Life Course

Life course refers to the identifiable stages of transition that individuals and households typically pass through, such as childhood, youth, parenthood, middle age, and retirement. It is, therefore, a term used to relate social structures, institutions, and history to particular changes and trajectories in individuals and families over time. Its importance to consumer culture rests on the identification of typical patterns (and demand) for consumption activities across life-course stages and in terms of how consumer culture impacts on, and even fragments, those stages. Its contemporary usage highlights the importance of life experience for understanding social change and the contingency and variation of individual or family transitions as opposed to a series of fixed, sequential stages. This disembarks from the term's original use by sociologist Leonard Cain in “Life Course and Social Structure” (in Handbook of Modern Sociology, edited by R. E. L. Faris, 1964) to refer to how social status changes as a function of age. The change in focus coincided with a drop in the popularity of life cycle, often used interchangeably with life course but more commonly emphasizing individual development, as in psychologist Erik Erikson's eight stages in Identity and the Life Cycle (1959/1980), or change in nuclear family structures, as first established by demographer Paul Glick's seven-stage “Family Life Cycle” (1947). The concept of life cycle, borrowed from the natural sciences, emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in social scientific debates and continues to be used in economics and in the study of organizations (O'Rand and Krecker 1990).

The life-course perspective is mainly used to discuss individual aging processes and the family, although it has some claims as a research paradigm in its own right for understanding social change (Heinz, Huinink, and Weymann 2009). The work of Glen Elder, following his book Children of the Great Depression (1978), has been central in developing and conceptualizing the term. The main principles of the term are outlined by Vern Bengtson, Glen H. Elder, and Norella M. Putney as the cohort interconnectedness of lives often referred to as generations, the importance of historical context in shaping individual trajectories, individual- or family-based transitions relative to these contexts, interconnectedness between life-course stages themselves, and the recognition of people's own agency in their construction of their lives.

Large-scale demographic changes, such as the aging of most advanced industrial societies, have consolidated life course as a field of social scientific study, particularly as the fragmentation of work rhythms and the rise of consumer culture have been highlighted as de-standardizing the stages it is seen to consist of. For example, Zygmunt Bauman (1990) refers to the emergence of “nomadic” identities across the life course as consumer cultures make available a range of consumption styles, irrespective of age, that people can “wander” between, as opposed to conventional constraints related to stage in the life course. According to Andrew Blaikie, such processes lead to a blurring of life-stage boundaries. In other words, the emerging range of consumption styles and lifestyles generate increasingly individualized trajectories, what Jenny Hockey and Allison James describe as being a “pattern of consumerism which points towards self-generated life-course transitions” (2003, 194). Studies of popular culture, however, continue to focus on particular age brackets. These include particular interest in the consumption of young people and, since the 1980s, the “new old” or “third agers”: middle-aged retirees with the material affluence to continue to engage with consumer culture (Laslett 1989).

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