Lifestyle and Social Class

Using data on health and lifestyles the paper attempts to show 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, it also shows that traditional notions such as social class and gender 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. Bourdieu argues that social classes possess varying levels of different types of capital (social, economic, and cultural) and that these are a major determinant of lifestyle and this will be represented in patterns of eating or varieties of leisure activities. A more recent view, associated with writers such as Lash and Urry, Giddens, or Beck, postulates that consumption is now more likely to be driven by post‐traditional forms of life relating to the fact that old social structures have effectively been flattened. The data find more support for the first of these views. 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 secondly to show that these clusterings tend to be strongly associated with traditional social categories such as class and gender.