will outline how various
historians have approached this question and will examine
the most prevalent meanings that have stuck to the
semiotically-adhesive child.

The Origins of Childhood
Philippe Aries begins his book, Centuries of Childhood, with
the startling statement that childhood — at least as we
currently understand it — did not exist prior to the Middle
Ages. Childhood was not a cultural preoccupation, simply a
brief phase of dependency passed over quickly and bearing
little special importance. The category of the infant existed,
since few passed beyond this stage in an era of extraordinary
mortality, but the category of child did not, since those who
could fend for themselves were treated as small adults.
Children participated fully in all of the activities of the adult
world, yet there seemed little need to separate them out as a
social category.

As the conception of a child as separate from an adult took
shape, however, it still did not bear connotations of
innocence. As Aries notes, sexual contact between children

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and adults, touching and stroking of the genitals, dirty jokes,
sharing rooms and beds, and casual nudity, was taken for
granted well into the ancient regime. Children were assumed
to be closer to the body, less inhibited, and thus, unlikely to
be corrupted by adult knowledge.

The idea of the child as innocent first took shape, Aries
argues, within pedagogical literature, helping to justifying a
specialized body of knowledge centered around the education
and inculcation of the young; this ideal rationalized the
learned class’s expanded social role and efforts to police their
culture. Other historians suggest alternative or
supplementary explanations for this modern conception of
the child. One key factor was the emergence of commercial
capitalism and the rise of the middle classes; the child
became central to the discussion of transfer of property and
the rights of inheritance. The emerging bourgeois classes
placed particular importance on the education and rearing of
their sons as preparation for participation in the market
economy. Out of the future-orientation of capitalism came a
new focus on child rearing and pedagogy. Some subsequent
historians, notably Lawrence Stone and Lloyd de Mause, have
pushed beyond Aries’ account to suggest that pre-modern
parents had little attachment to their children, treating them
with neglect and abuse. These claims have been sharply
criticized by other historians as going well beyond available
evidence.

The importance of Aries’ research may not depend on
whether he is correct on every particular: his book opened a
space for examining the social construction of childhood as
an ongoing historical process and for questioning dominant
constructions of childhood innocence. As Aries notes:

“The idea of childish innocence resulted in two
kinds of attitude and behavior towards childhood:
firstly, safeguarding it against pollution by life and
particularly by the sexuality tolerated if not
approved of among adults; and secondly,
strengthening it by developing character and
reason. We may see a contradiction here, for on
the one hand childhood is preserved and on the
other hand it is made older than its years.”

This contradiction runs through our modern conception of
childhood innocence — we desire it and we want to help
children to move beyond it. Or, to use Aries’s terms, we want
to “coddle” the child and we want to “discipline” the child.

This emerging distinction between child and adult also played

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a central role in shaping and regulating adult behavior. In The
Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias describes the gradual
“refinement” of manners and etiquette as the upper classes
adopted modes of behavior which separated them from the
lower classes; the cultural transmission and imitation of those
norms responded to the emerging middle class’s desire for
social betterment and political access. In his account, rules of
etiquette must first be explicitly expressed and consciously
imitated, but subsequently, are internalized, becoming part of
what defines us as human. However, since these norms must
be acquired, they must be transmitted to children, who are
initially perceived as operating outside the civilized order. The
child behaved in ways that adults would not, while the adults
were obligated to shape the child into conformity with social
norms. According to Elias, the child comes of age in a context
of fear and shame; shame is the process through which
social norms are internalized. Elias sees our history since the
middle ages in terms of increased restraint of the body and
tighter regulations of emotions, necessary to facilitate
participation in ever-more complex spheres of social
relations. However, more recent historians, such as John
Kasson , have pointed to historical fluctuations during which
society loosened or tightened its control over body and
affect. These fluctuations determine whether parents
“discipline” or “coddle” children, whether they react to
violations of adult norms with horror or amusement.

Drawing her evidence both from analysis of material culture
and from popular discourse about childhood, Karin Calvert
locates three distinct shifts in the cultural understanding and
adult regulation of American childhood between 1600-1900.
In the first phase, children led precarious lives confronting
the harsh conditions of frontier settlement, subject to high
infant mortality rates, “childhood illnesses, accidents, and a
lack of sufficient nourishment.” In such a culture, Calvert
argues, childhood was experienced as “essentially a state of
illness” or physical vulnerability: “Growing up meant growing
strong and gaining sufficient autonomy to be able to take
care of oneself.” Such a culture had little nostalgia for
childhood, stressing the early acceptance of adult
responsibilities. Child rearing practices sought to “hasten”
self-sufficiency.

Around the turn of the 18th century, attitudes shifted
dramatically, with a “growing confidence in the rationality of
nature.” If before, parents saw themselves as protecting their
children from natural threats, this new paradigm viewed
excessive parental intervention as producing invalid children.
Childhood was now perceived as a period of “robust health”

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during which “natural forces” took their course, allowing the
young to grow into vital adulthood. Childhood was seen as a
period of “freedom” before the anticipated constraints of adult
civilization and so parents valued the “childishness” of their
children, their nonconformity to adult expectations.

In the third phase, from 1830-1900, adults did not simply
take pleasure in childhood; they sought to prolong and
shelter it as a special period of innocence from the adult
world. As Calvert notes:

“Childhood was imbued with an almost sacred
character. Children were pure and innocent beings,
descended from heaven and unsullied by worldly
corruption. The loss of this childish innocence was
akin to the loss of virginity, and the inevitable loss
of childhood itself was a kind of expulsion from the
Garden of Eden.”

This new myth of childhood innocence served, in part, as the
basis for criticism of modernity and the breakdown of
traditional forms of family and community life.

Two Traditions: The “Free” Child and the “Disciplined” Child
As Calvert’s account suggests, our recognition of a
fundamental difference between children and adults did not
predetermine what significance got attached to that
difference. One strong tradition, as Jackson Lears has noted,
envied children’s close relations to nature and their freedom
from adult constraints. Romantic thinkers, such as William
Blake or Jean- Jacques Rousseau, engaged in a “primitivist ”
celebration of children’s “spontaneous feeling and intense
experience.” The child was emblematic of “freedom from
social convention and utilitarian calculation.” Adulthood was
understood as corruption and formal education as an
instrument that deforms the child’s development. As
Rousseau argues:

“Nature intends that children shall be children
before they are men. If we insist on reversing this
order we shall have fruit early indeed, but unripe
and tasteless and liable to early decay….Childhood
has its own methods of seeing, thinking, and
feeling. Nothing shows less sense than to try to
substitute our own methods for these.”

Rousseau’s Emile outlined an approach to education that
linked learning to natural sensation and material
consequences rather than adult instruction and regulation.
Rousseau wanted to preserve children’s pristine moral

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impulses, and especially to protect children’s minds from the
influence of books:

“The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties
have developed….Therefore education of the
earliest years should be merely negative. It
consists, not in teaching virtue or truth, but in
preserving the heart from vice and from the spirit of
error….Exercise his body, his limbs, his senses, his
strength but keep his mind idle as long as you
can….Leave childhood to ripen in your children.”

The Romantics valued the child’s easy access to the world of
the imagination and sought to free themselves to engage with
the world in a more child-like fashion.

Another tradition, grounded in puritan assumptions, focused
on adult responsibility to constrain and “manage” the child,
shaping their development in accordance with community
standards. According to Kincaid, the prevailing metaphors of
Victorian child-rearing discourse emphasize the malleability of
children’s minds, their willingness and eagerness to submit to
adults. Here children are not inherently evil — simply empty-
headed — and thus appropriately disciplined and instructed
by their elders:

“Children’s minds are like wax, readily receiving all
impressions.” (1880)

“Like clay in the hands of the potter, they are
waiting only to be molded.” (1882)

“There is a pliability in the young mind, as in the
young twig; which renders it apt to take any shape
into which circumstances may press it.” (1818)

These wax, clay, and botanical metaphors rationalize
increased adult control over children’s minds and bodies,
often resulting in harsh punishment.

The persistence of these two contradictory strands — one
celebrating childhood freedom from adult control, the other
insisting on the necessity of adult restraint — helps to explain
the ebb and flow between authoritarian, discipline-centered
and permissive, child-centered approaches. Yet, these
contradictions can surface within the same thinker.
Progressive era child-rearing experts, such as William Buron
Forbush or G. Stanley Hall, simultaneously celebrated
childhood freedom and advocated increased adult
intervention into children’s play. Forbush might state, “the

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infant is like the wild creature of the wood, and it is as cruel
to confine the physical activities of young children as those of
squirrels and swallows.” Hall might state, “Childhood is the
paradise of the race from which adult life is a fall.” Yet, both
promoted organized and supervised play activities, such as
the Boy Scouts or the YMCA, and urged the development of
classroom rituals intended to foster patriotism and religion.
Drawing on social Darwinism, the young child was, in the
words of one progressive reformer, “essentially a savage,
with the interests of a savage, the body of a savage, and to
no small extent, the soul of one.” Hall and his associates
were remarkably literal minded in insisting that the child be
pushed through the various stages of civilization — “from
Rome to Reason” — in order to gain adulthood.

The “Value” of Childhood
Hall’s “Child Study Movement” responded to what economist
Viviana A. Zelizer describes as a serious revaluation of the
child within American culture. In the agrarian cultures of the
19th century, children were expected to contribute labor to
the family farm as soon as they were physically able. More
children meant more income. Even in the immigrant families
of turn-of-the-century New York, children contributed to the
household economy. However, the rising middle classes
directed increased public pressure against child labor, placing
new emphasis upon the child’s sentimental value and pitting
the ideal of the untarnished “child of God” (and of nature)
against the horrors of working children. The sentimental
conception of the child, Zelizer argues, compensated for the
lost economic worth of child labor and quickly spread.
Children were to be shielded from participation in the
economy, either in terms of productive labor or in terms of
relations of consumption. Public attitudes towards adoption
shifted, for example, from a culture which encouraged the
“boarding out” of children as cheap labor to one that
emphasized sentimental bonds between adoptive parent and
child; the result was a decreased demand for older boy
children (deemed economically productive) and an increased
demand for babies and young girls (viewed as cute and
cuddly.) The death of children, no longer taken-for-granted,
became a scandal that could be mobilized in reform
campaigns.

With improvements in children’s physical well-being , the
primary focus of child rearing shifted towards concerns with
psychological development, with cultural materials scrutinized
for their potentially damaging effects upon children’s mental
health. Attacks on popular culture, for example, reflected this
new psychological and sociological conception of the child.

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Media reform campaigns started in the late 19th and early
20th century with criticisms of series books, joke magazines,
and the comics, but soon spread to all commercial culture
targeted at the young. Jokes magazines and comic strips, for
example, were accused of destroying “all respect for law and
authority,” teaching “lawlessness,” “cultivating a lack of
reverence” and thereby “destroy[ing ] the American homes of
the future.”

Such attacks also reflected children’s increasingly central role
as consumers. Advertising aimed at children violated the
“social contract” forged during this period of sacredization.
Madison Avenue, the critics charge, no longer viewed children
as outside the sphere of economic life. However, as Stephen
Kline suggests, the ideology of the “sacred” child also
contained the roots of a consumerist ideology. The marketing
of consumer goods was coupled with parents’ concerns for
their children’s well-being, ideals of sanitation or education,
and improvements in domestic life. The child became a
central salesman for mass-marketed goods, with marketing
researchers exploiting each new breakthrough in child
psychology to more effectively reach this lucrative market.

The Permissive Paradigm
Writing in the 1950s, Martha Wolfenstein saw the shift from a
culture of production (with its demands for discipline and
regimentation) to a culture of consumption (with its
expectations of a “fun morality”) as a major force shaping
child-rearing practices in the 20th century. The emergence of
permissiveness in the post-war era, she argues, was partially
a response to the expansion of the consumer marketplace
and the prospect of suburban affluence. Permissive
conceptions of the child embraced pleasure (especially erotic
pleasure) as a positive motivation for exploration and
learning. Bodily urges, seen as dangerous and threatening in
early 20th century formulations, were now regarded as
benign forces which could be “redirected” into more
appropriate channels. Permissiveness represented an
Americanization of Freudian psychoanalysis and its
“discovery” of childhood sexuality. The association with
childhood rendered these new (and foreign) ideas “innocent,”
allowing adults to rethink their own sexuality as well.

At the same time, permissiveness represented an ideological
response to the Second World War and public distaste for
anything smacking of authoritarianism. The mobilization of
children as “citizen soldiers” during the war had led parents
to rethink the distribution of power within the family in
political terms. In the post-war era, child rearing experts

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promoted permissive approaches as more “democratic,” as
helping to prepare children for participation in the post-war
era. Within this discourse, children’s relations to their parents
paralleled citizens’ relations to the state; many child rearing
guides centered around discussions of domestic
jurisprudence. The core ideology behind permissiveness can
be traced back to progressive currents in American thought.
Benjamin Spock, the most popular child-rearing expert of the
immediate post-war period, drew insight from his political
involvement in the Popular Front Movement, from
anthropological discoveries of Margaret Mead who stressed
the more “liberated” approaches to children’s sexuality found
in various “primitive” cultures and from emerging ideas about
“social engineering” within American sociology and
psychology. Permissiveness’s popularity in post-war America
seems all the more ironic when read in relation to the
militarization of American science and education, the
cold-war, and McCarthyism. For some, the need to protect
innocent children fostered public concern about the arm’s
race and thus increased support for anti-communism at home
and abroad. For others, the romantic conception of the free
child as a utopian escape from adult regulation offered a way
of coping with grown-up repression and conformity.

Post-War America was ripe for a new conception of
parent-child relations; American women were having children
at younger and younger ages; their dislocation from urban
centers towards outlying suburbs separated them from their
mothers and other traditional sources of child-rearing advice.
Spock’s book guided their day-to-day practices; its mixture of
“commonsense” and expert advice offered a security blanket
for young and inexperienced parents. This new approach to
child rearing also helped to transform gender relations within
the family, leading, as Robert Griswold notes, towards a
reconceptualization of the father as playmate rather than
patriarch, and preparing for the revival of feminist politics in
the 1960s.

At the same time, precisely because this shift in the power
relations in the home meant a break with the way mothers
and fathers had themselves been raised, young parents
demanded more and more information and thus,
permissiveness proved a highly productive cultural discourse.
In the child-centered culture of post-war America, permissive
themes and images surface everywhere, from advice manuals
to magazine and television advertisements, from children’s
programming to adult novels. Not surprisingly, the child
became a potent political metaphor with liberal critics
characterizing Joseph McCarthy as “Dennis the Menace” and

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Spiro Agnew suggesting that anti-war protesters should have
been “spanked” more often when they were children.
Similarly, political metaphors surface consistently in child-
rearing guides, with a guilty conscience compared to the
Gestapo or parental control to “brain-washing.”

The mobilization of the image of the innocent child at the
1996 conventions reflected the continued break-down of the
permissive era paradigm, which has been caught within
conservative backlash against the 1960s “counterculture.”
Republican ideology has tended to embrace a more discipline-
centered approach, while Democratic ideology tends towards
“authoritative parenting” as a middle position between
permissive and authoritarian approaches.

Implications and Contradictions
This history of the innocent child presupposes some
relationship between large-scale ideological shifts and
localized practices. Our beliefs about childhood have some
impact on our treatment of children, just as shifts in material
practices, such as the responses to industrialization Zelizer
documents, impact on our conceptual frameworks. However,
historical traces of individual child-rearing practices are
difficult to locate prior to the 20th century. Historians of
childhood depend upon adult records, most often upon
records and advice from the learned classes and thus they
may accurately reflect only the experience of the middle
class. Children left few direct traces of how they responded to
adult expectations. Only in more recent eras does the
historical record support a more dynamic account — one that
sees competing interests between parents and children.

The actual business of living and parenting during these
historical periods was no doubt much messier than our
intellectual and social histories might suggest. In our own
times, parents often find themselves muttering “my parents
would never have let me get away with that,” reflecting an
internal conflict between their own experience of childhood
and their idealized conceptions of how children should be
raised. Many contemporary parents hold themselves
accountable to the ideals of the permissive family culture of
the 1950s and 1960. These ideals can not be met within a
changed economy that demands that both parents work
outside the home or a changed social structure where more
than half of American children have divorced parents. Faced
with these uncertainties, parents, not surprisingly, are unable
to maintain consistent ideology or a coherent style of
parenting; instead, they respond to local conditions in
confused and contradictory ways.

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Recent scholarship also suggests that contemporary America
may be a far less “child-centered” nation than it imagines. Joe
Kincheloe locates a core “ambivalence” in American attitudes
towards childhood, while Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Howard
F. Stein describe a “pathological” culture where “bad” children
become scapegoats for our frustrations and guilt. Often,
Scheper-Hughes and Stein suggests, we focus on the
individual child-abuser as an aberration rather than
acknowledge what our society exacts from its children. Their
descriptions of abusive families, latchkey kids, and neglected
children could not be further from the squeaky clean and
loving ideals of permissive child rearing — a nightmare culture
which manifests itself most fully in black humor and horror
movies.

A history of the ideology of childhood, then, is most
convincing when it acknowledges the continued circulation of
old conceptions and the emotional tug of previous practices,
when it sees change in gradual rather than revolutionary
terms, when it can account for the complex negotiations that
occur during moments of cultural transition, and when it can
acknowledge the gap between our best intentions and our
worst impulses. Children’s culture is shaped at the global
level through powerful institutions and at the local level
through individual families. Through these everyday
practices, the myth of the innocent child gives way to the
reality of children’s experience.

