Consumption and Generational Change

The Rise of Consumer Lifestyles

Ian Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351526234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

The study of consumption in social life is growing. Moving from being a relatively unimportant part of the processes of production, distribution, and exchange, questions of how people consume and to what ends now occupy center stage. Today's capitalism is exemplified by a global arena of consumption in which distance is no obstacle to distribution and ownership. Equally, social distinctions that accompanied classically "modern" forms of consumption are now more complex and fluid than classifications of "high" and "popular" culture allow.This book addresses the rise of consumer culture and the various attempts to explain and account for it. It considers the view that a particular generational framework was formed in the post-war period and has been carried on into the early twentieth century with particular consequences for the experience of later life. The rise of individualism, of mass consumption, leisure and lifestyles have been accompanied by the democratization of social forms and for many a corrosion of community and social cohesion. The text highlights how understanding is gained from examining the generational habits that developed in tandem with the rise of mass consumption.Drawing on historical perspectives and comparative studies, the book addresses social change with reference to generation effects and conflict. Having set the scene in terms of the literature on consumption, lifestyles and generational change, the volume poses key questions in relation to the transformation of later life that are addressed in turn by the contributors. This is a key volume as we enter the second decade of a new century.

Part I

Theoretical Perspectives on Generations and Consumption

2

The Third Age: Field, Habitus, or Identity?

Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs

Introduction

Peter Laslett introduced the idea of “the third age” into social gerontology during the mid-1980s (Laslett, 1987; 1989). Since then, it has become a pivotal concept in debates concerning the social and cultural nature of later life in contemporary Western society (Gilleard and Higgs, 2000; Weiss and Bass, 2002; Biggs, 2005). It remains, however, a term open to different interpretations and any definition of the third age implies its ontology. We propose that rather than treating it as a “new stage of life,” as Laslett (1987) did, or dismissing it as a short-hand term for the well-off elderly, as Bury (1998) and Blaikie (2002) have, the third age can be better conceptualized as a cultural field (in Bourdieu’s sense of the term) shaped by later life consumption patterns, in which particular actors from particular cohorts participate more heavily than others. The nature and forms of that participation and the differing third age “lifestyles” they support extend and expand the nature and form of the field itself. This is the core premise that this chapter will explore.

In an earlier study, we have argued that attempts to define the third age by its underlying cohort or class composition are inadequate because they fail to locate such structures within a particular generational field (Gilleard and Higgs, 2002). It is the existence of a distinct generational field that makes the third age distinct. This field, we suggest, has its historical origins in the cultural transformation of the 1960s and is intimately linked to the development of mass consumer society. Here we extend this argument, which was originally framed by Mannheim’s work on “the problem of generation” (Mannheim, 1997) by linking it to Bourdieu’s concepts of “field” and “habitus” (Bourdieu, 1977; 1990).

Generational Units and Generational Fields

For Mannheim, the status of a generation is determined by the confluence of a historical period with a particular cohort, in a particular social context. This confluence creates a “community of location,” which forms the necessary but not sufficient conditions for realizing a “generational unit.” Mannheim notes that a further element is needed—participation in a “common destiny” (Mannheim, 1997: 45–47) which then and only then creates a distinct “generational style” (op. cit., 51–53). For many contemporary writers, baby boomers are just such a generational unit, formed by a community of location—namely membership of a cohort born in the 1940s whose members reached adulthood during the 1960s and who will mostly be retiring during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Their common destiny is to have grown up and grown old in conditions of relative security and increased affluence.

However, Mannheim also cautions against speaking of generations “without any further differentiation … jumbling together purely biological phenomena and others which are the product of social and cultural forces … thus arriv[ing] at a sort of sociology of chronological tables (Geschichstabellensoziologie)” (op. cit., 53). As he put it, “every new departure … has to operate in a given field which although in constant process of change is capable of description in structural terms” (op. cit., 55, italics in original). It is this last point that the analysts of the baby boom cohort/generation have tended to ignore. Representing the third age as a Mannheimian generational unit structured by birth cohort and historical location, such researchers have paid little attention to the social and cultural dynamics that operate within that “community of location.” Hence, the ascription of a cohort/generational identity to a defined population is based upon an incomplete representation of Mannheim’s conceptualization of “generation.”

