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Money matters. Constructing the consumer subject through choice of education and career path

Author(s): Elisabeth Hovdhaugen, Kaja Reegård

Friday 16  |   11:20-11:40

Room: TP43

Session: Lifestyles, consumption, and inequality

Lifestyles and consumption are critical to understand the mechanisms through which inequality is sustained and promoted. There is thus a great deal of sociological literature and scholarly debate on the ways we belong, see, and present ourselves to (certain segments of the) world through consumption and lifestyles. However, we know less of the mechanisms through which narratives of future lifestyles, consumption patterns and perspective on money shape and reinforce social inequalities. The paper combines insights derived from the sociology of consumption with sociology of youth and education to analyze the importance young people attach to money, and which lifestyle futures they want to achieve, perceiving education as a mean to reach this end. The analyses are based on a rich qualitative data set, comprised of interviews and 62 texts on educational choices authored by 18-year-olds taking an academic programme in two upper secondary schools in the biggest cities in Norway. The schools are typically characterized by students of medium to low socio-economic background, and median grades. We find that money matters to the students beyond achieving financial independence from their parents. Rather, the young interviewees, particularly the men, explicitly expressed the wish to complete an education to get a high-paid job which enables them to consume material products, e.g., sports cars as an object signifier, conveying a certain lifestyle. Their plans for higher education were vague, however, typically within the fields of economics, finance, IT, and marketing. Recent views in the literature associated with writers such as Lash and Urry, Giddens, or Beck, postulates that consumption is now more likely to be driven by post-traditional flattening of social structures. The paper, however, discusses in Bordieuan terms how the findings of materialism are intertwined with traditional social categories such as gender, class and ethnicity.