PART THREE
CHILDREN’S CULTURE

“Parents and children negotiate all kinds of deals
over television and toys….The battle lines between
public versus commercial television, educational
videos and literary adaptations versus toy-based
animated series, this video over that one, or one
more hour of viewing versus one less are redrawn
continually in parents’ and children’s daily lives.”
— Ellen Seiter

Many important contributions to the new scholarship about
childhood have made the child disappear; cultural critics and
historians have pulled the rug out from under our prevailing
cultural myths to show us that the innocent child is often a
figment of adult imaginations. Philippe Aries taught us not
only that childhood has a history but that there may have
been a period before childhood existed. James Kincaid tells us
that “what the child is matters less than what we think it is.”
Jacqueline Rose suggests that behind the category of

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children’s fiction, there exists only a fictional child — a
projection of adult desire. Children’s fictions, after all, are
written by adults, illustrated by adults, edited by adults,
marketed by adults, purchased by adults, and often read by
adults, for children. As Rose’s analysis suggests, children’s
writers have a wide array of motives, some illicit, some
benign, for their desire to “get close” to the child and to
shape her thoughts and fantasies. The examination of
children’s fiction, then, starts by stripping away the fantasy
child reader, or even the fantasy of “children of all ages,” in
order to locate and interpret the adult goals and desires
which shape cultural production.

This displacement of the child from the center of our analysis
was a necessary first step for critiquing the mythology of
childhood innocence. Yet, such work often leaves children
permanently out of equation, offering no way to examine the
social experience of actual children or to talk about the
real-world consequences of these ideologies. Increasingly,
the child emerges purely as a figment of pedophilic desire.
Rose suggests that our desire to erase children’s sexuality
has less to do with adult needs to suppress or regulate
children’s bodies than with the desire to “hold off” our “panic”
at the prospect of sexualities radically different from our own.
At the same time, she sees the process of storytelling as one
of “seduction;” adults tell tales to justify their prolonged
closeness to the objects of their desire. Photography critic
Carol Mavor has traced the complex desires which link Lewis
Carroll’s photographs of naked girls with his children’s books;
both reflect his urge to arrest young girls’ development at the
moment when they first “bud” while forestalling the inevitable
approach of adult sexuality and death.

Far from a perversion of the Victorian era, this fascination
with the erotic child, James Kincaid argues, is utterly
pervasive in our contemporary culture, surfacing in scandal
sheet headlines about molestation and murder, in Coppertone
and Calvin Klein ads, and in popular films such as Pretty
Baby. Such images, he suggests, allow us to have our cake
and eat it too — to be titillated by erotically charged images of
children, while clinging to their innocence of adult sexual
knowledge. These interpretations reveal some of the
fundamental hypocrisy surrounding childhood innocence in
Victorian and contemporary culture. For writers like Kincaid
and Mavor, pedophilia becomes a scandalous category,
shocking us out of complacency and forcing us to examine
the power dynamic between children and adults.

In evoking the shock of pedophilia, they are playing a

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dangerous game. Contemporary media scares about child
molestation at day care centers are the latest in a long series
of attempts to use the ideology of the innocent child to force
working women back in the home, especially when coupled
with equally sensationalistic accounts of latch key children
and the horrors of video game/television violence. No one is
denying that child seduction and molestation can be real
problems, but the over-reporting of the most sensationalistic
cases denies us any meaningful perspective for examining the
actual incidence of such problems. These media campaigns
leave working mothers feeling that there is no safe way to
raise their children, short of providing them with the constant
supervision demanded by child-rearing experts.

In such a culture, almost all representations that
acknowledge children’s sexuality are subject to legal
sanctions. Courts and media reformers are taking legal
actions against award-winning art films like The Tin Drum,
the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann and
Jock Sturges, the class projects of a Harvard undergraduate,
and hardcore pornography. Even Kincaid has been attacked
in the British press for allegedly advocating pedophilia.
Elementary schools in Wisconsin organized “secrets clubs”
where children were encouraged to tell social workers about
their parent’s sexual and drug use habits. There is no
question that our culture proliferates eroticized images of
children, yet there is also no question that our culture
engages in a constant and indiscriminate witch-hunt against
anyone who shows too much interest in such images. Such
hysteria makes it difficult for artists to question more
traditional modes of depicting children, for social critics to ask
hard questions about sexuality, or for mothers and fathers to
be certain which family photographs might become weapons
in child custody battles. I am not denying the validity of
cultural analysis that recognizes pedophilic impulses, yet
there are serious dangers in reducing the question of adult
power over children to erotic desire.

Strip away pedophilia and we are still left with questions
about how contemporary scholarship might represent the
power relations between children and adults. Many accounts
of children’s culture focus almost exclusively on the exercise
of adult authority over children, leaving little space for
thinking about children’s own desires, fantasies, and
agendas. For example, Stephen Kline denies children any role
in the production of their own culture:

“What might be taken as children’s culture has
always been primarily a matter of culture produced

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for and urged upon children…Childhood is a
condition defined by powerlessness and
dependence upon the adult community’s directives
and guidance. Culture is, after all, as the repository
of social learning and socialization, the means by
which societies preserve and strengthen their
positions in the world.”

Children’s culture is, within this formulation, something that
happens to children. Children are not participants or
contributors to that culture. However powerful it may seem
as a criticism of the regulatory power of adult institutions,
Kline’s formulation rests on the familiar myth of the innocent
and victimized child whom we must protect — the mute one
whose voice we must assume.

Childhood Identities
Writing about our fascination with eroticized images of young
girls, Valerie Walkerdine suggests that popular culture is often
experienced as “the intrusion of adult sexuality into the
sanitized space of childhood.” This model is too simple, she
argues, since it denies children’s own role in shaping and
deploying these fantasies. As Walkerdine notes, such an
account does not acknowledge, for example, the ways that
working class girls actively embrace elements from adult
erotic representations as offering a fantasy of escape from
limited social opportunities or restrictive adult authority.
Walkerdine would find equally simplistic any account which
celebrated the working class girl’s performance of erotic
identities as “resistance to the position accorded her at
school and in high culture,” since this reading ascribes too
much social autonomy to children. She describes popular
culture as the site of contested and contradictory attempts to
define the child. Children’s culture is shaped both by adult
desires and childhood fantasies, with material conditions
determining whether or not we — as adults or as children —
are able to enact our fantasies.

Walkerdine represents a larger scholarly tradition that
examines the complex processes by which children acquire
identities or internalize cultural norms. Annette Kuhn’s Family
Secrets, for example, uses close readings of family
photographs to explore her own struggle with her mother to
define personal memory. Her autobiographical discussion
becomes all the more poignant because, as a feminist, Kuhn
recognizes the desperation behind her mother’s attempt to
project her own meanings onto her daughter:

“If a daughter figures for her mother as the
abandoned, unloved, child that she, the mother,

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once was, and in some ways remains, how can
mother and daughter disengage themselves from
these identifications without harm, without
forfeiture of love?”

In adopting the voice of the daughter, while acknowledging
her mother’s fears and fantasies, Kuhn reintroduces
children’s experiences into the discussion of “family values.”
Carolyn Steedman’s The Tidy House explores how creative
writing by young working class girls reveals a pained
recognition of their parents’ ambivalence towards child
rearing. Steedman explains:

“They knew that their parents’ situation was one of
poverty, and that the presence of children only
increased that poverty….They knew that children
were longed for, materially desired, but that their
presence was irritation, regret and resentment.
They knew that, in some clear and uncomplicated
way, it would have been better had they never
been born.”

Steedman reads the stories as the girls’ “urgent” attempts to
“understand what set of social beliefs had brought them into
being.”

This tradition of feminist analysis slides back and forth
between psychological and sociological investigation,
exploring the charged and unstable relations between
mothers and daughters in order to rethink the social and
psychic dynamics of the patriarchal family. Such analysis
casts the child — whether understood through
autobiographical introspection (Family Secrets) or textual
analysis and ethnographic description (The Tidy House) — as
an active participant in these family dramas; children’s
desires, hopes, fears, and fantasies are central to the process
of constructing personal identities.

One limitation of our current research is that almost all such
work has focused around issues of motherhood and
femininity. This is not surprising given women’s primary
responsibility for child-raising. However, we lack solid critical
analysis of the relations between fathers and sons within
these same critical terms; we need more work on the
construction of masculinity through the rituals of boyhood.
Feminism probably offers the best tools for initiating such a
project, yet few male scholars have adopted its modes of
analysis to confront their own formative experiences.

Children’s Culture and Adult Institutions

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These recent studies of childhood have generated a more
complex picture of the power relations between children and
adults. Parents, schoolteachers, church leaders, social
reformers, the adult world in general, are powerfully invested
in “fixing” children’s identities. Eve Sedgwick has explored
how parental anxieties that their sons and daughters might
grow up to be queer motivate the imposition of gender-
specific behaviors on “tom boys” and “sissies.” Sedgwick
reviews psychological literature and clinical practices that
confuse gender identification and sexual preference, seeing
inappropriate dress, play, and mannerism as early warning
signs that a child has homosexual tendencies. Sedgwick
challenges efforts by the mental health profession to
“maximize the possibility of a heterosexual outcome,”
wondering who speaks for the rights of queer children.

Children are subject to powerful institutions that ascribe
meanings onto their minds and bodies in order to maintain
social control. Barrie Thorne suggests, for example, that
teachers’ needs to routinize their procedures and to break
their classes into manageably scaled groups results in a
constant reinforcement of the basic binaries between “boys
and girls.” Children are more likely to play together across
gender differences in their own neighborhoods, outside of
adult supervision, than within school cafeterias and
playgrounds.

Children’s culture is shaped by adult agendas and
expectations, at least on the site of production and often at
the moment of reception, and these materials leave lasting
imprints on children’s social and cultural development.
Elizabeth Segel has examined how publishers, librarians, and
educators shape children’s access to different genres,
resulting in gender divides in reading interests that carry into
adult life. The separation of domestic based stories for girls
and adventure stories for boys re-affirm the gendering of the
public and private spheres. Boy’s books were often
“chronicles of growth to manhood,” while girl’s books often
“depicted a curbing of autonomy in adolescence.” The two
forms of literature prepare girls and boys for their expected
roles in adult society. However, these gender designations
are not totally rigid in practice. Young girls often read boys
books for pleasure and boys books are more consistently
taught in the classroom. On the other hand, boys typically
have been reluctant to engage with books with female
protagonists or feminine subject matter. Such an imbalance,
Segel argues, extracts “a heavy cost in feminine self-esteem”
and may be even “more restrictive of boys’… freedom to
read.” Ellen Seiter has extended Segel’s analysis to the

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gendering of children’s television. Feminists, she argues, may
be well-meaning when they attack hyper-feminine programs
like My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake, but their
continued disparagement of the things girls like may
contribute to — rather than help to rectify — girls’ declining
self esteem.

The Resistant Rituals of Childhood
Without denying the tremendous cultural power behind these
adult efforts to control children’s identity formation,
scholarship on children’s culture also acknowledges the ways
children resist, transform, or redefine adult prerogatives,
making their own uses of cultural materials, and enacting
their own fantasies through play. Miriam Formanek-Brunnel
has researched the gender politics of doll play in the 19th
century, indicating both ways that dolls were valued by adults
as a means of inculcating domestic skills in young girls and
the ways that doll play might “subvert convention, mock
maternalism, and undermine restrictions.” On the one hand,
the gift of a doll was intended to encourage girls to sew and
to rehearse other “domestic arts” expected of them as future
wives and mothers; the fragility of china dolls required
delicate movements and nurturing gestures. On the other,
young girls often used the dolls to rehearse funerals and
mourning rituals, expressing a core ambivalence about their
future maternal roles, or played with them aggressively,
chopping off their hair or driving nails through their bodies.
Formanek-Brunnel suggests:

“Girls in the process of constructing their own
notion of girlhood engaged their parents in a
pre-conscious political struggle to define, decide,
and determine the meaning of dolls in their own
lives and as representations of their own culture.”

Erica Rand’s Barbie’s Queer Accessories suggests such
localized resistance continues in contemporary doll play.
Rand solicited and interpreted adult’s memories of Barbie
play, finding that these recollections often circle around
unsanctioned and often erotically charged play. Many lesbians
remembered transforming the fashion model into a “gender
outlaw,” drawing on their memories of childhood doll play to
frame “dyke destiny” stories. Just as the myth of childhood
innocence naturalizes heterosexual assumptions about
appropriate gender roles, “dyke destiny” stories suggest the
inevitability of queer sexual orientation by tracing its roots
back to early childhood. Rand encourages skepticism about
such stories, examining the way that memory retrospectively
rewrites the past to conform to our present-day identities.

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Rand sees a constant struggle within children’s culture (and
within adult memories of childhood) between moments of
hegemonic incorporation and moments of resistance. The
same girl or boy may sometimes conform and sometimes
disobey.

Adult institutions and practices make “bids” on how children
will understand themselves and the world around them, yet
they can never be certain how children will take up and
respond to those “bids.” A growing literature depicts children
as active creators, who use the resources provided them by
the adult world as raw materials for their play activities, their
jokes, their drawings, and their own stories. Shelby Ann Wolf
and Shirley Brice Heath’s The Braid of Literature offers a
detailed description of Heath’s own young daughters as
readers, documenting the many ways they integrated favorite
books their lives. Children’s books became reference points
for explaining their own experiences. The girls often spoofed
their language, characters, and situations. The young girls
felt compelled not only to re-read favorite stories but to enact
them with their bodies. Such play represents a testing of
alternative identities. Maintaining a fluid relationship to adult
roles, children try things out through their play, seeing if they
fit or make sense, and discarding them when they tire of
them.

The Ket Aesthetic
Adult control over the cultural materials which enter children’s
lives certainly constrains the array of ideas and identities they
can use in their play; adult restrictions on play activities limit
this process of ideological exploration; yet, nothing can fully
block oppositional meanings from entering children’s lives.
Alison James has explored how children’s relations to cheap
candies (which are called “kets” in British slang) suggest an
oppositional aesthetic, one that challenges or reverses adult
categories and carves out a kids-only culture. Children
embrace candies which provoke strange sensations (bubbling
or crackling on their tongues), which incorporate unfamiliar
taste combinations, which mimic things (rats, worms, etc.)
adults refuse to eat, which embrace lurid or jarring colors, or
which encourage playful and messy modes of consumption.

James describes “children’s culture” as children’s space for
cultural expression using materials bought cheaply from the
parent culture but viewed with adult disapproval. Her account
could not differ more from Kline’s conception of a children’s
culture produced and controlled by adults. The cheaper they
are in price, the more cultural goods are likely to reflect
children’s own aesthetic and cultural sensibilities. Materials

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children can purchase with their allowances (such as candy,
bubblegum cards, or comic books) are less likely to bear the
heavy imprint of adult gatekeepers than high cost items
(books and videos) parents purchase as gifts.

This “ket” aesthetic can also be recognized within children’s
television programs, such as the “scream-real-loud” realm of
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse or the slop-and-slime world of
Nickelodeon’s game shows, or in video games, which have
often faced reformist pressures because of their use of
scatological or gory imagery. As Marsha Kinder has
suggested, Nickelodeon’s self-promotion has often
encouraged an ethos of “generational conflict,” stressing that
parents “just don’t get” its appeal to children: “adults are
untrustworthy; they wear deodorant and ties; they shave
under their arms, they watch the news and do other
disgusting things.” Nickelodeon’s self-presentation walks a
thin line, using children’s oppositional aesthetic to package
shows (such as Lassie) which contain little parents would find
offensive and creating programs (such as Kids Court or Linda
Ellerbee’s news specials) which almost — but usually not
quite — embrace a politics of kid-empowerment. Some of
Nick’s shows encourage children to cast a critical eye towards
adult institutions, teach them to be skeptical readers of media
images, encourage them to take more active roles in their
communities (including leading fights for free expression
within their schools) and take seriously their own goals for
the nation’s future (as in their Kids Pick the President
campaign coverage). Nickelodeon’s claims to be “the kids
only network” erects a sharp line between the realms of
children and adults.

This approach contrasts sharply with the children’s programs
of the 1950s (such as Howdy Doody and Winky Dink and
You) which Lynn Spigel has characterized as inviting a
“dissolution of age categories.” Such programs, she argues,
were “filled with liminal characters, characters that existed
somewhere in between child and adult” and which
encouraged a playful transgression of age-appropriate
expectations. Spigel points to their covert appeal to adult
fantasies of escaping into the realm of childhood free play
from the conformity and productivity expected of grownups in
Eisenhower’s America. The Nickelodeon programs such as
Double Dare or What Would You Do, on the other hand,
stage contests between children and adults, invite children to
judge their parents or to smack them with cream pies and
douse them with green slime. They support children’s
recognition of a core antagonism with grownups, while
positioning the network, its programs, and its spin-off

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products on the kid side of that divide.

