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RETHINKING THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD 195

forms of individualization, looking at the The social-structural problem is that the
expansion of children’s citizenship rights, the resources with which children are meant to
shifting of the boundaries between public and assemble their personalities and identities – con-
private life, the changing relations between cepts of self and other, difference, normality,
generations (the ‘generational order’). What is beauty and attractiveness, desirability, charm,
perhaps most important for the sociology of etc. – are at the same time subjected to
childhood is that one of the central conceptual processes of standardization, formation, and
concerns which has dominated the field – organization; so that the most important ques-
coming to see children as competent social tion facing the sociology of childhood becomes
actors – can itself be seen, following Beck’s less ‘are children competent social actors?’ and
analysis, as a social product, of what he refers more ‘on what basis do children act, with what
to as ‘second modernity’. His critique of the resources at their disposal?’; ‘what constitutes
concept of socialization, paralleling that of their supposed “freedom” of action?’ (O’Neill,
childhood sociology, is that ‘young people no 1994).
longer become individualized. They individu- The same may also be true of the other con-
alize themselves. ‘Biographization’ of youth ceptual focus of the sociology of childhood,
means becoming active, struggling, and the identification of childhood as a distinct
designing one’s own life’, so that ‘socialization social sphere with a logic and dynamics of its
is now only possible as self-socialization’ own; this too is a product of particular social
(Beck, 1997: 163). His analysis of the increas- transformations rather than simply a libera-
ing importance of the ‘self-fashioning’ of tion from outdated conceptual restrictions.
childhood and youth ends with the following The reasons for their being ‘outdated’ go
diagnosis: beyond the perceptiveness of a new genera-
The different, often extremely disparate sources of tion of sociologists; they also include a con-
meaning and experience for young people: tinuing intensification of the requirements of
school, television, advertising, the values and sym-
bols of the chosen peer group, the strict perform- adult citizenship, which now requires ‘deeper
ance standards of the world of work, the traffic roots’ in the individual’s biography, such as
jungle (their own car!), not forgetting the well- earlier and more nuanced training for the
meaning precepts of parents, all these force demands of individual identity in the contem-
young people to conceive of and organize them- porary world. In a sense Cody’s demand in The
selves as tinkerers of their own personalities.
(Beck, 1997: 163–4) West Wing for the ‘right’to participate in politics
can be understood as driven by a broader
This means that what is meant to be a social requirement that Cody begin his self-
conceptual advance on earlier sociological con- construction as a political subject earlier, so as
ceptions of childhood is well and truly bound up to increase his flexibility and responsiveness
with the very processes of social transformation to the competitive dynamics of his future
which affect the contemporary childhood that it political subjectivity.
is aiming to describe. Rather than simply having
to assert their status as actors in the face of a
society, and a social science, which arrogantly
refuses to acknowledge it, with only valiant FUTURE DIRECTIONS: AN
‘new’ sociologists of childhood as allies; in INTEGRATED THEORETICAL
many respects children today are increasingly AND RESEARCH AGENDA IN
both socially required to be ‘competent social SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF
actors’, and finding their agency hedged CHILDHOOD
in more and more by shifting forms of regula-
tion and governance (Bell, 1993; Hultqvist We would like to conclude with some
and Dahlberg, 2001; McGillivray, 1997; thoughts on possibilities for the restructuring
Prout, 2000; more generally, Rose, 1999). of theory and research in the sociology of