| dc.description.abstract | With the development of economy, human consumption has become necessary in everyday life. Stationery, particularly for school children, is now a daily necessity to their life and their work—learning. The demand of stationery, nevertheless, changes as they grow. What is noteworthy is that children’s consumer behaviors are not natural. The purpose of this thesis is to explore their learning trajectory of becoming a customer by stationery consumption.
This thesis is theoretically framed with the circuit of culture. Starting from the component of consumption, the thesis intends to explore how consumption, identity, representation, regulation and production are interconnected. Children’s stationery consumption with different ages and genders are further analyzed to examine the issues of 1) how peer identity and gender identity are shaped by stationery consumption, 2) how the relationship between product symbols and stereotypes has an influence on children’s consumption of stationery, 3) how parents achieve the empowerment, take the arbitration, and arrange the distribution according to different regulations of consumption, 4) what school regulations of consumption of stationery are made to pupils, and 5) how stationery vendors manage their customers.
Ethnography was applied in this thesis. Observations were taken in different market settings. Teachers, parents and vendors were interviewed. Documents were collected.
And, all of the data are triangulated.
The result shows that parents play a quite vital role in children’s stationery consumption. They guide children towards the correct behaviors in the market, instruct children the necessity of trying out and the function of stationery, and explain the symbolic meaning. Meanwhile, parents might deliver their cultural capital and gender stereotype. Parents might need to solve the problem of resource distribution by taking arbitration and arranging distribution among their children in the consumption
process. The result also reveals that the decision-making power changes with the increase of children’s ages. The transfer of decision-making power on product appearance to junior high schoolers results from parents’ unfamiliarity of campus life and stationery. Pupils eventually become independent consumers after such a long-term learning experience of consumption. | en_US |