Instead of fixating upon cohort analyses, practicing such Geschichstabellensoziologie, we have turned to the work of Bourdieu and his concept of the cultural field. We are not the first to seek to improve the sociological understanding of generation by integrating Mannheim’s ideas with those of Bourdieu. Edmunds and Turner suggested just such a possibility in their book, Generations, Culture and Society that was published in 2002 (Edmunds & Turner, 2002: 116). But it is one thing to suggest such integration; it is another to realize it within a coherent theoretical formulation—a goal that Edmunds and Turner did not attempt. Integrating Bourdieu’s concept of field with Mannheim’s conceptualization of “generation” provides us with an opportunity to achieve that integration, and in the process to re-conceptualize the third age.

For Bourdieu, the term cultural field is an “open concept” whose definition can exist only in relation to a particular theoretical system (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). It is not copyrighted and remains open to alternative uses within alternative theoretical systems. Linking Mannheim’s theoretical framework of generational units and generational styles to Bourdieu’s concept of a cultural field, the third age can be considered as an example of a generationally defined cultural field. It is a field defined by particular cultural practices concerning consumption and later life where particular logics of power and influence operate and determine the nature of the participants and the frameworks of these practices.

The underlying logic of the field is determined by consumption, a post-scarcity consumption that supports the search for distinction and that implicitly or explicitly rejects, denies or marginalizes “old-age.” The practices that define this field are the routines of individualized consumption, routines whose function can be defined by or which help support what Foucault has referred to as “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1988). The logic that operates within the third age is the logic of consumption and the individualization of society’s material surplus. The growth in mass access to this increasing surplus during the second half of the twentieth century helped promote ideals of personal choice and individualized lifestyle as sources of “virtue.” These ideals became dominant signifiers of “the good life” (Schulze, 1997). The subsequent evolution of mass consumer society has exercised a continuing influence upon all those who have grown up and grown old within it, creating what Lisabeth Cohen has referred to as “citizen consumers” (Cohen, 2003) whose participation in consumption has come to symbolize the virtues of choice, self-expression, autonomy, and pleasure that became emblematic of a generation during the “long sixties.” These virtues were not, of course, self-selected.

To quote Jenkins, “the existence of a field presupposes and in its functioning creates a belief on the part of participants in the legitimacy and value of the capital which is at stake in the field” (Jenkins, 1992: 85). For Bourdieu, the capital at stake is not just material (at least not in shaping its “conscious collectif”) but is equally cultural and social. Within the field marked out by the third age, the dominant form of social capital is derived from extended horizontal networks rather than vertically aligned kinships. The linkages established between friends and “partners” have come to overshadow previously valued vertical forms of social capital based upon kith and kin and the spatially secured bonds of inter-generational solidarity. This does not mean there is no interchange between the generations; there is, of course, but it has become a less salient source of social capital.

Much of the cultural capital of the third age derives from the effective use of leisure—engaging in what Ekerdt (1986) has referred to as the “busy ethic,” with its emphasis upon activity, exercise, travel, eating out, self-maintenance, and self-care. Distinction lies less in the area of work, in one’s past or present contribution to the social product and more in the area outside work—the creation of symbolically valued lifestyles. Work and leisure have become disconnected. Cultural capital flows more powerfully from the use and quality of individual leisure time than from what work is done and how money is earned. The symbolic forms of capital that are legitimated within this field are those that support an active agentic consumerism, consumption that most expresses choice, autonomy, pleasure, and self-expression. The growing opportunities for personal choice that mass consumer society enables, indeed requires, helps to maintain the continuing expansion of material and cultural capital and its overflow from use value into proliferating systems of distinction. Arenas of choice have expanded well beyond the traditional boundaries of the market and now incorporate aspects of the “life world” previously held to be the preserve of either the family or the state. Within this post-sixties mentality, it is not youth per se that is bought and sold so much as the ideologies of youthfulness, symbolized by the consumerist quartet of virtues identified above—choice, autonomy, pleasure, and self-expression.

Old age—attributed community of “the old”—forms a key boundary marking the limits of third age culture. The third age is defined by both the continuities of choice and the discontinuity of old age. Within the field is a conscious absence of any individualized old age. Old age is rejected as a collective choice because it seems to augur a return to the past. The community of old age threatens to dissolve the lifestyles of autonomous individuals, turning them into an amorphous, collective, mass grave—the burial ground of individuality and choice. Old age is culturally marginalized because those who were old and out-of-date were the others that helped a generation define itself. As the signifier of material and symbolic bankruptcy, old age is simply not a choice.