This desire to create an autonomous cultural space for
children’s play is not new, nor does such freedom from adult
control necessarily retard the child’s inculcation into
anticipated social roles. Children must break with their
parents before they can enter into adult roles and
responsibilities. Children’s play has often been a space where
they experimented with autonomy and self-mastery. E.
Anthony Rotundo’s analysis of “Boy Culture” in 19th century
America suggests its complex relationship to the adult world.
As industrialization led to a greater division of labor, forcing
men to leave the home to work in the factories and leaving
women in the domestic sphere to raise the young, the
formation of masculine identities entered a new phase. Young
boys sought an escape from maternal restraint, fleeing into a
sphere of male action and adventure. Their play with other
boys was clearly framed as oppositional to adults, taking the
form of daring raids on privileged adult spaces, comic
assaults on parental authority, or simply a rejection of
maternal rules and restrictions. Through this play, boys
acquired the aggression, competitiveness, daring,
self-discipline, and physical mastery expected of those who
would inhabit a culture of rugged individualism. The more
rambunctious and irresponsible aspects of this culture would
need to be tempered as the young males entered adult jobs
and family relations, yet this rough-and-tumble “boy culture”
prepared them more fully for their future roles than the
maternal sanctioned activities of the domestic sphere.

Embracing a politics of appropriation and resistance runs the
risk of romanticizing child’s play as the seeds of cultural
revolution. I use the word, romanticizing, with precision here.
In many ways, the celebration of children as “gender
outlaws” or cultural rebels can be traced back to Rousseau’s
celebration of the “natural” and “spontaneous” child as
embodying a freedom not yet subordinated to the demands
of the civilized world. While this myth of the child certainly
has advantages over the more repressive image of the child
as a blank slate or the multivalent image of the innocent child
at risk, it is nevertheless a myth. Perhaps, there is no way for
adults to speak of children without putting words in their
mouths and turning them into symbols for our own use.
However, Rotundo’s analysis suggests one escape from this
impasse, looking at the ways children’s play represents a
temporary space of freedom, while contributing actively to
socialization and indoctrination into cultural values. Rotundo
preserves the idea of children’s social and cultural agency
without assuming that they are outside the cultural

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formations or material conditions that shape all human
interactions.

CONCLUSION
THE POLITICAL STAKES OF CHILDREN’S CULTURE

“Children are at the epicenter of the information
revolution, ground zero of the digital world…..After
centuries of regulation, sometimes benign,
sometimes not, kids are moving out from under our
pious control, finding one another via the great hive
that is the net….Children can for the first time
reach past the suffocating boundaries of social
convention, past their elders’ rigid notions of what
is good for them.”
— Jon Katz

The Children’s Culture Reader seeks modes of cultural
analysis that do not simply celebrate children’s resistance to
adult authority but provide children with the tools to realize
their own political agendas or to participate in the production
of their own culture. The challenge is to find models that
account for the complexity of the interactions between
children and adults, the mutuality and the opposition between
their cultural agendas. Feminist analysis has taught us that
politics works as much through the micro-practices of
everyday life as through large-scale institutions and that our
struggle to define our identities in relations to other members
of our families often determines how we understand our place
in the world.

As I have been editing this collection, I have been continually
asked to explain and justify the “political stakes” in
re-examining children’s culture. As this discussion has
already suggested, I consider such questions misguided,
both because they accept at face value the premise that
childhood is a space largely “innocent” of adult political
struggles and because they fail to recognize how foundational
the figure of the innocent child is to almost all contemporary
forms of politics. Issues involving children are often viewed
as “soft” compared to “hardcore” issues like tax cuts, crime
bills, and defense expenditures, a language that suggests
historic divisions between a feminine domestic sphere and a
masculine public sphere. Feminists have long campaigned for
a reassessment of those priorities and a recognition of the
political stakes in domestic life. Yet, the politics of the public
sphere, no less than the politics of the domestic sphere, rests
on the figure of the child, as we saw in the various evocations
of childhood at the Republican and Democratic national

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conventions. Often, the figure of the brutalized and victimized
child gets mobilized in campaigns to build support for war;
the figure of the dead child is the most powerful trope in the
campaign for tougher sentencing of criminals. For example,
the recent “Megan’s Law,” which requires public notification
of the movement of convicted child molesters and other
offenders into the community, will be forever associated with
the memory of a specific child victim.

Moreover, without a politics of the family, without a
progressive conception of children’s culture, the left lacks the
ability to literally and figuratively reproduce itself. We need to
be engaged in the process not only of critiquing traditional
conceptions of the family, but of imagining alternative ways
that families might perform their responsibilities for the care
and raising of the young. We need to think about our roles as
parents, teachers, and citizens in ways that help us to
prepare children to participate in the process of social change
and political transformation. We need to embrace approaches
to teaching and social policy which acknowledge children’s
cultural productivity and which provide them with the
materials and skills they need to critically evaluate their place
in the world. The
Birmingham tradition of cultural studies helped us to question
the labeling of youth cultures as “deviant” by adult standards,
seeing in their “hooliganism” the signs of a subversive or
resistant subculture. We still lack a similarly political
vocabulary for examining moments when children buck adult
demands. Instead, we frame such localized moments of
resistance in moralistic categories of “naughtiness” or in
developmental psychological terms as “testing limits.” The
need is to recognize that children’s disobedience of teachers,
for example, might originate in a context of economic or
racial inequalities, might express something of the
frustrations of coping with a world which devalues your
interests and seeks to impose adult values onto your
activities. If politics is ultimately about the distribution of
power, then the power imbalance between children and
adults remains, at heart, a profoundly political matter.

Herb Kohl confronts these questions when he debates
whether we should “burn Babar.” He invites us to question
whether our recognition of noxious ideologies in traditional
children’s literature (such as Babar’s pro-colonialism agenda)
compels us to banish them or whether we should encourage
children to become critical readers locating and questioning
the implicit assumptions they find in the culture around them.
As Kohl writes:

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“The challenge parents face is how to integrate
encounters with stereotypes into their children’s
sensibility and help their children become critical of
aspects of the culture that denigrate or humiliate
them or anyone else….Instead of prohibiting things
that tempt children, this means allowing them the
freedom to explore things while trusting them to
make sensible and humane judgments.”

Jon Katz confronts these challenges when he shifts the focus
of debates about cyberspace away from the question of how
we might protect our children from corrupting influences
(whether through legal sanctions or filtering technology) and
towards how we might empower children to actively
contribute to the political culture of the net. Katz argues that
children, no less than adults, have “certain inalienable rights
not conferred at the caprice of arbitrary authority,” rights that
include access to the materials of their culture and the
technologies which enable more widespread communication
as well as “the right to refuse to be force-fed other
generation’s values.” Katz’s polemical and suggestive essay
points towards a reassessment of the role of education, away
from a focus on the transmission of established cultural
norms and towards the development of skills which enable
children to question the society around them and to
communicate their ideas, via new technologies, with others of
their generations. He writes:

“Children need help in becoming civic-minded
citizens of the digital age, figuring out how to use
the machinery in the service of some broader social
purposes….But more than anything else, children
need to have their culture affirmed. They need their
parents, teachers, guardians and leaders to accept
that there is a new political reality for children, and
the constructs that governed their own lives and
culture are no longer the only relevant or useful
ones.”

Sally Mann confronts these challenges when she creates
photographs of children, which emphasize their fears,
anxieties, and uncertainties, their everyday scrapes and
bruises, and sexuality rather than representing childhood as a
wholesome utopia. At their best, Mann’s photographs strip
away the myth of childhood innocence to show the struggles
of children to define themselves.

Linda Ellerbee confronts these challenges when she creates
television programs that encourage children’s awareness of
real-world problems, such as the LA Riots, and enable to find

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their own critical voice to speak back against the adult world.
She trusts children to confront realities from which other
adults might shield them, offering them the facts needed to
form their own opinions and the air time to discuss issues.

These critics, educators, and artists offer us models of a
children’s culture which is progressive in both its form and its
content. They move beyond mythic innocence and toward a
recognition and advocacy of children’s cultural, social, and
political agency. Such works do not ignore the fact that
children suffer real material problems, including neglect,
abuse, and poverty, and that there are times and places
where adults must protect them from themselves and from
the world. There are also times and places where we need to
listen to our children and factor their needs, desires, and
agendas into our own sense of the world and into the
decisions that effects our children’s lives. Children need
adults to create the conditions through which they develop a
political consciousness, to defend their access to the
information they need to frame their own judgments, and to
build the technologies which enable them to exchange their
ideas with others of their generation. They need us to be
more than guardians of the fort or protectors of the village,
and we will not rise to those challenges as long as our actions
are governed by familiar myths of the innocent child. The goal
is not to erase the line between children and adult, which we
must observe if we are both to protect and empower the
young. The goal is to offer a fuller, more complex picture of
children’s culture that can enable more meaningful, realistic,
and effective political change.

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Rethinking Childhood
Author(s): Leena Alanen
Source: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1988), pp. 53-67
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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Acta Sociologica 1988 (31), 1:53-

67

Rethinking Childhood

Leena Alanen
Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyvaskyla

The study of children is either totally absent in sociology or is treated within
very limited contexts which are considered marginal for sociological theory
and research. The paper aims at examining why there is no sociology of
childhood and what kind of sociological rethinking is needed to bring children
into sociology. First, the conventional approach in child-related themes –
recognized as ‘socialization’ – is discussed. Secondly, sociological notions of
‘the family’ are taken up and criticized on the basis of the feminist project
of deconstructing the family. Finally, childhood is considered as a social
construct and some demands for research on children and childhood are
developed that may help to avoid the long-held and unnecessarily limiting
views on these topics and make way for the emergence of a sociology of
childhood.

‘The study of children and child development is both empirically and theoretically
central to the discipline (of sociology)’. This assertion is made by the two editors
of a recent book on sociological studies of child development (Adler & Adler 1986).
They go on to justify why this is so, yet are forced to admit that there is a great
paucity of sociological literature in this area. Another writer in the same book
(Ambert 1986) documents this latter fact: there is indeed a near absence of studies
on children in (North American) sociology. The fact has been recognized elsewhere
too, and first attempts to clear the ground for a future sociology of childhood to
emerge have been made (e.g. Wallner & Pohler-Funke 1978; Jenks 1982).

The aim of my paper is to examine sociology from the point of view of finding
at least some tentative explanations for this absence of children in sociology. In her
article in the book just mentioned, Ambert suggests two explanations. The first
one derives from the originally macrosociological perspectives with which sociology
as a discipline emerged. Children (like women) were seen as peripheral to the
global systems under study or simply taken as future replacements for their adult
members. Little attention was therefore devoted to children, who were not accepted
as significant members although they did occupy their ‘proper place’ (again like
women) in the lives of the more significant ones (men). This insignificance is still
granted to children, whereas feminist scholarship has been able to challenge many
taken-for-granted assumptions on womanhood of malestream sociology and has
contributed to changes within the discipline itself (see e.g. DuBois et al. 1985). –
The second explanation suggested by Ambert derives in its turn from the present
reward system within the profession: research on childhood and children simply is

53

no avenue for participating in the central discussions and debates within sociology,
which discourages serious research in the area.

The acceptance of the marginal relevance of childhood research for sociology
clearly stands in opposition to the bold assertion of Adler & Adler – that this in
fact is not the case and that the issue of childhood is central to the discipline.
Accepting this leaves one with the problem of why children still remain at the edge
of sociological knowledge. Ambert’s statement that the perspectives in use in
sociological research account for this, points to the obvious task of looking critically
at its theoretical and conceptual approaches.

A convenient starting point for such an examination is given in the observation
that children and childhood are in fact approached only within some limited topics.
The family, and later the school, are such topics. Families and schools are, of
course, perfectly legitimate objects in studying children and childhood, for the
simple reason that the modern, Western childhood is a familialized and scholarized
one. It is in these contexts then that today’s children largely live out their everyday
lives. They are also the contexts that often prove troublesome and problematic for
both children and their significant others, a fact which calls for further serious
studies on the lives of children in families and schools.

In research, the encapsulation of children within such limited notions has another
side to it as well. Ennew (1986), in a thoughtful analysis of one childhood problem,
begins her examination of the sexual exploitation of children by stating the set of
ideas that define the current notion of modern childhood. These ideas are clearly
at work within the issue she examines, both in the public alarm and in the studies
that have been conducted around it.

The first set of ideas (Ennew 1986: 20) separates children from adults and defines
the ideal family as a nuclear unit consisting of protected children and protecting
adults. The second set, in turn, separates adults from children within the production
process. The child is denied the (formal) status of a worker, for the reason that
being a child demands protection from work and provision of training.

Not only do these two sets of ideas structure the way we think about the sexual
exploitation of children, they largely set the baseline for both the ways we think
about children in general and the ways we go about organizing childhood for the
younger members of our societies. Underlying this thinking seems to be a triangular
configuration made up of assumptions concerning the nature of an essentially non-
social childhood, the family as an appropriate context for this kind of childhood,
and socialization (the more academic term for what childhood processes are about).
This configuration presents the (Western) child not as (yet) part of her society, but
condemned into a curiously non-social existence – ‘a family life sentence’ (Billy
Bragg: ‘The Home Front’, in: Talking with the Taxman about Poetry) – described
as a period of lack of responsibility, with rights to protection and training, but not
to autonomy, a configuration that is irrelevant both culturally and structurally to
the majority of the world’s children.

The triangularity of childhood, the family and socialization proves to be as if
moulded into one piece that cannot be broken into parts for separate consideration.
This clearly affects the way that childhood issues are discussed and implications
drawn. The questioning of one component, e.g. the family as the setting for
childhood socialization, takes place within accepted and unproblematized notions

54

of the other two, thus in fact blocking the possibilities of even imagining novel
relations between the three components. This is to be seen, for example, when
discussing the impact of the recent changes in family forms and ‘non-traditional’
life styles on children: the new, family arrangements are evaluated against
the accepted knowledge on childhood and socialization, i.e., knowledge that is
based on observations on a particular version of ‘the family’. It is little wonder
that this often results in explicit or implicit moralism and pressure towards nor-
mative family policies – naturally in the interests of providing the best for our
children.

The very same triangular configuration appears within social science as well, with
implications for research that in the end may prove to be responsible for the absence
of children in sociology. The gaps in our sociological knowledge of children and
childhood are then there not without reason. The observations that childhood issues
come up in limited contexts and that the need for a sociology of childhood has only
recently been asked for provide grounds for asking how in fact the child is constituted
within social theory and what the implications are.

Jenks (1982) confirms that the child is indeed constituted within social theory: it
is assembled to support and perpetuate certain versions of man [sic], action, order,
language and rationality. This specific constituting of the child within social theory
then defines for sociology the particular presence or absence of children on research
agendas. The suggestion that there are basic conceptual limitations for constructing
a sociology of childhood points to the need for a ‘strong’ programme for this
endeavour. This means, in analogy to the ‘strong’ programme already effectuated
in feminist research (see Bell & Roberts 1984), that more is needed than merely
staying content with the task of observing the absences of child-relevant knowledge
and starting to fill them, thereby adding an extra dimension to sociology. The
‘strong’ programme proposes the need for critical questions to be raised about the
very perspectives in sociology on children and childhood that are built into its
present concepts and categories. These should be looked at from the viewpoint of
their tendency to produce systematical distortions and omissions concerning the
place of the child in social life. This questioning, in turn, would necessarily promote
the transforming of (some of) the perspectives, potentially leading to changes in
the discipline itself.

I have written this rather lengthy introduction to my paper in order to convince
the reader as well as myself of the benefits that can be derived for both sociological
research and practical child politics from questioning the very concepts that underly
the conventional approach in sociology to child-related issues. For my own use, I
have translated this approach – ‘growing up in the family’ – into the conceptual
triangle of socialization/the family/childhood. It is this triangle, and its implications
for sociology, that to me seem to demand rethinking.

The paper first examines how the child is approached in sociology and how this
approach is justified. The approach, conceptualized as ‘socialization’, is further
analysed to find the particular positioning that it grants to children in society. The
partiality and distortions in this clearly demand correction.

‘Socialization’ points instantly to the second suspect contributing to the neglect
of children in sociology: the family. Feminist criticism of conventional notions of the
family and the project of deconstructing the family prove to form a methodologically

55

helpful bridge from the negative critique of ‘socialization’ to a positive notion of
childhood as a social construct.

Finally the paper takes up some of the beginnings for constructing a sociology of
childhood. This demands the reformulation of the triangular configuration that has
long been the obsession of sociological studies on childhood. Growing up in the
modem family may then appear not so much ‘a life sentence’ as a life project of
the child’s own making, too.

1. Looking for the child in sociology
Jenks, in an introduction to a collection of articles and excerpts from social science
literature entitled The Sociology of Childhood (1982), reaches the generalization
that the child is indeed constituted in social theory. If real live children rarely
appear in social science research, at least the ‘theoretical’ child has a function within
it. It is precisely this function that proves to have a powerful influence on how
children are treated in social science research and sociology in particular.

Jenks describes the constitution of the child in social theory as revealing a
continuous paradox: The child is familiar to us and yet strange, she inhabits our
world and yet seems to answer to another, she is essentially of ourselves and yet
appears to display a different order of being (1982:9). This ambiguity in the
relationship between the child and the adult, appearing both in common sense and
in theory, remains imprisoned within the notion of difference. But difference
between the two positions indicates the identity of each: the child cannot be imagined
except in relation to a conception of the adult, just as it becomes impossible to
produce a sense of the adult and his/her society without first positing the child
(Jenks 1982:10).

The significance of this formulation is in the fact that it contains an unac-
knowledged and therefore unsolved paradox. A conception of the child is reached
only by leaving the child side of the relationship ’empty’, i.e. without any substantial
positive definition.1 The child is envisioned merely as different and particular –
compared to the adult – and this difference is accounted for by simply focusing on
the process of overcoming it. And indeed social science has concentrated – to Jenks
in an overattentive fashion – on theorizing ‘the integration of the child into a social
world’ (the title of just one of many books, this one edited by Richards (1974), and
more conscious of the dominant focus than most others).

