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1. Entry for Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture
Rebecca Leach
Age and Ageing
Until relatively recently, the older consumer has been almost invisible to the wider world. In Western
countries, older people have typically been poorer than the rest of the population and they have been
much less engaged in the consumer revolutions of the 20th
Century. As a consequence, they have often
been ignored by marketers also; or at least placed into categories which simply define them as old, poor
and uninterested in consuming. The social and cultural studies of consumer culture that have emerged
over the last few decades have also neglected engaging with age except in two key areas: the concern
over children’s consumption and the dominance of studies of youth subcultural consumption. Old age,
however, has been virtually absent, in terms of volume of work, as a relevant area of study in the
proliferation of work on consumer cultures. Similarly, the human sciences which address ageing have
also neglected the notion of consumption as relevant for understanding older people’s experiences, for
a number of reasons some of which are discussed below – including implicit ageism in society as a
whole, explicit ageism within disciplinary approaches, gerontology’s resistance to engaging with
cultures of consumption until relatively recently. However, this appears to be changing, as generation
and age work alongside broader social changes to bring new experiences of old age into view, and as
more complex models of social life impact upon policy-focused work on ageing. This entry explores
the patterning of consumption in later life, the challenges raised by the rethinking of old age and the
implications that generational change are having on our model of what it is to be an older consumer,
and – in turn – what impact older people are having on models of consumption.
The significance of Age to Consumer Culture
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2. We might argue that age – or rather ‘old age’ – is a modern social question. Although older people
have always formed part of society, the improvements in mortality and life expectancy – and crucially,
healthy life expectancy – in the 20th
Century in Western nations have led to greater survival rates into
older and older ages. On the whole, in richer countries, people are living longer and they are living into
later life in larger numbers, and with greater levels of health and fitness than ever before. Whereas in
the 1950s, only around 8 per cent of the global population was over 60, in 2000 it was 10 per cent and
by 2050 it is projected to reach over 20 per cent, comprising 2 billion older people (Harper, 2006). In
addition, however, there is also a proportionately higher growth in the ‘oldest old’ – those who live
longer than their 80s, but who often also need support and care in later life. Harper suggests that this
age group is the fastest of all, with annual growth of 3.9% (2006, 9). Demographers suggest the
‘pyramid’ shape of population pyramids will gradually spread into more of a rectangle, as larger
numbers of people live longer, until sharply tapering off at a point closer to the age of 100. Although
the growth in life expectancy is not quite as marked in developing countries, there has nevertheless
been a general increase with some exceptions (eg in Eastern Europe), and although the speed of change
is slower than in developed countries, the ageing population will be proportionately larger and arguably
a greater social ‘problem’ than in developed countries because of less developed economic well-being.
While in the West, older people can (mostly) look forward to being wealthier and healthier than
previous cohorts and therefore able to ‘use’ consumption as a social strategy, in the developing
countries this will be very different.
[This would be a good opportunity to display some population pyramids to show the global trends, if
you are able to achieve permissions to do so – do you want me to supply these specifically? There are
some good examples in Harper’s book or various national statistics organisations can supply them. I
would suggest some comparative figures showing age, birth rate and mortality pyramids, perhaps
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3. taking the US, UK, another W European country and a developing country to compare. Please let me
know if you want me to find them – I wasn’t clear from earlier suggestions…]
On its own, this demographic change requires a re-thinking of the place of ageing in consumer culture
– since a larger ageing population by default spends more money, uses more services and in different
ways than previously. In policy circles, and in the eyes of the public, how to deal with the ‘bulges’ of
demographic change causes some social and political concern, for example on the issue of ‘dependency
ratios’ (the ratio of working to non-working citizens, in order to maintain taxation and welfare) and on
intergenerational resource allocation. In the global financial crisis of 2008-10, the outcomes of
recession and global financial restructuring are likely to have a big impact on intergenerational conflict
over resources and ultimately, consumption patterns. Concerns arise over access to public health
services as the population ages, state pension and welfare provision costs will increase and
intergenerational conflict is beginning to emerge over the perceptions of older groups’ relative wealth
in Western countries, in relation to younger cohorts who – in the popular view at least – perceive
themselves as less well-off. This is reflected for example by a recent glut of popular publications
‘blaming’ the Baby Boom generation for many social ills, including press reports of Boomers’
excessive consumption and contribution to global warming. It remains to be seen, as apart from a small
number of studies, there is little sustained social research into the current consumption patterns of
Boomers and other midlife/older generations. In the current climate, financial strain is certainly
restricting access to public services and shrinking private resources in Western European states,
potentially leading to scapegoating of particular age groups, such as Baby Boomers who appear to have
benefited from the 20th
Century expansion of the Welfare State. However, the global financial crisis
may also have lasting and as yet unknown impacts upon general consumption patterns including those
of older people, as welfare states shrink, as unemployment looms and as pensions contract. Nor is it
clear that the Baby Boomers (or any other older generation) are straightforwardly ‘wealthy’ – class,
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4. gender and ethnic divisions impact over and above generational and cohort influences here as in other
groups. Moreover, we do not yet know to what extent older age groups will shift towards greater
intergenerational support, foregoing their own consumption in order to transfer resources to their
families.
When we explore how the ageing population interacts with consumption more explicitly in social and
cultural terms, we can see that both the study of ageing and the study of consumption may need to
rethink these assumptions in order to better address the challenges of demographic change. A key
example given by Harper is the assumptions which currently link policy and markets in the UK: it is
currently assumed (and much evidence suggests that this has been the case) that older people retire and
shift their consumption patterns from household goods to leisure activities. It is further assumed that
there is a direct link between age and use of public healthcare services, and in a simplified public
concern about demography, that there will be increased ‘pressure’ on the economy caused by this drop
in consumer spending, and rise in service provision, as the bulges in population work through.
