Lifestyle

The idea of lifestyle has a long history that is closely associated with consumption practices and consumer culture. It refers to the ways in which people express their identities through the practices that they are engaged in, notably outside of the area of work and typically within the arena of consumption. In particular, it is a term often associated with matters of how people communicate their tastes through their individual everyday interests and practices.

While there was a surge of interest in the question of lifestyle in the 1990s within sociological and cultural studies, styles of life sometimes associated with social class position were an important issue for early sociological writers, such as Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, at the end of the nineteenth century. In particular, lifestyle seemed a way of addressing not just issues of class but also of status, which had become less certain at that time because of rapid social change with the modernization of Western societies. For Veblen, the newly monied rising capitalist class, or leisure class, of the late-nineteenth century in America, unable to draw on aristocratic tradition and rank to assert their emerging status within society, used the conspicuous display of consumer goods to highlight their wealth and emerging prominent social position. Weber, too, in an essay called “Class, Status, Party” sought to show how each of these three dimensions of social life determined a person's position within society and his or her access to life chances and social power. Although often closely associated, Weber argued that class and status were not always directly connected. Class, for Weber, is established by a person's economic position within the capitalist marketplace while status and status groups relate to more cultural factors associated with questions of honor and position within a community. For example, a person can have a high and powerful class position but belong to a weak status group or vice versa. While [Page 861]this analysis does not address the issue of lifestyle directly, the suggestion is that it will be shaped not just by class position but also through the relationship between the social class and status group that a person belongs to.

Simmel's analysis of what he called styles of life is altogether more detailed and explicit on the question of lifestyle, and it forms the lengthy final chapter of his most important book from 1900, The Philosophy of Money. There, Simmel argues that money within a capitalist society produces a culture in which separate spheres of life develop around which objective lifestyles are formed that people identify with. Styles of life are an expression of individual creative potential that people create from their experiences—how we express who we are and make the world meaningful to ourselves and others—those styles of living become objectified as recognizable lifestyles within a money economy and the rationalizing culture it promotes. Linked to his theory of objective culture as a source of alienation from the vitality of living creative practices, Simmel suggests that lifestyles are the outcomes of a rationalized capitalist culture that lead to the fragmentation of experience in modern society.

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