Children And Social Competence

Arenas Of Action

Ian Hutchby, Jo Moran-Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135714222
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A text which addresses the relationship between childhood, competence and the social arenas of action in which children live their lives. Taking issue with the view that children are merely apprentice adults, the contributors develop a picture of children as competent, sophisticated social agents, focusing on the contexts which both enable and constrain that competence.

Chapter 1: Situating Children’s Social Competence

Ian Hutchby and Jo Moran-Ellis

In the summer of 1996, when this volume was in preparation, one of the biggest news stories in the UK was the crisis in the British beef industry caused by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). During this crisis, European nations banned the importation of British beef and associated products. The British government struggled to get the ban lifted, but for a long time its only success came in the form of small concessions. The first of these related to one of the ‘associated products’: the lifting of the ban on importation of bulls’ semen. Hearing this story reported on the morning news, one of the authors (IH) and his partner, struck by its bizarrerie, treated it as the occasion for an exchange of jokes about possible reasons for importing bulls’ semen. When their 8-year-old child came in wondering what the laughter was about, their response was to stop laughing, say that nothing was going on, and claim that she was too young to understand what they had been talking about. Although the child demanded, increasingly angrily, that the adults ‘just tell her’ what the joke was, it was some time before her mother gave her a somewhat diluted description of the cause of the laughter: ‘It was just a story on the news.’ ‘What about?’ ‘About bulls’ semen being sent to other countries.’ After one or two further aggrieved questions as to why that should be amusing, the child went back to her previous activities.

This seemingly trivial story illustrates some very significant points about the relations between children and adults in contemporary Western culture. Primarily, it indexes the extent to which, and the ease with which, adults construct children as essentially non-competent, or at least, as competent only in specific ways and within certain parameters. In our story, the adults elected to treat the child as not in possession of the competence to understand their joke. More significantly, they situated the child within a certain definition of ‘childhood’, particularly in relation to the subject matter of the joke with its sexual, or at least reproductive, connotations. The lack of competence accorded the child in that moment was not so much a cognitive competence—the issue was not whether the child was able to understand the humour, even if it might have to be explained to her. Rather, the child was constructed as non-competent in the normative light of a particular conception of childhood as a time of ‘innocence’: in this case, a conception evidently underpinning a view that children of 8 should not be exposed to jokes which implicate such matters as sex and reproduction.

However, the story also illustrates how the child herself is concerned to contest her construction as an innocent, non-competent party to this overheard exchange. There are good reasons why she might want to do this. Consider that overheard laughter can represent something intrinsically interesting, and also potentially threatening. We are apt to wonder why people are laughing, and depending on the context, we may be under the impression that we ourselves are the butt of some joke. There is thus a strong tendency for humans to try to discover the cause of overheard laughter. Yet in our story, having exercised that curiosity the child in response is treated ‘like a child’ and told that it is beyond her understanding. Thus, her competence is denied in two ways: first in regard to her ability to find out the cause of some overheard laughter; and second in regard to her ability to understand that laughter. The significant thing is, of course, that this child actively refuses to be so treated and demands to be accorded competence.

In microcosm, we find here the twin dynamics that are at the heart of what has come to be called the new social studies of childhood. On the one hand, the dynamic of children’s social competence: children are neither as innocent nor as non-competent as common-sense ideologies of childhood often make them out to be, but active agents who possess and can assert complex social competencies in their own right. On the other hand, the dynamic of social enablement and constraint: children’s competencies are situated within concrete social contexts in which there may be differently structured and variably enforced efforts to constrain, as well as enable, the competencies that children are allowed or encouraged to manifest.

Over recent years, what can be described as a ‘competence paradigm’ in the sociology of childhood has emerged in a number of key publications (James and Prout, 1990a; Waksler, 1991; Mayall, 1994a; Qvortrup et al., 1994). The main thrust of this research is to take issue with the perspective on children and childhood propounded by developmental psychology, and by socialization theory in mainstream sociology, in which children are seen as the objects of overarching social processes by which they move from being non-adults to being adults. Without denying that human beings develop over time and in describable ways, nor that appropriate social behaviours are learned and not natural, the competence paradigm seeks to take children seriously as social agents in their own right; to examine how social constructions of ‘childhood’ not only structure their lives but also are structured by the activities of children themselves; and to explicate the social competencies which children manifest in the course of their everyday lives as children, with other children and with adults, in peer groups and in families, as well as the manifold other arenas of social action.

