ABSTRACT

Lifestyles and Social Classes

CRIC Discussion Paper No. 9

Mark Tomlinson

The paper attempts to show using data on health and lifestyles that it is possible to identify distinct niches of behaviour in British society in the 1980s and 1990s. Contrary to many current theories of consumption and lifestyle, however, the paper also shows that traditional notions such as social class, gender etc. are still highly relevant to a discussion of lifestyle and consumer behaviour and may even be better determinants. The ‘post-traditional’ groups and behaviours postulated by certain ‘post-Fordist’ thinkers are no more powerful than the ‘traditional’, although the reasons why this is so remain to be explained.

The discussion is loosely framed around two opposed views of consumption and lifestyle. The Bourdieu view that social class is a major determinant of lifestyle versus the more recent views of Lash and Urry, Giddens or Beck. That is that consumption is now more driven by post-traditional forms of life that have effectively flattened the old social structures. However, there is little evidence of this latter process taking place with the data used here.

The analysis uses categorical data techniques on the 1985 Health and Lifestyles survey and 1992 follow-up survey to first show the clustering of behavioural patterns, and second to show that these clusterings tend to be strongly associated with traditional social categories such as class and gender.

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