As far as social theory is concerned, then, the child remains negatively defined –
defined only by what the child is not but is subsequently going to be, and not by
what the child presently is. The child is depicted as pre-social, potentially social, in
the process of becoming social – essentially undergoing socialization.

The concept of socialization supplies sociology precisely with this perspective
which it shares with social science in general. ‘Socialization’ has indeed become
the conventional categorical tool for approaching child-related issues, whether
conceming the family, parenthood or the experience of being a child. This is evident
simply by looking at sociology textbooks which – if indeed they have a chapter on
children – usually do this under the rubric of ‘socialization’ (Ambert 1986:16;
Thome 1987).

‘Socialization’ possesses a compelling insight, which for example Thorne (1987)

56

notes but doesn’t remain content with: born without language or knowledge of
social organization, children do become inducted into the social worlds that surround
them. But for Thorne as well as others (e.g. Speier 1976) the socialization framework
also embeds problems for child research: it emphatically brings out ‘the adult
ideological viewpoint’ as well as functionalist and determinist assumptions. Its
limitations help to distort the sociological understanding concerming the dynamics
of social structure, human agency and historical change (Reyer 1980; Thorne 1987),
making it hard even to imagine, and even harder to conceptualize children as
veritable social actors.

2. Socialization: the career of a concept
Both the term and the concept of socialization originally emerged as a corollary of
the concept of society, in an age when arguments for a separate scientific discipline
of sociology were being advanced. In this context, ‘socialization’ referred to social
forces drawing individuals together into a community. It was understood to make
social life possible and was to be considered a reality in its own right, or in the
words of Durkheim (who named the notion), a reality sui generis, to be treated as
a social fact in clear distinction of its effects on individuals.

The emergence of ‘socialization’ was then the emergence of a genuinely socio-
logical category, which furthermore was included within the vocabulary of a realist
sociology (see, e.g., Johnson, Dandeker & Ashworth 1984). This sociology –
contrary to empiricist and subjectivist sociologies which were later to dominate
the field – insists on social phenomena being things-in-themselves, outside and
independent of all those elements that it comprises, such as individuals, their
particular circumstances and consciousness. The social reality of socialization was
to be seen in its constraining effect on individuals, this appearing as the inter-
nalization by them of social facts originally external and independent of them.
Socialization, then, was taken as an exclusively social process, which nevertheless
had secondary effects through internalization (a psychological process).

The original and developing concept of socialization contained within itself a
strong moral sense: the society in which the forces of socialization are in effect is
a civilized one, i.e. one in which the originally unsocial human nature is gradually
superseded. The civilized society, of course, then proves to be the society of
adults. – The original concept of socialization also contained an assumption of the
fundamental polarity of human nature between an uncivilized, unsocialized side
and a civilized and socialized side. Here the child was ‘naturally’ located on the
uncivilized side, as a being yet to be socialized in the power field of social forces.

It is therefore the idea of a reality residing on the level of the social and exercising
a determinate influence on individuals that maintains the original link of the issue
of socialization to sociological analysis – an idea that later was named sociological
determinism. However, sociological determinism within a realist sociology is dif-
ferent from sociological determinism transplanted to other sociologies. The shift in
the meaning of socialization during its career exemplifies this. The term clearly
emerged as an entirely different concept, as in the course of time it became included
in the more individualistic and increasingly empiricist research in the United States
(for an interpretation of the fate of ‘socialization’ in the US, see Wentworth

57

1980). The term was given a new interpretation that made use of the sociological
determinist view on the empirical world, but above all it reinterpreted socialization
as referring to the psychological process of internalization. The social reality that
Durkheim spoke of came to be reduced to externally given conditions or milieu for
the actual drama of socialization-as-internalization. Besides the current research
problems in early American sociology two other sources of influence for this
reduction were Freud and his psychoanalytical thinking, and the anthropology of
the Culture and Personality school, including the childhood studies by Margaret
Mead (for accounts on these influences see Clausen 1968 and Wentworth 1980). The
reduction of socialization to internalization left to research the task of accounting for
the process whereby society, the social environment and the cultural system in
which children are born and grow up are taken as external givens and contents to
be internalized – and thereby reproduced – by them.

This shift in the fundamental meaning of the sociological category of socialization
is, of course, paradoxical for sociology itself, as it removed the whole concept
out of sociology into the domain of psychology. Nevertheless, it was this very
transformation that from the 1950s onwards was the base for the emergence of the
tradition of specific studies on socialization – a development that was given theor-
etical foundation by Talcott Parsons who inscribed the notion of socialization-as-
internalization into his grand theory.

3. The ‘socialization’ perspective to childhood
The feature perhaps most easily detected in the present-day notion of socialization
has been named by Speier (1976, see also Thorne 1987) ‘the adult ideological
viewpoint’, stressing the exclusive power of adults in defining children. This view-
point, within the ‘socialization’ framework, can be seen to apply to various agents,
depending on the particular context of socialization. However, adulthood need not
be their common denominator. More significant is the fact that they share a
structural position of power in relation to those undergoing socialization (here:
children). There are grounds then for renaming this viewpoint an elitist perspective.
The process of socialization is essentially looked at from the viewpoint of society’s
institutions and organizational apparatuses and their representatives, these assumed
to have systemic constraints or vested interests for reproducing themselves and
therefore exercise influence on children in order to produce in them such outcomes
that are conducive to that reproduction. It is easy here to see that the other side of
the elitism coin is functionalism.

As a consequence of the viewpoint’s inherent elitism and functionalism the
intentions and interests of children as participants in their own socialization are
effectively excluded, presumably on the assumption that they more or less converge
with those of the elites. This, of course, helps to model children as passive objects
and victims of influences external to them, unable and unwilling to resist. The
outcomes of the socialization process – following the elitist viewpoint – can therefore
be accounted for merely by referring to constraints in children’s environments. A
case of sociological determinism is given here.

A further feature in the socialization perspective to childhood, again following
its inherent elitism, is the firm and exclusive commitment to the outcomes of the

58

process at the expense of the process. But of course not all possible outcomes are
given attention. Only those that are expected, intended or desired by the agents
that the perspective depicts as instigators of socialization processes are observed.
This outcome-centredness futher maintains two limitations within the frameworks.
First, despite frequent mentions of concern for the process, it is in fact remarkably
neglected in actual research. This is evident by looking at the methods most often
applied: techniques of correlating environmental conditions and outcomes (‘inputs’/
‘outputs’) dominate, leaving the process inside a black box.

Second, the exclusive attention paid in research to outcomes expected, intended
or desired by elites necessarily brings about a systematical neglect of any other
outcomes. This not only avoids the possibility that children as participants might
contribute something themselves – the case is dismissed by elitism at the beginning –
it also works against any conflicts or contradictions being noticed in the process or
outcomes that may even partly refute those expected by elites. Functionalist
presumpYtions are in effect here again, giving rise to an overly harmonious view of
socialization.

The most serious simplification and indeed omission in the socialization per-
spective concerns the process itself. Following from what has been said it is clear
that what is commonly taken to be the whole process of socialization, is at most
one part of it, namely the part that is best conceived of in psychological terms and
theories. Socialization-as-internalization continues to monopolize our under-
standing of socialization. The ample reservoir of psychological theories available
to account for it renders it even more difficult for students of socialization to take
notice of this basic deficiency. The original sociological notion of socialization as a
social process is lost, and only recently this fact has been taken up and arguments
for a sociology of socialization raised. A correction at this principal point in the
socialization perspective will help to correct its other distortions and simplifications,
too, granting even children the status of social actors, albeit in unequal social
relations.

4. Making ‘socialization’ social
The assumptions of determinism, linearity, functionality and harmony in the process
of socialization, its reduction to internalization and its outcome-centredness have
all been observed and criticized within the research tradition, but mostly individually
and in piecemeal fashion (see, e.g. Long & Hadden 1985). Thus the assumption of
functionality in socialization has proved to be, if not entirely false, then at most
only a partial truth. More precisely conducted empirical studies have shown that
socialization does cover other phenomena besides those that are regarded as
conducive to the reproduction of society’s institutions and structures. These include
contradictory effects and results that cancel each other out.

It seems that the limitation easiest to overcome in the socialization perspective
is its unreflected commitment to the viewpoint of elites. Research methods do exist
that give voice to groups that have normally been silent in research (particularly
ethnography). By using these methods at least more ‘democratic’ and complete
descriptions on the experience of socialization may come out (see e.g. Willis 1978).
Such methods may also help to produce evidence on the remarkable competence

59

that children – even small children – have in constructing their everyday social
relations (see e.g. Goode 1986; Waksler 1986). This in turn may contribute to
children being seen in a new light, not just as objects primarily being acted on (even
if this is largely true for children most of the time), but also as social actors in their
own right.

Ethnographic, ‘phenomenological’ or cultural analyses on the life of the child
will furthermore help to bring about a more complex notion of socialization in
admitting that the assumption of linearity – that is, the assumption of socialization
resulting from its given preconditions – must fail. Instead, a certain degree of
autonomy will have to be granted to the processes involved, pointing to the need
to reconsider these as social processes.

This, it is admitted, implies in turn that children be viewed as social actors and
agents of their own lives. It is methodologically wrong then to victimize children in
research, no matter how much they appear as victims in their various real life
situations. This view then leads to a reconsideration of children and childhood also
in the context of on-going theoretical debates about the relationship between social
action and social structure (see e.g. Burns 1986 and Hindess 1986). Childhood will
therefore be moved from its conventional micro-world of family, school and
significant others, and placed within the terrain of central theoretical concerns in
sociology as well. This implies the consideration of childhood in structural terms
(see, here, Qvortrup 1985).

So, children seen as social actors has far-reaching implications not the least
for the socialization perspective itself. In fact this view risks ruining the whole
conventional idea of socialization, as it forces a reconsideration of its most prob-
lematical point – the understanding of socialization as a process.

This point has recently been addressed in the scientific literature (e.g. Wentworth
1980; Long & Hadden 1985). Geulen (1987) approaches the very problem when
suggesting that socialization research and developmental psychology, while sharing
a concern for analysing and explaining human development, display opposing
strengths and weaknesses. The socialization approach, compared to the alternative
approach to human development, is increasingly being recognized as having a
deficient understanding of the process aspect, whereas developmental psychologies
in particular conceptualize this aspect in various ways. For some researchers in the
socialization tradition a reliance on these more elaborated psychological process
concepts (e.g. of Piaget or Erikson) has appeared as the solution to their problem.
Geulen however demonstrates the inadequacy of this. There are logical limitations
for such an integration of the two perspectives, and the resulting eclecticism cannot
be accepted. The problem of how to conceptualize socialization as a process
therefore remains.

The difficulty obviously lies in the recognition that socialization is in fact a social
process, as already implied earlier in this paper (and originally established by
Durkheim). The problem is a theoretical one and resists piecemeal solutions.
A return to Durkheim’s original notion of socialization will hardly provide a
sociologically satisfying answer, although his work may be inspiring in this project
(see here e.g. Bhaskar 1979:117-121). The criticism levelled against the way of
treating children in the socialization perspective, however, suggests avenues for
rethinking that have been progressing in other areas of social science. As the

60

conventional notion of socialization has tended to objectify those undergoing
socialization, approaches that stress agency seem more promising. And as ‘soci-
alization’ furthermore has tended to centre on outcomes of an individual (or
psychological) nature, approaches stressing the socially constructed nature of social
life and conditions point to social relations, structures of social interaction, insti-
tutionalized social practices and shared (but also contested) meanings as outcomes
of socialization as well. These being integrated into a new understanding of soci-
alization implies that socialization might be reconceptualized as construction instead
of internalization (whichever its particular psychological interpretation).

5. Deconstructing the family
A ‘constructionist’ understanding of social phenomena has been advanced in family
research – an area of interest for deconstructing the configuration of childhood,
socialization and the family. Feminist inspired family research in particular has
made us aware of the insight that social conditions should be approached from the
perspective of their being constructions. The social condition primarily dealt with
by feminist research is of course the women’s (unequal) condition, and the family
is the focus on the assumption that it is the family that forms an important, perhaps
even decisive, part of the women’s condition.

Family sociology has been slow, if not altogether impotent, in finding answers to
the question of gender inequality. The extremely atheoretical nature of most family
sociology, deriving from its patent empiricism, is one expfanation. In it a unitary
notion of ‘the family’ has been taken for granted and made the basis for family
research and theory. Bernardes (1985) for instance depicts the situation in family
sociology by stating that traditional family sociology has adopted an ‘ideal type’
model of a presumed ‘nuclear family’ or ‘typical family’. One reason for the
prevalence of the unitary view of ‘the family’ is the frequent reduction of the family
to a natural or biological unit (see Coward 1983, Barrett & McIntosh 1982)
commonly depicted within functionalist frames. Another explanation lies in the fact
that the idea of ‘the family’ as a unitary institution is part of the arsenal of the
theory of industrial society (see Harris, 1983, Close 1985). This seems to have
become in its simplified versions a kind of common-sense sociology and has as such
effectively maintained the idea of ‘the family’ as an essence successful in taking
various appearances in various social environments.

However, since the 1960s ‘the family’ has not been without criticism. First the
radical critique of society’s institutions and the concomitant search for alternatives
applied, of course, to this particular institution as well. Within family research itself
an empirical critique came for example from family history, comparative family
research and descriptive studies on everyday realities of family living (see e.g.
Anderson 1979, Rapoport et al. 1982). The variety of ‘family forms’ or ‘family
types’ that were found to exist could only with great hesitation be subsumed under
some general concept of ‘the family’. Here Barrett & McIntosh (1982:83) note that
as each writer demonstrates an experiential certainty of the object under study, the
reader is left with the impression that they are simply not talking about the same
thing. Family researchers then agree that there are groups of people commonly

61

identified as ‘families’. But the theoretical problem of how these empirical families
relate to ‘the family’ has remained open. Consequently, an implicit adherence to
an essential understanding of ‘the family’ is retained, although expressions like ‘the
British family’ are explicitly abandoned (Laslett, in Rapoport et al. 1982).

Contrary to this, the critique of ‘the family’ coming from the emerging feminist
studies could not remain theoretically content with the unitary view. One of the
channels by which a questioning of ‘the family’ came forth was the observation of
the diverse meanings, experiences and consequences that living in families had even
for members of the ‘same’ family – men, women, adults, children, sons, daughters.
The differentiation of these were clearly distorted or denied by various con-
ceptualizations that recur in literature on the family (Thorne 1982). The observation
of diversity within families made it impossible to entertain the solid fact of an
essential family. This image had to be more of an imaginary thing, a constructed
(not a natural or inevitable) unity of a multitude of meanings behind the term
‘family’. These as well as their justifications needed to be discovered and related
to the actual life of real families. Family sociology then was not so much of the
family but of families, including a concern for ‘the family’ as an ideological and
cultural construct.

The search for meanings for ‘the family’, their interrelations and the etymologies
that followed, brought a realization that the term ‘family’ covers a wide range of
material arrangements, sets of relationships and ideologies. These include at least
household and residence arrangements, kinship systems, sexual relationships, ideol-
ogies of femininity and motherhood and of the private domain (see e.g. Flandrin
1979, Harris 1981, Coward 1983). Thus the proper object for a sociology of families
was to be found ‘behind’ the taken-for-granted unity of ‘the family’, and if unity
there be, it had to be a problem to explain, not a fact to assume.

New questions were opportune for family theory now. The dissolution of the
imaginary unity of ‘the family’ questioned the theoretical object of family sociology
itself. If family phenomena and ‘the family’ are part of the empirical surface, and
if behind or underlying these there is a multitude of material and ideological
structures and processes, then to theorize family is to theorize these elementary
structures and processes, their inter-relationships and the ways in which family-
identified empirical phenomena are constructed within them.

These questions were first tackled by Juliet Mitchell in her pioneering article
from 19

66

(see Mitchell 1971) depicting the family unit as a distinctly social
construct. To her it is the ideology of the family that manages to represent the
family as a (quasinatural) unit as well as gives it an atemporal quality. This has
clearly escaped the attention of past family theory (for reasons that have been
analysed by Coward (1983), for example). Instead, Mitchell goes on to dissolve the
false unity of ‘the family’ by what can be conveniently termed destructuration, that
is, she decomposes the family into the three elementary structures of reproduction,
sexuality and socialization.

Mitchell’s way of dissolving the family has its weak points (see e.g. Vogel 1983:13-
17) but its theoretical merit endures: she puts forward a radically different task for
family research to solve when denying the category ‘family’ any explicit theoretical
presence and locating the theoretical object of family research on a reality that
substantially underlies and effectively constitutes observable empirical phenomena.

62

Mitchell’s as well as many others’ (see e.g. Rubin 1975 and Rapp 1982) project
means a clear break from the patent empiricism of mainstream family sociology.

Developments within sociological theory, with the significance of both Marxist
and feminist research, have been conducive to further theoretical work in the line
originally opened by Mitchell. Theoretical critiques of structuralism, genealogical
studies inspired by Michel Foucault, debates on theories of ideology and culture
have all made an impact in many recent works towards renewing family theory. In
broad terms these works may be depicted as attempts at deconstruction of the family
(compare with Mitchell’s destructuration). Here. deconstruction means establishing
both the false unity of the family (the concept) and the fully social, constructed
nature of family structures, values and processes (see Barrett & McIntosh 1982,
Barrett 1985, Stacey 1984). The specific historical, political, cultural and class
variation of empirical family phenomena is to be demonstrated and traced back to
underlying processes, conditions and relations between social forces and actors that
effectively have functioned to construct and maintain present structures like kinship
systems, residence and household arrangements, gender relationships, particular
ideologies, etc.

