Local, National and International Constructions of Social and Economic Worlds

Abstract

In this article we draw together several recent debates which have a bearing on the development of children's socio-economic understanding. Firstly, socialisation: we indicate the problem of defining the development of children's understanding as the progressive disembedment of one area of child's thought from another (e.g. social from economic understanding). We provide examples of how and why socio-economic knowledge has to remain undifferentiated in order for people to carry on with daily life. Secondly, we want to suggest that Western, ideal views of what is meant by ‘the social’ and ‘the economic’ have become enshrined at international and national levels of policy-making. This has had a profound effect on local social life and particularly on how people understand their transactions with one another. We begin by outlining problems concerning socialisation and introduce the model of discourse translation to examine connections between social worlds. American and Indonesian ethnographic material is reviewed examining the ‘embeddedness' of socio-economic thought; the latter additionally draws attention to the effects of international and national discourses on local social and economic understanding.