The conscious absence of old age that defines the outer boundaries of the third age is achieved less by people masking or misrepresenting their chronological age as by denying its structural power. Age is emptied of personal meaning and is treated as “nothing but a number.” The sixty-year-old contemplating blepharoplasty or botox injections, the seventy-year-old pondering the merits of vibrators, or the eighty-year-old choosing which degree course to study illustrate just some of the extreme habitus of this cultural field. More common and mundane are the many everyday actions of people over sixty; they go out shopping, book holidays, visit the library or leisure centre, e-mail friends, or get online. The practices arising from such everyday micro-choices constitute the very fabric of the third age.

Generational Habitus

Just as a generational location can be thought of as a “generational field,” so can what Mannheim termed generational style be reinterpreted as “generational habitus.” Another of Bourdieu’s “open concepts,” habitus refers to a set of mostly unconscious practices and forms of being that arise from and help shape the cultural fields in which they are co-assembled. Bourdieu refers to habitus as “history turned into nature” (Bourdieu, 1977). By this he means that lifestyles and everyday cultural practices embody the history of the field within which they emerged. Since we propose treating the third age as a cultural field emerging from the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s, the origins of a third age habitus must be sought in that period of change.

We have earlier argued that the emerging logic of twentieth-century capital fostered a belief in the importance of consumption and choice. This was first realized during the late 1950s and 1960s with the development of class cutting lifestyles and subcultures, based upon deliberately sought distinctions in dress, music, and entertainment (Hebdige, 1979). These distinctions were explicitly generational. They did not seek to reproduce class, but subvert it. The cultural undermining of the pretensions of the middle classes was paralleled by an equal rejection of the restrictiveness of traditional working-class life. Youth, whether middle or working class, turned its collective back on class culture.

The third vector of practice that helped shape the generational habitus of the third age originated in the discourse of the new social movements with their stress upon personal awareness, cultural autonomy, self-expression, and the symbolic nature of the oppression they faced. Personal choices became political choices, and national liberation movements joined with cultural liberation movements to assert the voice of autonomy and self-expression. Race, gender, sexual orientation, and (for a while) age movements united in a radical front crossing boundaries that had previously gone largely unchallenged. This politics of recognition, as Nancy Fraser has described it, was voiced more by students than by workers—young men and women whose numerical significance became a global phenomenon. For these students, and their youthful counterparts in the arts and the media, self-expression meant the freedom to reject all that was old, all that represented the old way of doing things. Colonial authorities, the political establishment, and the owners of capital symbolized the old and those who were not old, not white, not men, and not masters found common cause in expressing a wish to be heard, a wish to replace old capital with new.

The fourth vector—admittedly a much stronger influence in Europe than in the US—was the transformation of urban life. The clearances of old pre-war inner-city housing stock laid the foundations for new social housing that was designed to house, not just “young families” but families ready to engage with the new technologies of home. The flats and houses of the post war estates that were built in the fifties and sixties were designed with washing machines and tumble driers, vacuum cleaners and TV’s, electric irons, and electric cookers in mind. They were designed not to replicate pre-war standards of living, nor to reproduce prewar styles of living. The new estates that replaced or restructured the old communities of propinquity, created the conditions in which household structures themselves could change. Those aged over sixty were increasingly able to live apart from their children, just as their children were able to live apart from their parents. The generational split that was being created within the arena of fashion, music, and the new media was also being realized at the level of the individual household (Gilleard and Higgs, 2005).

Last, and lagging behind many of these social and cultural changes, work itself began to change. The transformation of working life in post-war, post-industrial Western society began as a cultural shift in attitudes toward work, a shift in perspective made possible by the general rise in living standards and the new stability provided by the post-war welfare state. Despite the continued growth in factories and factory workers, in coal mining, engineering, and shipbuilding, the centrality of the workplace was hollowed out. Migrant workers were brought in to do jobs that the host population was reluctant to do. The pre-war gendered segregation of the workplace was declining and the time spent at work was continuing to shrink. Work was no longer a homogenizing community, nor a place capable of instilling fear and discipline. Expansion in the size of the public sector workforce altered the relationships on the “shop floor.” This hollowing out of work as a dominant en-culturing force helped cre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I: Theoretical Perspectives on Generations and Consumption
• Part II: Historical Dimensions of Generation and Consumption
• Part III: International Comparisons of Changes in Consumption Patterns across Generations
• About the Contributors
• Index