The deconstructionist move within social science stresses the need for rigorous
historical studies on the often not entirely peaceful developments and struggles
between various and mostly unequally positioned social forces that make the
construction sites of the structures underlying observable family phenomena. His-
tories of family-relevant constructs are still rare, but historically minded studies
have been conducted on the social construction of motherhood, womanhood,
sexuality, gendered subjectivity, skilled (and unskilled, i.e. women’s and children’s)
work, the modern suburban family, etc. (Dally 1982; Margolis 1984; Lewis 1980;
Weeks 1981; Foucault 1979; Hollway 1984; Urwin 1985; Hartman 1979; Coyle 1982;
Cockburn 1983; Game & Pringle 1983; Riley 1983; Ng 1986). Subsequent research
for example on the role of the (welfare) state in constructing domestic life (Cass
1983), normal, i.e., economically viable family units (Brophy & Smart 1982; Langan
1985; Ursel 1986) or the relations between children and their parents (Freeman
1984; Dingwall et al. 1984) in turn builds upon the same insights.

In this company the modem prolonged, familial childhood appears as a social
construct as well. That modem childhood has been constructed and undergoes
further reconstruction by the (welfare) state for one is recognized (e.g. Leira 1986).
The history of childhood literature, however, gives a longer view on the construction
of modern childhood.

6. Childhood as a construct
Philippe Aries’s work (1962) on the discovery of childhood seems to tell the story
of how the idea of childhood first emerged, coupled with a new image of family
intimacy, and how it was subsequently put into practice within schemes of child
care and education. The history of childhood appears – in this interpretation of
Aries’s intention – as a piece of the history of ideas, conducive to the modern sense
of childhood that we now know.

A more thorough analysis of Aries’s historical method and his mostly implicit

63

social theory, however, helps to produce another view for thinking about childhood.
In this reading (see e.g. Muller 1979) childhood emerges, not as an idea of the child
in the first place, but as a particular social status within specially constituted
institutional frames. These frames were a practical accomplishment of the bourgeois
class, seeking by political means to secure its own reproduction in structurally
changing circumstances. ‘The child’ emerged in this context as a social and practical
construct to be realized for the younger members of that particular class. It is for
this project that various schemes of child care and education were developed,
leading to the formation of extraordinary social worlds for their inhabitants –
notably ‘the intimate family’ and the school – and consequently to the formation
of a particular ‘habitus’ as well. This product – modem childhood – was later made
available for other social classes (Donzelot 1980), although not without a struggle
(which Donzelot chooses largely to ignore in his analysis of the French experience).
This practical accomplishment subsequently made the ground for new formations
as well, from the emergence of ‘motherhood’ and other child-related professions
and experts to the institutions of knowledge production about children, based on
observing the newly emerged social worlds of childhood and perceiving their
inhabitants accurately as ‘children’, different from adults.

It is easy to detect here the closeness of Aries’s thinking to particular structuralist
schools in French sociology (Foucault, Bourdieu). However, the possible con-
tribution to a sociology of childhood, of this kind of reading of the history of
childhood, does not depend on one’s judgment on these schools. It does not even
depend on the credibility of Aries’s results.2 The important point is, to my mind,
the insight that childhood need not be reduced to an idea or a mentality that needed
first to conquer people’s minds in order to be instituted for the younger members
of society. On the contrary, childhood was – and in its modem versions is – the
ever-constituted result of decisions and actions of particular historical social actors,
in their economical, political and cultural struggles that potentially concern the
whole spectrum of their interests. To account for childhood then calls for analyses
of these broad social processes that in their interaction come to constitute – rather
than deliberately aim to constitute – social practices that define childhood. – The
implications of this approach to childhood for a sociology of childhood are obvious.

7. Conclusion

Sociologists need not – and should not – content themselves with the notion that
children belong primarily to the province of psychology, education and pediatrics.
The relevance of psychological, medical or educational knowledge is not under
dispute even when asserting that there are crucial limits to that knowledge set by
the particular versions of childhood that we have been observing and now may
observe. If it can be accepted, as I suggest, based on recent developments in
sociological (and historical) research, that childhood is under continuous recon-
struction within a large field of societal constraints and confronting social forces,
the implications should be clear. One of the most obvious of them is that research
on children and childhood needs to be conducted in a genuinely interdisciplinary
fashion.

My main argument has been for a sociology of childhood, as this area is very

64

much absent in social science. Reasons for this have been traced and perspectives
for advance have been seen in many areas, calling for critical examination of
sociological theories and categories and for empirical research informed by this
critique.

The latter would need to avoid the conventional victimization of children in social
science researchi, granting them instead the status of participants and constructors
in the very processes that make their – and our – world. This derives from
approaching social life as a dynamic field of confrontations and struggles between
social forces. The approach then allows for viewing even children as a structural
‘class’ in relation to other classes and capable of collective action and therefore
capable of engaging in social struggles. There may be objections for treating children
as a social class, some of them stressing the social barriers for this kind of class
formation. Nevertheless, even if children might not appear as a social class in its
own right, childhood remains a political issue that is enmeshed in on-going everyday
struggles. Research that helps to uncover these struggles in reality grants children
agency and thereby aligns with children. A sociology of childhood, and for children,
if not (yet) by children themselves, hopefully emerges from these alignments.

Notes
The article is based on my paper given at an interdisciplinary conference on the life and
development of children: ‘Growing into a Modern World’ in Trondheim (Norway), June 10-
13, 1987.
1 Contrary to this, the image of the strange, indeed ‘enigmatic’ child is a recurrent theme in

both verbal and non-verbal arts (see Kuhn 1982).
2 Wilson (1980), for one, is highly critical of Aries’s work from a historian’s point of view,

seeing many weaknesses in the ways Aries generates evidence to support his argument.

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• Article Contents

p. 53
p. 54
p. 55
p. 56
p. 57
p. 58
p. 59
p. 60
p. 61
p. 62
p. 63
p. 64
p. 65
p. 66
p. 67

• Issue Table of Contents

Acta Sociologica, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1988), pp. 1-102
Volume Information
Front Matter [pp. 1-80]
Editorial [p. 2]
Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: Remarks on the Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West [pp. 3-13]
After the Working-Class Movement? An Essay on What’s ‘New’ and What’s ‘Social’ in the New Social Movements [pp. 15-34]
Feminist Research: In Search of a New Paradigm? [pp. 35-51]
Rethinking Childhood [pp. 53-67]
Research Note
Class Identification in Norway: Explanatory Factors and Life-Cycle Differences [pp. 69-79]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 81-87]
Review: American Ragout: The Eating of Foucault ‘Over There’ [pp. 87-92]
Review: untitled [pp. 93-95]
Review: untitled [pp. 95-97]
Review: untitled [pp. 98-99]
Review: untitled [pp. 99-101]
Back Matter [pp. 102-102]

Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Vol. 24, No. 5, 1995

Adolescents’ Uses of Media for Self-Socialization

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett 1

The emphasis of this paper is on the role of media in the socialization of
adolescents. First, a typology of adolescent media uses is presented, including
entertainment, identity formation, high sensation, coping, and youth culture
identification. Then, these five uses are discussed in relation to adolescent so-
cialization. The central point of this discussion is that media differ from so-
cializing agents such as family, school, community, and the legal system in
that adolescents have greater control over their media choices than they do
over their socialization from these other sources. The result is a substantial
degree of self-socialization, in the sense that adolescents may choose from a
diverse range of media materials the ones that best suit their individual pref-
erences and personalities. Another result is that there is often a lack of inte-
gration in the socialization of adolescents, in the sense that they may receive
different socialization messages from media (and peers) than they do from the
adult socializers in their immediate environment.

INTRODUCTION

Part of the environment of nearly every adolescent currently growing
up in the United States and other industrialized countries is daily use of
a variety of media. American adolescents, on average, listen to music for
about four hours a day (Leming, 1987) and watch television for another
two hours (Lichty, 1989). Seventy percent of popular music recordings are
bought by 12-20-year-olds (Brake, 1985). Teenaged adolescents watch more
movies than any other segment of the population. More than 4 million

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the fifth biennial meeting of the Society for
Research on Adolescence, San Diego, Califormia, February 10-13, 1994.

1Associate Professor, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, 31 Stanley
Hall, Columbia, Missouri 65211. Received Ph.D. from University of Virginia. Research
interests include adolescent reckless behavior, adolescents’ uses of media, and the transition
to adulthood. To whom correspondence should be addressed.

519

0047*2891/95/1000-0519507.50/0 �9 1995 Plenum Publishing Corporation

520 Arnett

adolescent girls monthly purchase magazines such as Seventeen and Sassy
(Evans et aL, 1991), and three-fourths of white females aged 12-14 read
at least one magazine regularly (Klein et al., 1993). Add to this videos,
books, and newspapers, and the total amounts to a significant part of the
daily experience of adolescents.

If it is striking to consider the extent to which adolescents in con-
temporary industrialized countries are immersed in media as a regular part
of their daily lives, it is perhaps made more striking to consider the phe-
nomenon in historical perspective. At the beginning of the 20th century,
most adolescents’ (and others’) exposure to media would have been limited
to print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers (if anything).
There were no electronic media at all–no television, no radio, no record
players or stereos or CD players. In the space of less than a century, all
of these media have become a central part of the cultural environment of
industrialized societies.

What does this transformation in the cultural environment portend
for the socialization of adolescents? Essentially it amounts to the creation
of a new source of socialization. Of course, the media have become part
of the social environment of people of all ages, but their potential role in
the socialization of adolescents is perhaps especially strong. Adolescence
is a time when important aspects of socialization are taking place, especially
with regard to identity-related issues such as occupational preparation, gen-
der role learning, and the development of a set of values and beliefs. How-
ever, it is also a time when the presence and influence of the family has
diminished, relative to childhood (Larson and Richards, 1994). While the
influence of the family has declined by adolescence, participation in other
socializing experiences such as marriage and long-term employment typi-
cally has not yet taken place. That certain socialization issues become in-
tensified, and yet familial sources of childhood socialization have
diminished and sources of adult socialization are not yet present, may make
adolescents more inclined to make use of media materials in their sociali-
zation than they would be at younger or older ages.

Although there are many contemporary media researchers and theo-
rists who view the media solely in terms of what they perceive to be its
effects (e.g., Comstock and Strasburger, 1990), there is by now an alterna-
tive tradition of several decades, the “uses and gratifications” approach, in
which an understanding of media is sought that emphasizes the role of
social and psychological factors in mediating (and mitigating) individuals’
media consumption (Blumler, 1979; Katz, 1959; Katz et al., 1974; Klapper,
1960; Lull, 1980; Rosengren, 1974; Rubin, 1994). This approach stresses
individual choice and how “people intentionally participate and select me-
dia messages from communication alternatives . . . what people do with

Uses of Media 521

the media, instead of what the media do to people” (Rubin, 1994, p. 421).
This is the perspective that will be taken in this article.

The focus of this article will be on the ways that adolescents use me-
dia in a kind of self-socialization, independent of the influence of parents
and other adult socializers. First, however, it is necessary to specify ado-
lescents’ principal uses of media.

FIVE USES

Five uses of media by adolescents can be specified: entertainment,
identity formation, high sensation, coping, and youth culture identification.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive; media are too diverse, and adoles-
cents too diverse in their uses and interpretations of them, for any exhaus-
tive classification to be possible. Rather, these five uses are intended to
represent the most common uses of media by adolescents.

Other typologies of media uses have been offered (Blumler, 1979;
Greenberg, 1974; Katz et al., 1973; Lull, 1980; McQuail et al., 1972; Rubin,
1979). However, most of these have been specific to television (with the
exception of Blumler, 1979), and none of them have focused specifically
on adolescents. In the typology presented below, all of the uses described
except entertainment are theorized to be developmental, in the sense that
they may be more important for adolescents than for children or adults.
This is not to suggest that these uses are unique to adolescents, simply that
they may be more important for adolescents than for others. The typology
presented here is theoretical (although based on empirical studies), and is
intended to contribute ideas that may be useful as a basis for empirical
investigations of adolescents’ uses of media. Each of the five uses will be
discussed in turn below. Following this, the implications of these uses for
the socialization of adolescents will be discussed.

Entertainment

Adolescents, like adults, often make use of media simply for enter-
tainment, as an enjoyable part of their leisure lives. As Michael Brake
notes, “The central theme of leisure is fun, a feature often overlooked in
sociological studies of mass culture” (1985, p. 187). Adolescents cite music
near the top of the list of things that make them happy (Ban, 1986). Re-
corded music often accompanies adolescent leisure, from driving around
in a car to hanging out with friends to secluding themselves in the privacy
of their bedrooms for contemplation (Larson, this issue). Since its begin-
nings, rock music has been equated with fun, “putting responsibility on

522 Arnett

hold, enjoying the moment, and being dramatic and outrageous with no
apology” (Snow, 1987, p. 327). Adolescents state that one of their top mo-
tivations for watching music videos is simply entertainment (Sun and Lull,
1986). Television is used by many adolescents as a way of diverting them-
selves from personal concerns with passive, distracting, undemanding en-
tertainment (Larson, this issue).

Identity Formation

One of the most important developmental challenges of adolescence,
from the perspective of most developmental psychologists, is identity for-
mation, the cultivation of a conception of one’s values, abilities, and hopes
for the future. In cultures where media are available, media can provide
materials that adolescents use toward the construction of an identity
(Swidler, 1986).

An important aspect of identity formation, and one for which ado-
lescents may especially make use of media, is gender role identity (Steele
and Brown, this issue; Brown and Hendee, 1989; Greenberg, et al., 1992;
Larson, this issue). Adolescents take ideals of what it means to be a man
or a woman partly from the media, which present physical and behavioral
gender ideals in images through music, movies (Greenberg et al., 1986),
television (Brown et al., 1990), and magazines (Evans et aL, 1991). Girls
who are just beginning to gain sexual and romantic experience are espe-
cially fascinated by media depictions of male-female relationships (Steele
and Brown, this issue). Adolescents use the information provided in media
to learn sexual and romantic scripts (Brown, et al., 1990). For both girls
and boys, gender, sexuality, and relationships are central to the kind of
identity exploration and identity building for which adolescents use media
(Ward, this issue).

Magazines are a medium where gender role identity formation is an
especially common implicit theme, particularly in magazines for adolescent
girls. Nearly half of the space of the most popular magazines for teenage
girls is devoted to advertisements, mostly for fashion and beauty products,
and fashion/beauty is a prominent topic of the articles in these magazines
as well (Evans et al., 1991). Magazines for adolescent girls also provide
abundant “information” about boys and the intricacies of heterosexual re-
lationships; such relationships are the most common topic of feature arti-
cles in these magazines (Evans et al., 1991).

Sex and gender are not the only identity-related topics that adoles-
cents learn about from the media. There is evidence that television can
serve as a source of occupational information for adolescents (Wroblewski

Uses of Media 523

and Huston, 1987), perhaps contributing to the formation of occupational
aspirations. Many adolescent heavy metal fans are inspired by the music
and by their admiration for heavy metal stars to express an intention to
pursue a career in music themselves (Arnett, 1991; in press). Watching tele-
vision news and reading the newspaper is related to adolescents’ political
knowledge and participation (Garramone & Atkin, 1986), and provide ma-
terials that may be used in the development of political values.

High Sensation

Adolescents tend to be higher in sensation seeking than adults (Arnett,
1994), and certain media provide the intense and novel stimulation that ap-
peals to many adolescents. There are many media products that appeal to
adults as well as adolescents, but there are some that appeal almost exclu-
sively to adolescents, at least partly because of the high-sensation quality of
the stimulation. The audience for “action” films is composed mostly of ado-
lescent boys and young men, because this is the segment of the population
that is highest in sensation seeking (Arnett, 1994) and so most likely to be
drawn to films that portray high-sensation scenes involving explosions, car
chases (and car crashes), gunfire, and the like. Adolescent boys also domi-
nate the audiences for the high-sensation musical forms of rap and heavy
metal (Arnett, in press), and these are the two types of music that are most
popular among teens (Bezilla, 1993). Heavy metal fans use high-sensation
words like “intense,” “fast,” and “powerful” to describe why they like the
music (Arnett, 1991; in press). Similar high-sensation terms could be applied
to rap music, with the addition of vicarious excitement from the depiction
of inner-city violence (Samuels, 1991).

Coping

Adolescents use media to relieve and dispell negative emotions. Sev-
eral studies indicate that “Listen to music” and “Watch TV” are the coping
strategies most commonly used by adolescents when they are angry, anx-
ious, or unhappy (Kurdek, 1987; Lyle and Hoffman, 1972; Moore and
Schultz, 1983). Music may be particularly important in this respect. Larson
(this issue) suggests that adolescents often listen to music in the privacy of
their bedrooms while pondering the themes of the songs in relation to their
own lives, as part of the process of emotional self-regulation. In the course
of early adolescence, when there is an increase in the amount of problems,
conflict, and stresses at home, at school, and with friends, there is also an
increase in time spent listening to music (while time spent watching tele-

524 Arnett

vision decreases; also see Brown, et aL, 1990). Certain types of music, such
as rap or heavy metal, may appeal especially to adolescents who use music
for coping. Little research exists on rap music, but adolescent fans of heavy
metal report that they listen to heavy metal especially when they are angry,
and that the music typically has the effect of purging their anger, calming
them down (Arnett, 1991; in press). Heavy metal is the most popular mu-
sical preference of male adolescents with serious emotional problems (Ep-
stein et al., 1990), which suggests that boys with emotional problems may
use heavy metal as a way of coping with their problems. Another study of
adolescents hospitalized in a psychiatric facility measured adolescents’
moods before and after music listening, and found that the adolescents
who preferred heavy metal reported significant increases in positive affect
after listening to heavy metal, whereas adolescents who preferred other
types of music did not show this increase after listening to their preferred
type of music (Wooten, 1992).

