Suchergebnisse

Purpose
– This study aims to examine aspects of children's sustainability socialization. Many studies examine children's attitudes to sustainability. However, few studies build an understanding of how, where and when children are socialized to sustainability.


Design/methodology/approach
– Interviews with 30 children explore the socializing agents (who), learning situations (where), learning processes (how) and learning effects (what). The study also delineates and compares the environmental, self and social dimensions of sustainability.


Findings
– Socialization to environmental sustainability is highly structured and formal, and children rarely go beyond the knowledge and actions they are taught. Socialization to the self dimension combines formal and informal mechanisms with a greater propensity for elaboration and generalization. Meanwhile, socialization to societal sustainability involves unstructured and individualized processes and outcomes.


Research limitations/implications
– This is an exploratory study. Future research could develop scales to measure children's sustainability dispositions and actions. Researchers could then use such scales to examine the sustainability socialization of children from other demographic and cultural groups.


Practical implications
– The findings indicate that children are often positively disposed towards sustainability but lack the knowledge and direction needed to exercise this desire. Thus, marketers should more clearly articulate how their product solves a sustainability problem.


Social implications
– This paper could inform sustainability education policy. It has practical applications in the area of sustainability curriculum design in schools.


Originality/value
– Being the first study that explores children's socialization to three dimensions of sustainability, this paper provides a unique contribution to consumer behaviour theory and would be of interest to academics, practitioners and social marketers.

The environmental consumer-citizen has become a global master narrative that is the outcome of environmental discourse ( Darier, 1999 ; Harper, 2001 ). In this article, we examine a particular strand of the environmental citizen identity in the context of environmental and consumption consciousness. Through interviews with Australian children about themselves, their consumption, and their links to local and larger global communities, we uncover an adapted strand of this narrative. A local transformation of the master narrative on environmental citizenship is seen in the national identity narrative of the 'ethno-consumer'. This identity narrative is one of the 'good' green Australian consumer-citizen constructed in relation to regional political and economic discourses. We uncover how this strand of environmental consciousness is used as identity capital in children's narratives of self and nation (Hage, 1998). We suggest that there exist several levels of identity narratives. In this particular context, the national identity narrative appears to adapt and accommodate, but also dominate, the global master narrative for these children.