The social ordering of belonging: Children’s perspectives on bullying

• Social norms were part of children’s perspectives of what produces bullying.
• Bullying were conceptualised as a process of socially ordering of belonging.
• Including positioning’s of inclusion/exclusion and social dominance/subordination.
• Membership based on social hierarchies, peer activities, and being new or old in the group evolved.
• Identifying three conditions producing bullying: social hierarchical, peer ordering and new member ordering.

In this article we investigate children’s perspectives on bullying, by listening to how they themselves discuss and make sense of how and why bullying emerge and how this can be understood from a symbolic interactionist perspective. Forty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with Swedish schoolchildren from fourth- to seventh grade and analysed with constructivist grounded theory. Our findings suggest that social ordering of belonging appeared to be a core process of children’s’ narratives of what produces bullying. Social ordering of belonging refers to a process in which children positioned themselves and others in terms of social inclusion/exclusion and social dominance/subordination and addressed three sub categories producing bullying: (a) social hierarchical ordering, (b) peer ordering, and (c) new member ordering.