Although television-watching decreases in adolescence, teens watch
television an average of two hours per day (Lichty, 1989), and during these
hours they may use television for coping purposes. Larson (this issue) re-
ports that adolescents use television as a way of turning off the stressful
emotions that have accumulated during the day. Also, Kurdek (1987) found
that adolescents use “watching TV” as a deliberate coping strategy when
experiencing negative affect. Adolescents also may choose media materials
for specific coping purposes. A study of Israeli adolescents, in the aftermath
of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, indicated that the media were an important
source of information during the war and that adolescents used the infor-
mation obtained through the media to help them cope with the stress of
the war (Zeidner, 1993).

Youth Culture Identification

Media consumption may give adolescents a sense of being connected
to a larger peer network, which is united by certain youth-specific values
and interests. In a highly mobile society, the media provide common ground
for all adolescents. No matter where they move within the United States,
adolescents will find peers in their new area who have watched the same
television programs and movies, listened to the same music, and are famil-
iar with the same advertising slogans and symbols. At the same time that
media connect adolescents to other adolescents around the country and
even around the world, the adults within their own families may be unfa-
miliar with many of the media products that provide the basis for youth

Uses of Media 525

culture identification. Music, particularly, is a medium for the expression
of adolescent-specific values (Roe, 1985).

Adolescents’ identification may be not to youth culture as a whole
but to a youth subculture. Recently in Europe, a subculture of neofascist
skinheads has developed, mostly adolescent boys and young men. One of
the unifying trademarks of this subculture is their music, known as “Oi”
music. It is characterized by punk-style music, and lyrics that hurl insults
and threats to foreigners and ethnic residents of their countries. Sales of
the music have increased steeply in recent years, to hundreds of thousands
annually, across Europe (Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1992).

This is one example of the way that adolescents may use media to
establish a subculture, to carve out a subcultural identity that is distinct
not only from the larger society but from other youth subcultures, as well.
Of course, only a minority of adolescents ever become part of a distinct
youth subculture. Roe’s (1987, this issue) studies of Swedish youth suggest
that one source of self-selection into youth subcultures is success or failure
in school. In particular, adolescents who fail at school develop an opposi-
tional view of the world, and seek out similar peers as well as oppositional
music that gives a voice to their alienation and their group identity (also
see Lull, 1987). Media, particularly music, provide a way of defining and
uniting the members of a youth subculture as well as expressing their shared
view of the world (Roe, 1987; Willis, 1978). In recent decades, youth sub-
cultures have been defined by punk, heavy metal, and rap music.

THE USES OF MEDIA WITH RESPECT TO SOCIALIZATION

A common theme in the five uses of media specified here is that, in
all of these respects, adolescents draw materials from media that contribute
to their socialization. When they seek entertainment or high sensation from
media, when they use media materials toward identity formation or for
coping, when they participate in a media-based youth subculture, adoles-
cents are also, in a larger sense, participating in activities that are part of
their socialization. That is, media are part of the process by which adoles-
cents acquire–or resist acquiring–the behaviors and beliefs of the social
world, the culture, in which they live (Arnett, 1995). It may be useful, then,
to address the properties of media with regard to the socialization process.

The framework for this discussion will be the theory of broad and
narrow socialization (Arnett, 1992a, 1992b, 1995). According to this theory
there are seven principal sources of socialization: family, peers, school,
community, the media, the legal system, and the cultural belief system.
Three goals of socialization are specified as central to the process through

526 Arnett

which people adopt the ways of their culture: (1) impulse control, including
the development of a conscience; (2) role preparation and performance,
including for occupational roles, gender roles, and roles in institutions such
as marriage and parenthood; and (3) the cultivation of sources of mean-
ing-what is important, what is to be valued, what is to be lived for. These
are the things that children and adolescents must learn, and adults must
possess, in order for them to function adequately as members of their cul-
ture. Generally, cultures that stress individualism and independence with
regard to these goals can be said to have broad socialization, whereas cul-
tures that stress obedience and conformity have narrow socialization. Broad
socialization promotes a broad range of variability in social and psycho-
logical development among the members of a culture, as each person is
allowed and encouraged to pursue their own preferences to a large extent.
In contrast, narrow socialization encourages all members of a culture to
adhere to a prescribed standard of beliefs and behavior.

As a socialization influence, the media tend toward broad socializa-
tion, particularly in a society where there is freedom of the press and the
media are relatively uncontrolled and uncensored by government agencies.
In such societies, there is tremendous diversity in the media offerings avail-
able, providing adolescents (and others) a diverse array of potential models
and influences to choose from. This is likely to promote a broad range of
individual differences in values, beliefs, interests, and personality charac-
teristics, because adolescents can choose from diverse media offerings the
ones that resonate most strongly with their own particular inclinations.

There is an important difference between media and other socializa-
tion agents in the adolescent’s environment–family members, school per-
sonnel, community members, law enforcement agents, and perhaps
religious authorities. Typically, these other socializers have an interest in
encouraging the adolescent to accept the attitudes, beliefs, and values that
they have, in order to preserve social order and pass the culture on from
one generation to the next (Wrong, 1994). In contrast, media are typically
presented by people who have the economic success of the media enterprise
as their primary concern. As a result, the content of media consumed by
adolescents is driven not by a desire to promote social order and pass on
the culture but by the uses adolescents themselves can make of media.
Because the media are market driven to a large extent, media providers
are likely to provide to adolescents whatever it is they believe adolescents
want–within the limits imposed on media providers by the other adult so-
cializers.

This means that adolescents have greater control over their sociali-
zation on the dimension of the media than they do over socialization from
family, school, community, and the legal system. Two points are worth

Uses of Media 527

stressing here. First, this results in a great deal of diversity in the media
available to adolescents, from hip-hop to heavy metal, from public televi-
sion to MTV, from Seventeen to Newsweek to Mad magazine, as media
providers try to cover every potential niche of the market for media prod-
ucts. Adolescents can choose from among this diversity whatever media
materials best suit their personalities and preferences, and on any given
occasion adolescents can choose the media materials that best suit the cir-
cumstances and/or their emotional state. Second, to some extent this so-
cialization goes over the heads of the other socializing adults in an
adolescent’s environment. Parents may try to impose restrictions on the
music, television shows, movies, and magazines their adolescents consume,
but these restrictions are unlikely to be successful if an adolescent is de-
termined to avoid them. Parents and adolescents simply do not spend
enough time in each others’ company for such restrictions to be enforceable
(see Larson and Richards, 1994).

As a source of adolescent socialization, media bear the most similarity
to peers. In both cases, adolescents have substantial control over their own
socialization, as they make choices about media and peers more or less
independently of the preferences of their parents or other adult socializers.
In both cases, adolescents sometimes make choices, from the range of op-
tions available to them, that adults find troublesome but can do little about.
Both media and peers are often present in youth subcultures (peers by
definition, media in some youth subcultures but not others), and adoles-
cents’ participation in youth subcultures is often disturbing to adults be-
cause such subcultures are often oppositional and explicitly reject the
authority of adults (Brake, 1985; Lull, 1987).

Examples of how adolescents may use media in ways that are dis-
turbing to their parents and other adults in their immmediate social envi-
ronment can be seen in relation to each of the five uses of media described
above. They may find entertainment in “action” movies and other media
that many adults consider disturbingly violent. In assembling materials to-
ward identity formation, they may develop admiration for media stars, deco-
rating their bedroom walls with the images of stars who seem (to adults)
to reject the values of the adult world, stars who may in fact reject the
very idea of “growing up” to a responsible adulthood (Steele and Brown,
this issue). Adolescents also may be attracted to high sensation media that
adults find disagreeable for precisely the reason it is so appealing to ado-
lescents- the extraordinary high-sensation intensity of it. Adolescents may
seclude themselves in their rooms and use media in coping with their prob-
lems, in a way that seems to shut out their parents (Larson, this issue).
Finally, as noted above, adolescents may become involved in a media-based
youth subculture that actively and explicitly rejects the future that adult so-

528 Arnett

ciety holds out to them. In all of these ways, socialization from the media
may be subversive to the socialization promoted by other adult socializers
(Lull, 1987).

However, this portrayal of adolescents’ media use as oppositional
should be qualified in several respects. First, it bears repeating that media
are diverse, and not all of the media content used by adolescents could be
regarded as contrary to the aims and principles of adult society. Much of
it is, in fact, quite conservative; many media providers, especially in tele-
vision, shrink from controversy (Brown et aL, 1990; Larson, 1990) and tend
to avoid topics that could subject them to public attack (and advertisers’
boycotts). Second, adolescents do not come to media as blank slates, but
as members of a family, community, and culture who have socialized them
from birth and from whom they have learned ideals and principles that
are likely to influence their media choices and how they interpret the media
they consume. Third, the range of media available to adolescents, though
vast, is not unlimited. Some parents put restrictions on how adolescents
may use media when the parents are present; schools often restrict ado-
lescents’ media use during and between classes; there are legal restrictions
in the United States on the content of television programs (at least on the
major networks) and on the magazines and movies that may be sold to
adolescents under age 18. Fourth, profit is not the only motive of media
providers. They have lives outside of their occupational roles, and they have
interests as members of their families, communities, and culture that, at
least for some of them, limit the extent to which they are willing to be
perceived as undermining the socialization goals of the rest of society.

There are also limits on the extent to which adolescents desire to be
independent in their socialization. Socialization involves learning to accept
and embrace the ways of one’s culture (Spiro, 1994, chap. 5), and most
people eventually do adopt the ways of their culture even if they have a
period during childhood or adolescence when they resist or oppose those
ways. This result is not merely something that adults inflict on less powerful
children and adolescents, but something most young people seek out and
respond to readily: it is the way human beings, so little guided by instincts,
learn to impose some sort of order on the chaos of cognition, emotion,
and experience (Berger and Luckman, 1966). Thus this paradox: even as
adolescents use media toward an enhancement of their individuality, and
sometimes to oppose the beliefs and values represented by adults, they also
seek comfort in the security of finding others who like what they like (es-
pecially among their peers), they also seek guidance in what is most to be
desired and preferred among the media choices available to them.

Finally, it should be emphasized that the portrait of socialization pre-
sented here applies to the contemporary West, and that socialization may

Uses of Media 529

be quite different in non-Western cultures. In the latter, socialization tends
to be narrower than in the West (Arnett, 1992a, 1995). Legal and parental
controls over adolescents’ access to media are likely to be tighter in cultures
with narrow socialization, so that adolescents are unlikely to be able to use
media toward self-socialization to the same degree. However, even in many
non-Western countries today, the introduction of Western media is opening
up new possibilities to adolescents, loosening the extent of parental control
and increasing the extent to which adolescents choose the materials of their
socialization (Davis and Davis, this issue; also see Burbank, 1988; Condon,
1988).

INDIVIDUALISM AND ALIENATION

Because of the diversity of media available to adolescents in the con-
temporary West, and because of the freedom adolescents have to select
among these media options, through their uses of media adolescents in-
crease the extent to which they are independent of their parents and other
adult socializers. Media allow adolescents to engage in self-socialization,
as they select the media products most attractive to them and use them in
diverse ways related to socialization: to promote impulse control or legiti-
mize the avoidance of it; to learn the roles offered by adult society or to
reject them; to find sources of meaning or to declare their angst over the
lack of meaning in their lives.

The independence adolescents have in choosing the materials of their
socialization exists not only because of the rise of the media but also be-
cause of the simultaneous decline in the power of the family as a socializer.
In the course of the 20th century, compulsory school attendance, and the
need for increased education to prepare children and adolescents for the
demands of an increasingly information-based economy, has diminished the
role of the family in providing occupational training. Increasing affluence
during this time has decreased the economic power of parents over their
progeny; more and more, young people have been able to make it on their
own rather than waiting for their parents to provide them with land or an
inheritance or a position in the family business (Modell, 1989). Parents
also have voluntarily relinquished some of their previous authority over
their children, as a parenting ideology promoting broad socialization values
of independence and self-expression gained ascendancy over the previously
dominant ideology that had placed narrow socialization ideals of obedience
and conformity as the highest values (Alwin, 1988).

The result of the rise of the media and the decline of the family as
socialization agents is, for adolescents, an increase in their independence

530 Arnett

in the socialization process, as described above. However, it also results in
a certain incoherence in the socialization process. We might say that there
is a lack of integration in their socialization, in the sense that the sociali-
zation messages they receive from the media (and sometimes peers) may
differ from the ones they receive in their families, schools, and communi-
ties. The independence and diversity of this may be exciting, in the great
range of possibilities for living that are offered from these diverse sources.
However, the contradictions among the messages may also be confusing,
at some times and for some adolescents. An adolescent girl may learn from
the media and (perhaps) peers that a young woman should dress in a way
that is sexually provocative, while also learning from her parents and other
adults in her community that a young woman who does so is not to be
respected. An adolescent boy may come to believe, through media, that it
would be a great thing to devote many hours each day to playing electric
guitar so that he might become a rock star like his media heroes, while
his family and his teachers consider this a disastrously deluded notion and
urge him to apply that energy and dedication to his schoolwork. Perhaps
these contradictions, this lack of integration, are in part responsible for the
alienation and anomie that exist among some members of the current gen-
eration of adolescents (Arnett, in press).

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

The diversity of adolescents’ uses of media, and the diversity of media
materials available to them, make it possible for adolescents to select some
of the materials of their own socialization. However, the selections they
make sometimes result in conflict with other socializers, when adolescents
use media in ways that are antithetical to the values and goals of their
parents and other adults. Furthermore, the independence granted to ado-
lescents in making media choices may contribute to their alienation, as they
attempt to sort out the dissonance between the socialization messages in
the media they use and the socialization messages promoted by adults in
their families, schools, and communities. Broad socialization allows for a
high degree of individual choice and freedom, but at the extreme some
individuals may find it disorienting, and find themselves struggling to
choose from among the many paths available to them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Lene Jensen, Reed Larson, and Jane
Brown for their comments.

Uses of Media 531

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46 The Journ

Information-Seeking Behavior in Generation Y
Students: Motivation, Critical Thinking, and
Learning Theory

by Angela Weiler

Available online 2 November 2004

Research in information-seeking behavior,
motivation, critical thinking, and learning

theory was explored and compared in a search
for possible motivating factors behind students’

dependence on television and the Internet for
their information needs. The research indicates
that only a very small percentage of the general

population prefer to learn by reading.

Angela Weiler is Public Services Librarian,
Coulter Library, Onondaga Community College,

4941 Onondaga Road, Syracuse,
NY 13215, United States
bweilera@sunyocc.eduN.

al of Academic Librarianship, Volume 31, Number 1, pages 46–53

INTRODUCTION

Much commentary has been circulating in academe regarding
the research skills, or lack thereof, in members of ‘‘Generation
Y,’’ the generation born between 1980 and 1994. The students
currently on college campuses, as well as those due to arrive in
the next few years, have grown up in front of electronic
screens: television, movies, video games, computer monitors. It
has been said that student critical thinking and other cognitive
skills (as well as their physical well-being) are suffering
because of the large proportion of time spent in sedentary
pastimes, passively absorbing words and images, rather than in
reading.

It may be that students’ cognitive skills are not fully
developing due to ubiquitous electronic information technolo-
gies. However, it may also be that academe, and indeed the
entire world, is currently in the middle of a massive and wide-
ranging shift in the way knowledge is disseminated and
learned.

THE ROOTS OF INFORMATION-SEEKING RESEARCH

Information seeking has been studied since the 1950s, but these
early studies involved mostly the information-seeking activities
of researchers and scientists. Information seeking has only been
studied in the general population, and particularly within
student groups, in the past 20 years or so.

The first model for study of information-seeking behavior in
the general population was developed by James Krikelas in
1983. This model suggested that the steps of information
seeking were as follows: (1) perceiving a need, (2) the search
itself, (3) finding the information, and (4) using the informa-
tion, which results in either satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Krikelas stated that ‘‘information seeking begins when some-
one perceives that the current state of knowledge is less than
that needed to deal with some issue (or problem). The process
ends when that perception no longer exists.’’

1
Krikelas’ model

is clearly a linear one, and Eisenberg and Brown have
suggested that it lacks complexity and flexibility necessary to
adequately address the topic.

2
It is interesting, however, to note

that this model states that information seeking is based on
‘‘need,’’ a concept which is closely related to motivation and
consequently to many theories of learning, which will be
examined later in this article.

A second model developed by Carol C. Kuhlthau of Rutgers
University stresses a process approach with an emphasis placed
on cognitive skills; as they increase, so does information-
seeking effectiveness. This model is one of the few that was
developed based on actual research and not simply on practical
experience. Kuhlthau’s model goes beyond the actions of
seeking and looks at the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the
seeker as they go through their process. It is based on a
longitudinal study of a group of high school students as well as
additional studies using larger, more diverse groups of students
and two additional smaller longitudinal studies. The model she
described is valid across the user groups studied. Kuhlthau’s
model includes cognitive issues and also feelings which arise
during information seeking: confusion, anxiety, doubt, con-
fidence, etc.

