Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-pkt8n Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-31T16:55:25.406Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Consumption and Identity in Later Life: Toward a Cultural Gerontology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Chris Gilleard
Chris Gilleard
Affiliation:
Department of Geriatric Medicine, St George's Hospital Medical School, Tooting, London SW17 0RE, U.K.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper considers the role of contemporary consumer culture in helping older people re-fashion their own identity in later life. As a result of the expanding role played by consumption in modern mass societies, adult identities now are being denned as much by how people spend their time and money as by the goods and services they can produce. An increasing number of retired people are able to participate in this consumer culture, and in doing so are creating new possibilities of being ‘old’. The contemporary period, whether deemed ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity, seems to present a growing challenge to the dominance of structures of age, class and gender in defining the nature of our personal identity. There is more emphasis upon the exercise of choice and agency across all periods of the lifespan. The means by which this process is enacted in the lives of pre- and post-retired people should become central to a new, culturally focused social gerontology.

Keywords

Consumer culturepersonal identityold age.
Type
Forum
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , July 1996 , pp. 489 - 498
Copyright
Copyright Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baudrillard, J. 1988. Consumer society. In Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Polity Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Bauman, Z. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals. Polity Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Bocock, R. 1993. Consumption. Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Chaitow, L. 1992. Natural Life Extension: Practical and proven strategies for youthful long life. Thorson, London.Google Scholar
Cook, F. L. and Settersen, R. A. 1995. Expenditure patterns by age and income among mature adults: does age matter? The Gerontologist, 35: 10–22.Google Scholar
Cowgill, D. O. 1986. Aging around the World. Wadsworth Publishing, Belmont, California.Google Scholar
Cowgill, D. O. and Holmes, L. D. 1972. Aging and Modernization. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York.Google Scholar
Estes, C. 1979,. The Ageing Enterprise. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Featherstone, M. 1983. Consumer culture: an introduction. Theory, Culture and Society, 1 (3): 4–9.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 3, Care of the Self.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. 1988. Technologies of the self. In (eds) Martin, L. H., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P. H.Technologies of the Self.Google Scholar
Freud, S. 1930. Civilisation and its Discontents. Hogarth, London.Google Scholar
Friedan, B. 1993. The Fountain of Age. Vintage, London.Google Scholar
Gelb, B. D. 1982. Discovering the 65+ consumer. Business Horizons, 05/06, 42–6.Google Scholar
Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Gomez, J. 1993. Sixty something. Thorson, London.Google Scholar
Gonyea, J. G. 1994. Making gender visible in public policy. In (ed) Thompson, E. H.Older Men's Lives. Sage Publications, London.Google Scholar
Habermas, J. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.Google Scholar
Habermas, J. 1989. The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. 2 Polity Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Harris, R. J. 1986. Recent trends in the relative economic status of older adults. Journal of Gerontology, 41: 401–7.Google Scholar
Hurd, M. D. 1989. The economic status of the elderly. Science, 244: 659–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, London.Google Scholar
Johnson, P. 1992. The Carnegie Inquiry into the Third Age Research Paper No. 2, Income: Pensions, Earnings and Savings in the Third Age. Carnegie UK Trust, Dunfermline.Google Scholar
Jong, E. 1994. Fear of Fifty. Chatto and Windus, London.Google Scholar
Kaiser, M. A. and Chawla, S. 1993. Productive but not empowered in developing countries. Ageing International, 37–42.Google Scholar
Laslett, P. 1989. A Fresh Map of Life: The emergence of the Third Age. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.Google Scholar
Lunt, P. K. and Livingston, S. M. 1992. Mass Consumption and Personal Identity: Everyday Economic Experience. Open University Press, Buckingham.Google Scholar
Macnab, F. 1994. The 30 Vital Tears. Wiley and Sons, Chichester.Google Scholar
McCracken, G. 1987. Culture and consumption among the elderly: three research objectives in an emerging field. Ageing and Society, 7: 203–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minois, G. 1989. The History of Old Age. Polity Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Neugarten, B. 1979. Time, age and the life cycle. American Journal of Psychiatry, 136: 887–94.Google Scholar
Neugarten, B. and Hall, E. 1980. Acting one's age: new rules for old. Psychology Today, 04: 8–15.Google Scholar
Rowe, D. 1994. Time on our Side. Harper Collins, London.Google Scholar
Schiffman, L. G. and Sherman, E. 1991. Value orientations of new age elderly: the coming of an ageless market. Journal of Business Research, 22: 187–94.Google Scholar
Touraine, A. 1995. Critique of Modernity. Blackwell, Oxford.Google Scholar
Townsend, P. 1981. The structured dependency of the elderly: a creation of social policy in the twentieth century. Ageing and Society, 1: 5–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, A. 1980. The social creation of poverty and dependency in old age. Journal of Social Policy, 9: 49–75.Google Scholar