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Buy the Book: Social Reproduction and the Middle-Class Family Outing to the Big-Box Bookstore Syracuse University SURFACE Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses School of Education 2011 Buy the Book: Social Reproduction and the Middle-Class Family Outing to the Big-Box Bookstore Benette Whitmore Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/cfe_etd Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Whitmore, Benette, "Buy the Book: Social Reproduction and the Middle-Class Family Outing to the Big-Box Bookstore" (2011). Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses. 48. https://surface.syr.edu/cfe_etd/48 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Education at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT This dissertation is a qualitative ethnography of a big-box bookstore that considers the relationship between book consumption, status, and social reproduction. The study draws from five years of fieldwork starting with three years of participant observation at 45 sessions of the weekly Story Time, where I observed 297 mothers or caregivers and 411 children. In the first three years of this research I also conducted informal interviews with 48 families at the store. Also in this phase of the study I conducted in-depth interviews at the store with nine bookstore workers and three managers. In the last two years of the study, drawing from data collected from participant observation and informal interviews, I conducted in-depth interviews and follow-up interviews with six families. The project analyzes what informants see as the bookstore’s role as an educative site, a site of consumption, and a site of leisure work. The term “leisure work” reflects how middle-class parents structure family time at the bookstore for the purpose of pleasure associated with pursuing both collective and individualized and interests, and for the education of their children. The big-box bookstore is an informal educative site, where children learn literacies associated with reading, spending money, and socializing. Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field; social, cultural, and economic capital; and social reproduction provide a theoretical framework for interpreting these perspectives to see how ideas around books come from both subjective and objective influences that are naturalized in ways that reproduce middle-class culture. The dissertation considers how workers, parents, and children’s relationships with books inform the habitus, how informants see books as signs of distinction, and how literacy and books become forms of cultural capital. These relationships affect the processes of identity formation and social reproduction. This project argues that, for workers and middle-class families, book consumption at the big-box bookstore is informed by middle-class desire as interpreted through a systemic corporate structure and fueled by dispositions around middle-class acts of consumption. Workers perform low-status, low-wage jobs that they enjoy for the most part. They struggle for middle-class status when their work is disrespected or they cannot exercise their expertise due to the store’s corporate structure. At the same time they sometimes misrecognize their roles because of the status they associate with book work. These dispositions and experiences reproduce middle-class orientations, as they influence meaning around cultural capital and books, and as they reflect and inform what represents status for workers, parents, and children in this study. ! BUY THE BOOK: SOCIAL REPRODUCTION and the MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY OUTING TO THE BIG-BOX BOOKSTORE By Benette Whitmore B.A. Queen's University, 1977 M.A. Syracuse University, 1980 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Foundations of Education in the Graduate School of Syracuse University May 2011 Copyright 2011 Benette Whitmore All Rights Reserved ! TABLE of CONTENTS ! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.........................................................................................................v Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION............................................................................................ 1 Bourdieu as a Theoretical Frame (Habitus, Field, Capital, Misrecognition, Social Reproduction) ................3 Limitations of Bourdieu’s Work ................................................................................................................12 Considering Class.........................................................................................................................................14 Framing Family and Family Time..............................................................................................................15 Defining Literacy..........................................................................................................................................18 The Settings and Participants.....................................................................................................................19 Outline of the Chapters (Workers, Parents, Children) ................................................................................21 ! Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW................................................................................ 24 Social Reproduction and Consumption....................................................................................................24 Social Reproduction and Literacy..............................................................................................................30 Social Reproduction and Family Time......................................................................................................37 Bourdieusian Ethnographies ......................................................................................................................42 ! Chapter 3: METHODS & PROCEDURES ...................................................................... 64 Methods and Methodology.........................................................................................................................66 (A). Background on the Research ............................................................................................................ 70 (Ai). Participant Observation ................................................................................... 71 (Aii). Worker Interviews .......................................................................................... 72 (Aiii). Family Interviews .......................................................................................... 74 (B). Interviews: What Do Workers, Kids, and Parents Have to Say? ..................................................... 77 (Bi). Reading Between the Lines: Informants’ Discourse around Books ..................... 79 ! ! (C). Participant Observation: What Can We Learn from Story Time? ................................................... 79 Reading the Researcher: My Place in this Work......................................................................................81 (i). How My Childhood Informs My Research....................................................................................... 82 (ii). How Motherhood Informs My Research........................................................................................... 83 (ii). How My Education Informs My Research....................................................................................... 83 Struggles of the Participant-Observer.......................................................................................................85 Why Children? ..............................................................................................................................................86 Data Coding and Analysis...........................................................................................................................87 Limitations of the Study..............................................................................................................................90 The Informants.............................................................................................................................................93 Closing the Book..........................................................................................................................................99 Chapter 4: NEGOTIATING MIDDLE-CLASS STATUS AROUND BOOK WORK ...101 Negotiating Status Inside Owl Books’ Corporate Structure ...............................................................102 Negotiating Status through a Relationship to Books ...........................................................................113 Negotiating Status through Relationships with Co-Workers & Customers .....................................122 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................143 Chapter 5: LEISURE WORK: PARENTS, PLEASURE, & INFORMAL EDUCATION at the BOOKSTORE......................................................................................146 Parents as Educators..................................................................................................................................148 Parents and Lessons about Money..........................................................................................................174
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