3

While Krikelas and even Kuhlthau’s models are for the most
part linear processes, component-based models have also been
suggested. Eisenberg and Berkowitz proposed a model based
on the ‘‘Big Six Skills’’—task definition, information seeking,
implementation, use, synthesis, and evaluation. Their model is
flexible and nonlinear in the same way that hypertext is,
allowing for different areas and avenues to be explored out of
sequence. In addition, seekers can go back to refine and
reidentify the information need, implementing new strategies.
Thus, the ‘‘Big Six Skills’’ may be a more appropriate way to
study information seeking and are also a better fit with the
more flexible of the learning theories and cognitive develop-
ment theory.

4

The literature of information-seeking often refers to
motivation, critical thinking, and learning theory, so it is
necessary to examine the core research in those areas in order
to fully understand the complexity of information-seeking
behavior in Generation Y students.

MOTIVATION

The importance of motivation in information science research
has been recognized by few researchers other than Kuhlthau.

5

However, a short overview of motivation theories clarifies the
important role motivation plays in information-seeking
behavior.

Abraham Maslow’s ‘‘hierarchy of needs’’ identified five
basic needs—physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, and
self-actualization—each one becoming a motivator after the
need preceding it has been satisfied. In a campus setting,
clearly physiological and safety needs are for the most part
provided; the other needs are in an ongoing process of being
addressed at varying levels.

McClelland’s ‘‘Theory of Achievement Motivation’’ identi-
fies three needs that are not hierarchical: the need for achieve-
ment, for affiliation, and for power. One of these needs is usually
dominant in any given person and thus drives their actions;
some people are ‘‘achievers’’ and function best independently;
some need socialization and thrive in group projects, and others
gravitate toward power and leadership positions.

6

Intrinsic–extrinsic orientation is related to behaviorism and
thus to motivation, but is more detailed in that it allows for
varying levels of reward, both internal and external. Thus, it
theorizes that some people create their own rewards, such as
satisfaction of curiosity or simply interest in a given topic. The
reward for these motivations then is satisfaction and feelings of
accomplishment or control. External rewards are the more
traditional rewards such as praise or a prize of some sort and

are usually less effective than intrinsic rewards.
7
In fact, there

have actually been negative correlations found between the
number of extrinsic motivators used and student performance.

8

Some other related motivational components that are
important to keep in mind when considering information
seeking are level of effort, expectations, and curiosity. The
ARCS model utilizes these components to finally provide a
strong framework that is often used in designing instruction to
enhance motivation levels. ARCS stands for attention, rele-
vance, confidence, and satisfaction and gives the instructor
responsibility for designing lessons around these areas and thus
increasing student motivation.

9
The ARCS model can also be

applied when designing lessons in information seeking.

CRITICAL THINKING

Critical thinking is a process that is widely acknowledged in
the literature to be crucial to the learning process, to cognitive
development, and to effective information seeking. Most
college faculty and librarians are painfully aware of how often
students seem to be incapable of thinking critically about
coursework in general, and about information needs or
information resources in particular. Evaluation and effective
use of information in any form is impossible without the use of
critical thinking, and so the level and quality of critical
thinking are of primary concern when speaking of information-
seeking behavior in Generation Y students.

The issue of critical thinking cannot be separated from how
students view their information universe, and the Grinnell
College study is particularly informative in this regard.

10

Students were questioned over several semesters about what
they perceived as good reasons for discussing certain sensitive
topics such as diversity issues on campus. Those students
holding strong views on such topics cited their strongly held
views as their main reason for discussing these topics, as
opposed to being motivated by the prospect of learning more or
seeking information about the issues or the viewpoints of
others. Conversely, not having a strong viewpoint (as well as
the difficulty level of the subject matter or having a lack of
knowledge in that area) was given by students as a reason for
not wanting to discuss the topic. Here we can see that the
students’ efforts at discussion and information seeking, at least
from peers, were limited to sharing information that they felt a
familiarity with and of which they possessed prior knowledge.
In discussion with peers, students rarely shared new informa-
tion they had located independently, or formulated new
opinions using new information, both of which methods would
require extensive use of critical thinking skills. Students seemed
to relate verbal interaction with peers, then, to be equivalent to
advocacy and not to be information seeking at all, and indeed
they appeared to prefer it that way. From their viewpoint, the
main purpose of discussion was to convince others of the
validity of their viewpoint, and not to collect new information.
In the Grinnell study, only 5 out of 200 students, or 2.5%,
viewed discussion (i.e., verbal information gathering) as a way
to gather and/or explore new information.

’’The issue of critical thinking cannot be
separated from how students view their

information universe.‘‘

January 2005 47

In addition, the study found a strong bias in favor of
knowledge collected through personal experiences, or by
talking with others about the others’ personal experiences,
rather than from disinterested information sources such as
research studies or statistics. Only about 13% of students
acknowledged scholarly information such as research studies to
be an important source of knowledge for them.

And lastly, students in the Grinnell study felt that
having their own knowledge and/or opinions challenged, or
even questioned, was undesirable and created discomfort,
which should be avoided. They felt that the search for
common ground and consensus should always take prece-
dence over disagreement and debate, regardless of the
issues or the possibility of new information to be learned.
Interestingly, 25% of the women claimed the right as part
of a diverse community to not have their opinions
challenged at all, as opposed to only 6% of the men. In
fact, other statements in the study suggested that the men
fully expected that their views would be challenged by
others. This ability or inability to accept dissonance will be
seen in other research among students as well and is
attributed by researchers to students being at various stages
of cognitive development.

In direct contrast to the Grinnell study, other studies refer
to the introduction of ‘‘motivational dispositions’’ as being
essential to the employment of critical thinking, and cite such
attributes as inquisitiveness, concern for being well informed,
open mindedness, flexibility, understanding of opinions of
others, fair mindedness, willingness to reconsider, and
reasonableness as reflective of this motivation. As the
students in the Grinnell study showed few of these traits, it
may well be that critical thinking becomes of secondary
importance when presented with emotionally charged and
personally sensitive subject matter such as campus diversity
issues. It may also be that face-to-face, verbal information
seeking may also affect the propensity to use critical thinking
skills.

11

The most realistic appraisal of this apparent conflict in data
would come from the research of psychologist William Perry.
By surveying Harvard undergraduates, he gradually developed
a scheme of ethical and intellectual development and theorized
that intellectual development undergoes a series of steps,
eventually reaching the stage wherein critical thinking occurs
on a regular basis.

Perry’s scheme begins with ‘‘dualism,’’ which is the belief
that information is either right or wrong (i.e., ‘‘You’re either
with me or against me’’). Dualism begins early in intellectual
development and often is reflected in the system of beliefs
and acquired knowledge and viewpoints that a student brings
with them to college from secondary school and is charac-
terized by the need for an authority figure to transmit
knowledge and beliefs. Independent or even collaborative
learning is difficult for students at this stage. In this phase,
students view teachers and other adults as ‘‘authorities,’’ and
on the information provided by them as either ‘‘good’’ or
‘‘bad,’’ creating either ‘‘good authorities’’ or ‘‘bad author-
ities,’’ depending on whether or not they agree or disagree
with the teacher’s information. Students in the dualistic phase
of intellectual development are thus particularly unsuited for
lessons the evils of the Internet, a source they view as ‘‘good’’
information. Anyone who has worked with college freshmen
will most likely be familiar with this dualistic phase of

48 The Journal of Academic Librarianship

development, and indeed the results of the Grinnell study
discussed above make perfect sense in the context of Perry’s
scheme.

A more effective lesson on Internet information then,
rather than specifically dwelling on ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’
Web sites, would be to present actual examples and to raise
questions rather than giving answers, opening the student
up to the next level intellectual development, ‘‘multi-
plicity.’’ Multiplicity is the ability to acknowledge that
the world contains knowledge that the student cannot yet
classify as right or wrong, knowledge which requires
further study and thought (the so-called ‘‘gray area’’). The
student progresses from dualism to multiplicity as they
encounter more and more diversity and legitimate uncer-
tainty in the world, facts or occurrences that cannot be
easily answered or explained. It is at this point that critical
thinking has its roots; the student must use more complex
reasoning to determine the validity or nonvalidity of any
given piece of information.

The student moves from multiplicity to ‘‘contextual relativ-
ism’’ when the knowledge characterized as multiplicitous
begins to outweigh the knowledge that is thought to be either
right or wrong, or dualistic. The student begins to see the world
as primarily relativistic and context-bound, rather than as a
world of black-and-white facts. Slowly over these last two
periods, critical thinking begins to develop and is used more
and more frequently.

12

Considering Perry’s work, and from reading the
anecdotal student comments he recorded in his study, we
can see that not all college students come to college at the
same levels of critical thinking ability, or even at the same
level of intellectual development, regardless of academic
standing.

LEARNING THEORY

Learning Theory is an offshoot of motivational theory. As
most educators are already painfully aware, students will
only seek information and learn if they are motivated to do
so. The difficult part is to discover the answer to the age-
old question of what motivates students. Educators have
often turned to motivational theory in their attempts to
answer this question, and the following are a few of the
more prominent theories closely related to motivation and
thus to learning.

Behavior Theory

This theory, first developed by B. F. Skinner in the 1950s,
uses the concepts of ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘negative’’ reinforce-
ment to control behavior. This theory explains learning
behavior very simply: Reward students who perform well,
and punish students who do not. Behaviorist theory, although
certainly observed among student populations, does not
explain all learning (i.e., learning that takes place without
overtly rewarding the behavior) and so has fallen increas-
ingly out of favor in recent years. In addition, behavior
learned by this method has been found to be easily changed
later on when conditions change or additional information is
encountered.

13

Control Theory

The ‘‘Control Theory’’ of behavior was developed by
William Glasser. The theory states that, rather than being a

response to outside stimulus, behavior is determined by what
a person wants or needs at any given time, and any given
behavior is an attempt to address basic human needs such as
love, freedom, power, etc. Thus, if the desired behavior
addresses students needs, the students will respond. If
students appear to be unmotivated to perform, it is because
the rules, assignments, etc., are viewed by them as irrelevant
to their ‘‘basic human needs.’’ Glasser has shown that a
majority of students recognize when the work they are doing
is irrelevant ‘‘busy work,’’ even if they perform well because
of incentives and even when the teacher uses praise as an
incentive. Many students will reject such empty work
altogether.

14

Learning Styles

The concept of people having different ‘‘Learning Styles’’
originated in the work of psychologist Carl Jung, who first
proposed the theory of different ‘‘personality types.’’ This
theory was expanded to education by determining that these
personality types have varying ways of learning. The
Myers–Briggs Personality Analysis test, developed by Isabel
Myers and Katherine Briggs, was developed using Jung’s
theory of personality types in an effort to determine what
type any given individual is. The personality type then
determines the learning style of a given individual. Jung
determined 16 personality types by weighing the degree in
which the following four main areas of personality dominate
a given person’s behavior: extraverted or introverted;
learning mainly by use of the senses or by intuition;
learning mainly by thinking or by feeling; and learning
mainly by judging or by perceiving. To be effective,
teaching styles would have to be modified to accommodate
these multiple learning styles.

15,16

Multiple Intelligences

Psychologist Howard Gardner developed the theory of
‘‘Multiple Intelligences.’’ Although Gardner’s theory is
related to Jung’s personality theory, Gardner’s theory relates
more directly to intelligence rather than to personality.
Gardner states that there are different skill sets that
individuals use in problem solving, and that these skill sets
represent distinctly different types of intelligence. Gardner
states that intelligence is comprised of a group of different
abilities, which originate in the stages of development each
person passes through as they grow to adulthood. He
identifies seven such intelligences—verbal–linguistic, logi-
cal–mathematical, visual–spatial, body–kinesthetic, musical–
rhythmic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal—but he suggests
that there are probably more.

17

Traditional education has heavily favored only two of
these areas: verbal–linguistic and logical–mathematical. The
lecture, teaching by rote memorization, and other timeworn
classroom methods obviously favor students who use
verbal–linguistic and logical–mathematical skills most often
in problem solving (e.g., the SAT test). Thus, people who
solve problems visually (visual–spatial—artists, for instance)
or who have to actually do an activity to learn or to solve a
problem (body–kinesthetic) would be at a distinct disadvant-
age in the traditional classroom setting. Indeed, educators
recognized years ago that only a very small percentage of
the general population prefer to learn by reading, and that
small percentage, not surprisingly, is comprised mainly of

people who are professionally affiliated with education and
libraries.

18

’’. . . it could be argued that in heavily relying
upon television, the Internet, videos/DVDs,

and other primarily visual sources of
information, students may simply be using the

modes of information seeking that are the
most efficient and . . . effective . . . for their

particular learning styles.‘‘

An interest in active learning techniques has come to the
forefront in recent years in an attempt to teach more to those
students relying on other types of intelligence to learn. There
have been reports of appreciable increases in posttest scores as
opposed to pretest scores when the teaching methods were
changed to address other types of intelligence. For instance, a
change to active learning activities (kinesthetic learning)
increased such posttest scores by 28.74%, and simply changing
from a purely textual handout to one which used analogies and
charts instead (visual learning) also increased participation and
posttest scores. Adding to the argument for teaching to learning
style is the fact that students for the most part retain only about
10% of what they read, but they retain 20–30% of what they
see.

19
These figures may account for students’ strong prefer-

ence for visual modes of information seeking (e.g., a television
or a computer screen). Indeed, it could be argued that in heavily
relying upon television, the Internet, videos/DVDs, and other
primarily visual sources of information, students may simply
be using the modes of information seeking that are the most
efficient and the most effective ones for their particular learning
styles.

INFORMATION-SEEKING BEHAVIOR

Motivation and critical thinking, along with the learning
theories above—behavior, control issues, multiple intelligen-
ces, and learning styles—become more meaningful as we begin
to look at the literature on information seeking itself. Clearly,
there are many intellectual and emotional factors at work when
a Generation Y student is seeking information.

Although a large number of studies have been done on
information-seeking behavior, the process itself is still largely a
mystery. As is clear from the material just covered, learning
theories, motivational factors, behavioral considerations, intel-
lectual development, and personality types are all factors in the
information-seeking process, making it a highly complex
one.

20
Although recently researchers have been expressing

the need for more qualitative research in studies of this type,
21

quantitative and/or longitudinal studies on generalized infor-
mation seeking are also scarce, particularly in student
populations.

However, to get a better feel for how students approach
information seeking, we shall begin by considering a focus
group study done at the University of Idaho Library. This study
was exceptional in that it made an effort to examine
information seeking of all types, not just in the context of
academic research or the library. Although the study was done

January 2005 49

by librarians, their purpose was to examine the broadest
possible range of information-seeking behavior and attitudes.
For this reason, they did not mention the word ‘‘library’’ in any
of the questions asked, and all of the groups but one met in
nonlibrary settings. A neutral moderator was used as well.

22

The researchers were concerned about the ‘‘general infor-
mation seeking’’ aspect of their study primarily because most
of the research already done in this area has been done in
highly specific areas. Studies have been done on students
seeking information in specific subject areas such as geog-
raphy23 or nursing,

24
or on the differences among students

seeking information in different disciplinary areas.25 Studies
have also been done on the use of specific information
resources such as the Internet or online catalogs, and on
specific user groups such as ‘‘mature undergraduates’’ (i.e.,
those over 21 years old),

26
‘‘nontraditional undergraduates,’’

27

multicultural students,28 or the homeless.
29

However, the
researchers at Idaho University Library wanted their study to
remain as general as possible, using undergraduates seeking
information of any type, in any location or resource.

This study illuminated a number of very useful points. First
of all, students often cited human beings as frequently cited
sources of information, both people they knew and strangers as
well. Although some preferred to find information on their
own, many expressed the preference to discuss information
needs with a ‘‘real person’’ rather than find all of the needed
information on their own. (This brings to mind the ‘‘author-
ities’’ that Perry discussed.) Students would appear to be
initially seeking ‘‘sources of truth’’ (i.e., Good Authorities)
rather than information per se.

The most interesting and perhaps even the most useful
information coming from this focus group study is the criteria
these students use when discussing their information ‘‘needs,’’
which as we saw from Glasser’s Control Theory are crucial in
defining what students will learn. High on their lists of needs
when seeking information were ease of use, reliability,
accuracy, currency, availability, and cost. Other terms they
mentioned as being important to them were trust, quality,
credibility, validity, completeness, and comprehensiveness; but
these were secondary to the first group.

Whereas obstacles to the obtaining of information in the past
were simply not having physical access to the information
(‘‘the book wasn’t on the shelf,’’ or wasn’t available at all),
‘‘infoglut’’ and questionable validity were cited as the most
common current obstacles to finding information. Not being
able to determine where a Web site came from or whether or
not it was accurate was also of primary concern to students in
this study.

30
The fact that these students questioned the validity

of Internet information at all is encouraging and seems to
reveal a multiplistic view of information among these particular
students. It had been previously found that Generation Y
students tend to overrate their abilities a great deal when it
comes to finding information on the Internet.

31,32

Regarding criteria for information seeking, the concern for
time spent locating information was brought up the most often
across the board, among undergraduates, graduate students, and
faculty. It was considered to be both of great importance and
also in undersupply. Indeed, they rated most information-
seeking experiences based on how much time they took, and
often will accept inappropriate information or information of
lower quality if finding it takes less time. They referred to
information seeking as taking time away from other things that

50 The Journal of Academic Librarianship

they viewed as more important. (‘‘More time to play’’ is how
one student put it.) Unless there is an intrinsic or extrinsic
motivation of some kind, or the research is of crucial importance
to them on a personal or professional basis, students have no
‘‘need’’ to obtain high-quality information resources, harkening
back once again to both Maslow and Glasser.

