Entitlements, Payments, Enterprise: framing pocket money in teenage girls' consumption practices

Harris, Gaby ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1827-8767 (2025) Entitlements, Payments, Enterprise: framing pocket money in teenage girls' consumption practices. Journal of Consumer Culture, 25 (3). pp. 279-295. ISSN 1469-5405

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Abstract

Despite the widespread provisioning of pocket money across households, young people’s uses and negotiations of money are inadequately addressed by studies of consumption. This reflects a broader neglect of the economic underpinnings in studies of consumer culture. In this article I draw on qualitative research with girls aged 15-17 to demonstrate how different forms of payments and entitlements, and (parental) regulations and conditions are negotiated in girls money and consumption practices. Crucially, I evidence the ways in which girls work to achieve and assert their autonomy in consumption. In doing so, I offer novel insights into the active means through which girls negotiate forms of pocket money to facilitate consumption. I extend and develop Zelizer’s (2017) work on domestic money to incorporate young people’s negotiations of households and markets, and thus challenge the limitations of excluding young people from studies of money and consumption. Framing pocket money in teenage girls’ consumption practices allows us to pay due attention to the economic and social relationships that underpin practice and illuminates how practices involve class and moral valuations.