As Allison James points out in her ‘Foreword’ to this volume, there are many different ways in which the dynamics of children’s social competence have been subject to analysis in this research. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as sociology, sociolinguistics, policy studies, law, anthropology and social geography, researchers have sought to redraw our ways of conceptualizing the ‘child’ and the parameters of ‘childhood’. Among the central questions that are addressed in this research are the extent to which children can be said to possess social competencies that are somehow unique and specific to the peer cultures of childhood; or alternatively, whether the social competence manifested by children is better seen as essentially the same, or of the same order, as that possessed by adults. In either case, explicating the nature and uses of those competencies reveals to us a picture of childhood as a dynamic arena of social activity involving struggles for power, contested meanings and negotiated relationships, rather than the linear picture of development and maturation made popular by traditional sociology and developmental psychology.

The latter picture, the genesis of which can be traced back to the early years of the twentieth century, has infiltrated common-sense in numerous ways in contemporary capitalist societies. Although the family is by no means any longer a straightforward, unitary phenomenon, the idea that children ‘belong’ in family frameworks is still an immensely powerful and pervasive one. Underlying this belief is the notion that children are socialized in important ways by the family, as well as by the education system and other ideological systems often seen as more harmful, such as the mass media. This view was made famous by Talcott Parsons in one of the seminal texts of functionalist sociology, The Social System (1951). Parsons’ writings drew rather uncritically on what were by then wellestablished tenets of developmental psychology (see Prout and James, 1990). In a version of what Giddens (1976) describes as the ‘double hermeneutic’—the process by which the accounts of social theorists both draw on and subsequently influence common-sense ideas in everyday life—these theories about socialization, like Piaget’s earlier theories about developmental stages in childhood (1926), have become part of ordinary thinking about the role of the family in children’s social development.

As Thorne (1993) remarks:

‘socialisation’ and ‘development’ [are] perspectives that many parents, teachers, and other adults bring to their interactions with children. As mothers and teachers of young children, women, in particular, are charged with the work of ‘developing the child’. But children don’t necessarily see themselves ‘being socialised’ or ‘developing’, and their interactions with one another, and with adults, extend far beyond these models. (p. 13)

At the same time, ‘asking how children are socialised into adult ways, or how their experiences fit into linear stages of individual development, deflects attention from their present, lived, and collective experiences’ (ibid.).

It is precisely this attention to the present, lived and collective experiences of children that the competence paradigm seeks to prioritize. Prout and James (1990, pp. 8–9) listed a number of key features of this paradigm. Primary among them were: (a) that ‘children’s social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective and concerns of adults’; (b) that childhood itself is a social construction, neither a natural nor a universal feature of human groups; (c) that childhood is therefore historically and crossculturally variable and can ‘never be entirely divorced from other variables such as class, gender or ethnicity’; (d) that ‘children are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live’; (e) that qualitative methods represent the most appropriate means for conducting research on children and childhood.

To this list, we would add the following points. First, that empirical research should be primary: the idea that children are competent social agents requires that researchers situate the study of those competencies in the empirical circumstances of children’s real, ordinary, everyday lives. Second, that those empirical circumstances, or ‘arenas of action’, can be both enabling and constraining in terms of children’s capacity to display social competencies. Third, that in order to understand adequately the properties of children’s social competence in the arenas in which it is situated, it is necessary to attempt to view the relevant social action ‘from within’, that is, as far as possible, to reveal the procedures by which the participants themselves organize and make sense of their activities in a given social context.

Each of these points throws up particular problematic issues for research. For instance, what methodologies are most appropriate for the aim to reveal the social organization of children’s worlds ‘from within’? Secondly, what are the most appropriate ways of conceptualizing ‘competence’ or ‘social competence’ in such research? And third, what are the best means by which to think through the relationship between children’s social competence and the arenas of action in which social agency is situated? In this chapter, our aim is to explore each of these issues in turn, and suggest some of the ways in which the chapters that follow present a particular set of responses to them.

Methodologies of Competence

Among the questions we are faced with in attempting to explicate children’s social competencies empirically is that of how the researcher gains access to the child’s perspective. This is not an issue which is confined to research on childhood. There is a long-standing tradition of interpretive or phenomenological methodology which has grappled with the problem of how the researcher can come to ‘see’ the world from the point of view of the researched. The foremost response in the sociology of childhood has been to adopt ethnographic approaches such as participant observation, interviews, and the analysis of children’s documentary accounts of their lives (James and Prout, 1990a; Waksler, 1991; Thorne, 1993; Mayall, 1994a). James and Prout (1990b, p. 5) state that ethnography ‘allows children a more direct voice in the production of sociological data than is usually possible through experimental or survey styles of research’ (though see Qvortrup et al., 1994, for an attempt to give children a voice in survey research).