When asked to describe a ‘‘dream information machine,’’
the groups consistently imagined a machine that was a ‘‘mind
reader,’’ that was ‘‘intuitive,’’ and could determine their
information needs without them having to verbalize them.
Clearly, both students and faculty realize the difficulty of
verbalizing complex information needs, and although they
think themselves to be clear in their minds as to what they
need, they still wish there was some mechanism that could see
what they envisioned their needs to be instead of having to
sacrifice accuracy during verbalization.

This ‘‘dream machine’’ would also be a one-stop source for
information needs, using voice recognition and natural
language to search to return a comprehensive collection of
information sources. ‘‘Portability’’ and ubiquitous access 24/7
were also important qualities in such a machine. It is difficult to
imagine such a machine ever being developed; however, the
authors remarked on the similarity between many of the criteria
and a reference librarian.

33

Considering all of this data and research, particularly the
propensity for visual learning and the concerns over time spent
exhibited by Generation Y students, it comes as no surprise to
find that they will usually go to the Internet first, whether it be
for personal, academic, or professional information. This has
been confirmed again and again in research studies such as
John Lubans’ various studies at Duke University from 1997 to
the present.

34
D’Esposito and Gardner found in 1999 that 40–

50% of the subjects in their study used the Internet on a weekly
basis,

35
and the Pew Internet study in 2002 found that 71% of

college students said they used the Internet as a major source of
information.

36

Looking at how faculty are dealing with this phenomenon,
Susan Herring’s study of faculty acceptance of student use of
the Internet in class work found that 73% of faculty accepting
student use of the Internet in assignments accepted such use
with no criteria or limits attached regarding the accuracy or
quality of the Web sites students used.

37
It is assumed that this

lack of discrimination or guidance among faculty regarding
student information resources would remove one motivating
factor students would have for seeking accurate, high-quality
information. Clearly, the time factor which Young and Seggern
found in their focus group study to be of paramount concern
applies to faculty as well as students; checking the Web sites
students are using or providing criteria or specific sites to use is
time consuming. Conversely, if time is of such concern to
students, it is not surprising that they would be drawn to
Internet use, as it takes no time at all find information on a
topic on the Internet if concern for accuracy is not a factor.

38

Unfortunately, most data collected on student information
seeking using the Internet has been collected by asking
students how often they use the Internet, how they would rate
their own skills at information seeking, etc. As has already
been noted,

39
conflicting statements and inaccuracies show that

students tend to overrate their Internet skills and experience,
presumably because the Internet is regarded as a ‘‘cool’’
medium, which students are expected to know about in great
detail. Even the OCLC white paper on the information habits of

college students found that although two thirds of students felt
strongly that they know best what Internet information to use
for assignments, only half agree completely that information on
the Internet is acceptable for assignments.

40

A number of other interesting findings in this OCLC paper
include the fact that 88% of students state they are less likely to
pay for information; and although 80% of students are
bothered at least somewhat by advertising on Web sites, only
20% believe that ad-free Web sites have are likely to have more
reliable information that sites with advertising. The Internet
falls somewhat short of meeting student performance expect-
ations in all areas (particularly currency and accuracy) except
‘‘ease of use’’ and ‘‘self-service,’’ where performance of Web
resources equals the importance students place on those
qualities. Also interesting is the finding yet again that four
out of five students are more likely to seek face-to-face help
with assignments rather than online or phone help; few
students mentioned using an ‘‘Ask a librarian’’ service.

41

There are a number of flaws apparent in some quantitative
studies of students use of the Internet. First of all, they are often
conducted online, skewing results in favor of students who are
already heavy users of the medium. Secondly, because random
samples have for the most part not been used, these studies
have tended to use groups of students who are fairly
homogenous either academically, ethnically, or economically,
thus skewing results and missing possibly important factors
such as the effects of the ‘‘digital divide’’ on student
experiences with the Internet. The Lubans studies in particular
used students from Duke University, whom we can assume
come from different backgrounds both economically and
academically from the average American college student.

42

Studies using quantitative methods such as citation analysis
to study student information seeking are few and far between.

43

Although many studies have been done over the past 20 or 30
years using citation analysis, only one was completed since the
Internet has become so widely used by students. Malone and
Videon found in that study that only 7% of students’ citations
were from the Internet, although this has probably changed
dramatically in recent years.

44

’’Studies using quantitative methods such as
citation analysis to study student information

seeking are few and far between.‘‘

The OCLC white paper, although still querying students
instead of measuring citations or other data and surveying only
academic information seeking, nevertheless offers quantitative
information gathered from a large population. The sample
surveyed was taken from a global panel consisting of seven
million individuals and then limited to 1050 U.S. college
students aged 18–24. The sample was statistically analyzed as
well and was determined to have a margin of error of F3 at the
95% confidence level. They also mapped the zip codes of
home and school addresses to confirm that the sample was
randomly distributed from across the United States.

OCLC found that although 70% of students used their
library Web sites for some assignment-related information,
only 20% use it for most assignments. Full-text articles are

used the most often (67%), with electronic books (21%) and
online reference (6%) being used the least often. However, a
full 90% of students also use their library’s print resources.
While acknowledging the demographic limitations of the Duke
study, the OCLC study still made several references to it.

45

When studying general, across-the-board information seek-
ing, the term used is ‘‘everyday life information seeking’’ or
ELIS, made popular in information research by Reijo
Savolainen in the framework he developed for such study in
1995. Although not specifically targeted at students, Savolai-
nen’s framework has been acknowledged to be seminal in the
field of information seeking. Two major dimensions of this
framework are seeking ‘‘orienting’’ information and seeking
‘‘practical’’ information, two areas that are important to keep in
mind when considering students’ information seeking.

46

Perhaps the most interesting of the recent studies in
information seeking are the studies done by Ethelene Whitmire
on the effects of prior (epistemological) beliefs on information
seeking. Her findings have indicated that students at higher
levels of epistemological development (i.e., who have moved
from a dualistic world view to a multiplistic or relativistic world
view) are better able to handle conflicting information and to
use critical thinking to determine authority and accuracy.

47,48

CONCLUSIONS

Information seeking is a highly subjective process, one which
students approach with prior knowledge, strongly held
opinions, and differing levels of cognitive development. From
the research it is apparent that, aside from personal precon-
ceptions, issues of time and levels of difficulty in obtaining
information are usually of more concern to students than issues
of accuracy. It is still unclear, however, whether this is because
they are not concerned about the accuracy unless their
instructor is, or because they are assuming most information
is by nature accurate. The casual ease with which students
accept information as being either true or false, particularly
while they are still in the dualistic phase of cognitive
development, would tend to bear out the last assumption.
The source of the information (i.e., information from a ‘‘good
authority’’) takes precedence over the information itself, thus
saving time and effort by not having to think critically to verify
information.

Although the amount of available research is overwhelm-
ing, one can see clear trends emerging from both quantitative
and qualitative studies, and particularly from focus group
information:

! Generation Y students are primarily visual learners, a style
which research has shown will almost certainly conflict
with the learning style and habits of almost any instructor.
Small changes in presentation, such as changing from pure
lecture to incorporate hands-on activities, will help to hold
student interest and increase information retention.

! Any hands-on activities should be directly related to a
specific task that the student perceives as a need, i.e., to
personal information needs or to a specific assignment for
an instructor.

! Students arrive at college at varying levels of cognitive
development and will continue to progress at varying levels
through the dualistic, multiplistic, and relativistic methods
of dealing with new information. It will probably be more

January 2005 51

effective for an instructor to instruct as much as possible by
raising questions, encouraging discussion, and using
hands-on activities than by lecturing.

! Students, like most of us, are very concerned about saving
time. They may be more open to instruction in search
techniques (Boolean and other methods) or in using the
library’s Web site if the time-saving aspects are made clear
to them.

! It cannot be expected that all students will arrive at college
ready to seek information with high levels of reflective and
critical thinking. Some students will develop these skills
later than others, and some will still be struggling with
them in graduate school.

48
Instructors and librarians would

be well advised to keep in mind that cognitive ability is a
developmental process and students must go through a
series of steps over a period of time before they are able to
seek information critically and reflectively.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. James Krikelas, ‘‘Information Seeking Behavior: Patterns And
Concepts,’’ Drexel Library Quarterly 19 (2) (1983): 5–20.

2. Michael Eisenberg and M.K. Brown, ‘‘Current Themes Regarding
Library And Information Skills: Research Supporting And Research
Lacking,’’ School Library Media Quarterly 20 (2) (1992): 103–
110.

3. Carol Kuhlthau, ‘‘Inside The Search Process: Information Seeking
From The User’s Perspective,’’ Journal of the American Society for
Information Science 42 (5) (1991): 361–371.

4. Michael Eisenberg and R.E. Berkowitz, ‘‘Information Problem-
Solving: The Big Six Skills Approach,’’ School Library Media
Activities Monthly 8 (5) (1992): 27–29, 37, 42.

5. Ruth V. Small, Nasriah Zakaria and Houria El-Figuigui, ‘‘Motiva-
tional Aspects of Information Literacy Skills Instruction in
Community College Libraries,’’ College & Research Libraries 65
(March 2004): 96–120.

6. Ruth V. Small, ‘‘Designing Motivation Into Library and Information
Skills Instruction,’’ School Library Media Research (1998).
Available: http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/slmrb/
slmrcontents/volume11998slmqo/small.htm (accessed March 20,
2004).

7. Ruth V. Small, Nasriah Zakaria, and Houria El-Figuigui, ‘‘Motiva-
tional Aspects Of Information Literacy Skills Instruction In
Community College Libraries.’’

8. Timothy J. Newby, ‘‘Classroom Motivation: Strategies Of First-
Year Teachers,’’ Journal of Educational Psychology 83 (2) (1991):
195–200.

9. John M. Keller and Katsuaki Suzuki, ‘‘Use Of The ARCS
Motivation Model In Courseware Design,’’ in Instructional Designs
for Microcomputer Courseware (1988), D.H. Jonassen (Ed.).
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10. Carol Trosset, ‘‘Obstacles To Open Discussion And Critical
Thinking: The Grinnell College Study,’’ Change 30 (5) (1998):
44–50.

11. Chau-Kiu Cheung, Elisabeth Rudowica, Anna S.F. Kwan, and
Xiao Dong Yue, ‘‘Assessing University Students’ General And
Specific Critical Thinking,’’ College Student Journal 36 (4)
(2002): 504–526.

12. William S. Moore, ‘‘My Mind Exploded: Intellectual Development
As A Critical Framework For Understanding And Assessing
Collaborative Learning,’’ Washington Center for Improving the
Quality of Undergraduate Education (2004). Available: http://
www.evergreen.edu/washcenter/resources/acl/iia.html (accessed
March 18, 2004).

52 The Journal of Academic Librarianship

13. B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (1953). New York:
Collier-MacMillan.

14. William Glasser, Control Theory In The Classroom (1986). New
York: Perennial Library.

15. Carl Jung and H.G. Baynes, Psychological Types, Or The
Psychology Of Individuation (1923). New York: Harcourt-Brace.

16. Gordon Lawrence, People Types And Tiger Stripes: A Practical
Guide To Learning Styles (1982) Gainesville, Fla: Center for
Applications of Psychological Type.

17. Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory In Practice
(1993). New York: Basic Books.

18. Kate Manual, ‘‘Teaching Information Literacy To Generation Y,’’
Journal of Library Administration 36 (1–2) (2002): 195–217.

19. Ibid.
20. Maxine Reneker, ‘‘A Qualitative Study Of Information Seeking

Among Members Of An Academic Community: Methodological
Issues And Problems,’’ Library Quarterly 63 (4) (1993): 487–507.

21. David Ellis, ‘‘Modeling the Information-Seeking Patterns of
Academic Research: A Grounded Theory Approach,’’ Library
Quarterly 63 (4) (1993): 469–471.

22. Nancy J. Young and Marilyn Von Seggern, ‘‘General Information
Seeking In Changing Times: A Focus Group Study,’’ Reference
and User Services Quarterly 41 (2) (2001): 159–169.

23. Kathy Fescemyer, ‘‘Information-Seeking Behavior Of Under-

graduate Geography Students,’’ Research Strategies 17 (2000):
307–317.

24. J.D. Roberts, ‘‘Senior Student Nurses’ Information Seeking Skills:
A Comparative Study,’’ Nurse Education Today 24 (3) (2004):
211–218.

25. Etheline Whitmire, ‘‘Disciplinary Differences And Undergraduates
Information-Seeking Behavior,’’ Journal of the American Society
for Information Science and Technology 53 (8) (2002): 631–638.

26. Lisa M. Given, ‘‘The Academic And The Everyday: Investigating
The Overlap In Mature Undergraduates’ Information-Seeking
Behaviors,’’ Library and Information Science Research 24
(2002): 17–29.

27. Jennifer L. Branch, ‘‘Nontraditional Undergraduates At Home,
Work, And School: An Examination Of Information-Seeking
Behaviors And The Impact Of Information Literacy Instruction,’’
Research Strategies 19 (1) (2003): 3–15.

28. Mengxiong Liu and Bernice Redfern, ‘‘Information-Seeking
Behavior Of Multicultural Students: A Case Study At San Jose
State University,’’ College & Research Libraries 58 (4) (1997):
348–354.

29. Hersberger J., ‘‘Everyday Information Needs and Information
Sources of Homeless Parents,’’ New Review of Information
Behaviour Research 2 (2001): 119–134.

30. Nancy J. Young and Marilyn Von Seggern, ‘‘General Information
Seeking in Changing Times: A Focus Group Study.’’

31. Deborah J. Grimes and Carl H. Boening, ‘‘Worries With The Web:
A Look at Student Use of Web Resources,’’ College & Research
Libraries 62 (1) (2001): 11–23.

32. Kate Manual, ‘‘Teaching Information Literacy To Generation Y.’’
33. Nancy J. Young and Marilyn Von Seggern, ‘‘General Information

Seeking In Changing Times: A Focus Group Study.’’
34. John Lubans, Jr., ‘‘When Students Hit the Surf,’’ School Library

Journal 45 (9) (1999): 144–147.
35. Joann E. D’Esposito and Rachel M. Gardner, ‘‘University Students

Perceptions Of The Internet: An Exploratory Study,’’ The Journal
of Academic Librarianship 25 (6) (1999): 456–461.

36. Pew Internet and American Life Project, ‘‘The Internet Goes To
College: How Students Are Living In The Future With Today’s
Technology,’’ (September 15, 2002). Available: http://
www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=71 (accessed March
22, 2004).

37. Susan Davis Herring, ‘‘Faculty Acceptance Of The World Wide
Web For Student Research,’’ College & Research Libraries 62 (5)
(2001): 251–258.

http:\\www.ala.org\ala\aasl\aaslpubsandjournals\slmrb\slmrcontents\volume11998slmqo\small.htm

http:\\www.evergreen.edu\washcenter\resources\acl\iia.html

http:\\www.pewinternet.org\reports\toc.asp?Report=71

38. Nancy J. Young and Marilyn Von Seggern, ‘‘General Information
Seeking In Changing Times: A Focus Group Study.’’

39. Kate Manual, ‘‘Teaching Information Literacy To Generation
Y,’’ Journal of Library Administration 36 (1–2) (2002):
195–217.

40. OCLC White Paper on the Information Habits of College
Students, ‘‘How Academic Librarians Can Influence Students’
Web-Based Information Choices,’’ (June 2002). Available: http://
www.mnstate.edu/schwartz/informationhabits (accessed
March 20, 2004).

41. Ibid.
42. John Lubans, Jr., ‘‘When Students Hit the Surf.’’
43. Kathy Fescemyer, ‘‘Information-Seeking Behavior 0f Under-

graduate Geography Students,’’ Research Strategies 17 (2000):
307–317.

44. Debbie Malone and Carol Videon, ‘‘Assessing Undergraduate Use

Of Electronic Resources: A Quantitative Analysis Of Works
Cited,’’ Research Strategies 15 (3) (1997): 151–158.

45. OCLC White Paper on the Information Habits of College Students,
‘‘How Academic Librarians Can Influence Students’ Web-Based
Information Choices.’’

46. Reijo Savolainen, ‘‘Everyday Life Information Seeking:
Approaching Information Seeking In The Context of Way of
Life,’’ Library and Information Science Research 17 (3) (1995):
259–294.

47. Etheline Whitmire, ‘‘Epistemological Beliefs And The Informa-
tion-Seeking Behavior Of Undergraduates,’’ Library & Informa-
tion Science Research 25 (2) (2003): 127–142.

48. Etheline Whitmire, ‘‘The Relationship Between Undergraduates’
Epistemological Beliefs, Reflective Judgment, And Their Infor-
mation-Seeking Behavior,’’ Information Processing & Manage-
ment 40 (1) (2004): 97–111.

January 2005 53

http:\\www.mnstate.edu\schwartz\informationhabits

• Information-Seeking Behavior in Generation Y Students: Motivation, Critical Thinking, and Learning Theory

Introduction
The Roots of Information-Seeking Research
Motivation
Critical Thinking
Learning Theory
Behavior Theory
Control Theory
Learning Styles
Multiple Intelligences
Information-Seeking Behavior
Conclusions
References