Targeted as the ‘grey consumer’, people retiring now participated in the creation of the post-war consumer culture. These consumers have grown older but have not stopped consuming.
Based on extensive analysis over two years, this unique book examines the engagement of older people with consumer society in Britain since the 1960s. It charts the changes in the experience of later life in the UK over the last 50 years, the rise of the ‘individualised consumer citizen’ and what this means for health and social policies.
The book will appeal to students, lecturers, researchers and policy analysts. It will provide material for teaching on undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses in sociology, social policy and social gerontology. It will also have considerable appeal to private industry engaged with older consumers as well as to voluntary and non-governmental organisations addressing ageing in Britain.
Later life in consumer society 49 FIVE Later life in consumer society introduction As we have seen in Chapters One and Two, the closing decades of the 20th century saw significant social changes in the nature of later life, some of which reflect the emergence of ‘consumer societies’ in the UK and elsewhere. The uneven nature of retirement, as well as the relative affluence of many retired people and the poverty of others, influence the experience and patterns of consumption in later life. Several key writers have pointed out how social identities are
Key messages Environmental ethics understood as general understandings are situated and contextualised in everyday life, experience and place. Therefore they are not a universal understanding of environmental ethics. Environmental ethics can take part in challenging and questioning the contemporary cultural formations concerning consumption and provision, and be part of forming a cultural critique. Strong environmental ethics are to a high degree connected to people’s ability to imagine (consumer) society and everyday life differently, and they can take
– including the acquisition, use and disposal of goods and services – in everyday life, across scales from the household through broader socio-material arrangements to the conditioning effects of consumer society. We draw inspiration from Bente Halkier’s insistence on combining insights from studies of direct political and ethical action and the mundane routine activities of the everyday ( Halkier, 2022 ). The context of Norway allows us to study sustainability negotiations in one of the highest consuming societies in the world (see Wethal and Hansen, 2023 ), but where
13 TWO Intimacy and ageing in late modernity In this chapter we will present different theoretical perspectives that we will use to discuss the structural preconditions for late-life intimacy in contemporary Western societies. In the chapter we discuss the rise of consumer society as a context for extending the lifestyles of mid-life into later life and the concurrent emergence of the third age as a historically new life phase of self-realisation. We also discuss the transformation of intimacy in the second half of the 20th century and how this
‘neutral’ concept for understanding the interplay between history and biography than terms such as generation. He defined cohort as ‘that aggregate of individuals who experienced the same event within the same time interval … [where typically] the defining event has been birth’ (Ryder, 1997, p 68). For Ryder, cohort represents ‘a proxy measure for what are in fact traits, dispositions and behaviours and … the social relationships in which [they] are Ageing in a consumer society 30 embedded, that actually carry the “effect” and provide theoretically meaningful
Conclusion 113 NINE conclusion introduction In this book we have traced a growing engagement with consumer society among the older age groups over the last 40 years of the 20th century. While this engagement has been both varied and uneven, the overall trend has been one of increasing ownership of and expenditure on key consumer goods during this period (from a low baseline). These changes in the consumption patterns of the older population reflect other deep and lasting transformations in British society that have left their mark on the landscape of
life today are those who grew up in the midst of these transformations, and, perhaps more crucially, participated in their development. Earlier cohorts had entered old age with a very different (and much more limited) experience of affluence and consumer choice. Drawing on chronologies of social change, this chapter provides a background for researching the extent to which consumption is now a part of later life. It begins by focusing on the problem of studying later life in the context of rapid social change. The Ageing in a consumer society 2 chapter then
In the context of widespread precarity and ongoing crises, it is no surprise ruins have captured much attention in recent years. This book is about a new kind of space, one that is deeply troubling for consumer society: the retail ruin.
Jacob C. Miller bridges human geography, archaeology and critical urban studies to offer a starting point for conceptualizing retail ruins. Drawing on fieldnotes and photographs, Miller crafts a hauntological approach informed by the theories of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to more recent thinking on assemblage, spectacle and the politics of urban space.
ARTICLE Post-capitalism, post-growth, post-consumerism? Eco-political hopes beyond sustainability Ingolfur Blühdorn Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria ABSTRACT As a road map for a structural transformation of socially and ecologically self-destructive consumer societies, the paradigm of sustainability is increasingly regarded as a spent force. Yet, its exhaustion seems to coincide with the rebirth of several ideas reminiscent of earlier, more radical currents of eco-political thought
