Corporate representations of the child worker: Swedish company websites offering sales opportunities to schoolchildren

Abstract

The study explores how companies specialised in a schoolchild work force represent children’s work and the working child on their official websites. The material is four websites from Swedish companies explicitly offering schoolchildren under 13 opportunities to sell products on commission in order to raise money for school trips. The analysis reveals there is an almost total visual absence of children performing work. Instead focus is placed on joy and on learning skills for the future. Caring adults are highly involved in the work that is described as safe and easy. Any possible negative connotations to exploited child labourers are avoided. These findings contribute to our understanding of how complex and contradictory the image of children is in prosperous societies where children do not have to work for survival, but yet do work.

Keywords:

• Representations of children
• visual analysis
• children’s work
• child labour
• children’s value
• Sweden
• middle school
• school trip
• websites
• consumption

Notes

1. Eliminated from consideration were company websites lacking information regarding target ages, information on the working process or having a dominant focus on non-school groups, such as sports clubs.

2. Parts of the websites target groups other than school classes and some offer other services. This analysis focuses only on parts of the websites giving specific work-for funding information, supported with relevant information regarding the school year/age of the targeted children.