Nonetheless, some of the techniques of ethnographic research are highly problematic when employed with children. For instance, to what extent is it possible for an adult researcher to ‘participate’ in children’s social worlds? Certainly, some inventive attempts have been made. Mandell (1991) advocates what she calls the ‘least-adult’ role in studying young children. Mandell outlines three types of observer role that may be adopted by ethnographers of childhood: the detached observer, a role which recognizes an absolute distinction between the social, intellectual and cultural worlds of children and adults; the marginal semi-participatory role, which does not go so far as to recognize an absolute distinction but asserts that the agebased power relation between children and adults can never be transcended; and the least-adult role which claims that ‘all aspects of adult superiority except physical differences can be cast aside, allowing the researcher entree to the children’s world as an active, fully participating member’ (p. 39).

Mandell found adopting this role in her research to be extremely difficult, although she also found that indeed it appears to be possible for an adult researcher to be accepted by children as a participant on their own terms. The insights this method allows are exquisitely demonstrated in David Goode’s phenomenologically oriented research into the experiential world of deaf-blind children (Goode, 1991). Goode describes how such children were seen as virtually feral by the medical staff who looked after them in the clinic where they lived, and were treated as being almost entirely incompetent. Yet by adopting a least-adult role with one child he was able to begin to ‘see’ the world from her perspective and to understand her apparently chaotic behaviours as highly competent strategies for managing the contingencies of that world. The leastadult role in this case involved particularly stringent demands: Goode refers to one ‘thirty-six hour period during which I remained by [Christina’s] side’ (ibid., p. 153). His aim throughout the research period was to use:

a strategy of ‘passive obedience’ in which I physically allowed her to take the lead in structuring our interaction. This proved a most beneficial (though difflcult to arrive at) stance. Once Chris knew that I was cooperative to this degree, she initiated a huge variety of activities and exchanges in her terms. (ibid., p. 156, original emphasis)

This suggests that it is possible to gain important insights into the organization of children’s social and experiential worlds by means of a particular version of participant observation. However, it should be borne in mind that the least-adult role is not to be seen as producing ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ accounts of children’s worlds. The search for authenticity has been a feature that has characterized a great deal of ethnographic research, but as Silverman (1993) argues this search is misguided. All that ethnography, and social research in general, can accomplish is to explicate what people appear to be doing and how they appear to be doing it, while bearing in mind that the researcher is an active participant in the production of research itself, and that the research process is reflexively related to its own subject matter: the social process (see Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983).

This does not invalidate ethnography. As Prout and James (1990) ask, ‘is it not possible for ethnography to make a claim to a weaker sense of authenticity in which previously unexplored or unreported aspects of childhood are made available and previously mute children empowered to speak?’ (p. 27). In the present volume, while none of the authors go so far as to use the least-adult technique, ethnographic methods inform us of a wide variety of ways in which children’s social competencies interrelate with the interactional, situational and social structural features of such settings as the family, the street, and the institutions in which some children are forced to live their lives (see Alanen, Baker, Christensen and de Montigny in this volume).

However, in their advocation of ethnography as the most suitable method for the new social studies of childhood, Prout and James (1990) explicitly contrast ethnography with survey and experimental research, as if these are the only alternatives. As many of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, other methodologies which focus closely on the organization of children’s verbal and non-verbal interactions both among themselves and with adults can reveal a depth and range of interactional competence that has so far been little remarked in the sociology of childhood. Primary among these approaches is conversation analysis (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998), a sociological approach to the study of language use which views ordinary talk as a highly organized medium of social action. The main claim of conversation analysis is that we can gain access to the ways in which participants make sense of one another’s actions, and so establish mutual and collaborative courses of social activity, by studying the construction of, and relationships between, utterances in ‘talk-in-interaction’ (Schegloff, 1982, 1990 and 1992).

There is a good deal of research in conversation analysis which is relevant to the question of how talk and other interactional activities represent resources through which child...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Situating Children’s Social Competence
• Part I Competence and Family Structures
• Part II Contexts for Discourse Competence
• Part III Competence and Institutional Knowledge
• List of Contributors