However, a more complex reading of the data suggests that more nuanced readings of consumer
behaviour in older groups are needed: evidence suggests that many older age groups prefer to remain
economically active, and indeed in the UK the government is encouraging this to fend off dependency
ratio issues. This in turn may lead to the continuation of spending on household items (for example, it
is widely predicted that the gradual increase in the compulsory retirement age will lead to a parallel
increase in the length of mortgage terms) as people continue to need to replace essentials and feel able
to provide luxuries, and reduce time for leisure. Moreover, higher numbers of people over 65 are
enjoying better health than older cohorts at the same age – one argument about pressures on service
provision suggest the increased demand on care and health services will mostly come from the ‘oldest
old’, and among the youngest older groups the balance between public and private provision of services
and products will mirror much more the pattern seen amongst working adults in general. Finally,
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5. much of the inherent ageism in employment – which puts the age 50 threshold as an invisible barrier,
beyond which productivity is assumed to decrease – is now challenged by demographic changes and
anti-ageist legislation. What this demographic shift means – in Western countries at least – is the
apparent growth of a new generation of, as Metz and Underwood (2005) put it, ‘older, richer, fitter’
worker-consumers who cannot simply be written off as ‘non-consumers’ or addressed only within the
context of social policy and care.
Age is not a simple category. At face value, it is the gradual change in human capacity and identity
wrought by biological changes due to the passing of time. In this respect, age forms an important
everyday social category that is used to classify people: infant, young, middle-aged and old work as
ordinary labels that have meaning in social settings.
However, like many biological categories, the notion of age becomes more problematic when its social
characteristics are examined in more depth. The biologically-driven model of age relies on a notion of
a human ‘life-cycle’, which forms a common pattern for all human organisms (distinct from other
organisms). There is, of course, much variety and disagreement in the biological explanation of ageing
processes; however it is a reasonable summary to suggest that various gradual changes in the
‘organism’ are at the heart of the process, although different causes of change may be proposed. The
notion of age as a (solely) biological, linear process, marked by the apparent growth in capacity and
physical prowess, peaking in mid adulthood, and then declining until death, is challenged by
psychologists and social scientists. The psychological models of ageing straddle the bio- and socio-
models, suggesting various cognitive and emotional mechanisms with which individuals manage
change, relationships, and shifting capacities as ageing progresses. Further, the social science model
suggests, ageing does not have a singular form, marked by inevitable physical and associated
psychological and social consequences. Rather, the biological process is only the background context
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6. for what are socially variable processes. The discipline of ‘social gerontology’ has challenged
simplistic notions of age, arguing variously that work, retirement and pension patterns, medical and
cultural stereotypes, raw inequalities around gender, class, ethnicity and wealth, and social networks all
shape the ageing process. The most dominant framework for understanding ageing in the social and
psychological sciences is captured in the notion of ‘life-course’ which suggests that age is linked to
social contexts which construct transitions and positions, rather than having a fixed pattern. This
notion of a socially-embedded ageing is important for the understanding consumer culture in a number
of ways.
The first important link between ageing and consumption is found in the critique of a ‘deficit’ model of
old age. The assumption (resting in biological assumptions of ‘loss of function’) of inevitable,
predictable decline as the dominant characteristic of ageing has been heavily criticised in social and
psychological studies. While the human body cannot escape its ultimate fate, the pathway to get there
is highly variable and, crucially, affected by social context. The deficit model of ageing however has,
until recently, shaped many of the assumptions about ageing consumers in marketing/advertising, in
social policy and in the minds of the public at large. As discussed below, this is true for both youner
and older consumers.
Early ages
The broadest link between consumption and ageing is the assumption that ageing has different effects
upon cognitive processing and that this in turn affects people’s abilities to make decisions about
consumption. We see this model built into the marketing segmentation approaches which use
demographic, psychographic and modelling techniques to unpick age-related consumption. So, we
might construct on the basis of biological and life-course assumptions, a notion of changing preferences
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7. according to age. Very young children, in the first instance, are consumers-by-proxy, in which parents
consume for them. As children age, independent preference formation and access to money and
decision making gradually increase their engagement in the consumer process. The earliest social
‘conflict’ over age and consumption comes in the struggles over ‘choice’ in the parent-child
relationship. Recently configured under the term ‘pester power’, parents perceive consumption and age
as a problem in which the apparently persuasive powers of advertising seek to encourage consumption
and in turn, parents develop strategies to resist and manage information being passed on to their
children. On the marketing behaviour side, the analysis moves across different conceptualisations of
children’s beliefs and behaviour to gain further market share, and to recognise how far power and
agency are exercised within families, and by children themselves. On the sociological side, the parent-
child relationship is examined to explore relative agency and relations of domination, and the notion of
‘persuasion’ is critically examined. Children are under ‘threat’ from consumer culture in some
interpretations – Schor’s (2004) ‘born to buy’ child is a case in point. However, this model of
childhood consumption has parallels with wider debates on the ‘hypodermic’ model of culture in which
children are seen as the vessel into which culture is ‘put’. As with the model of older age as a deficit
(see later), this model of the child consumer configures them as ‘vessels’ for adult decisions and
persuasive advertising rather than ‘beings’ in their own right who can make competent choices. The
debate about whether consumption is seen as threat cannot be exclusively examined therefore, without
considering the broader sociological context of how we configure the consuming agents at the heart of
the debate.
It is important to recognise the most significant debate on age and consumption that has shaped and
provided the context for most other areas of debate on this matter: youth consumption and subcultures.
There is a general agreement that the emergence of the teenager as a separate category of cultural and
consumer identity develops in the post-war years. This was because the congruence of emerging
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8. consumer markets in the post-war years in US and Europe which tapped into new buyers; alongside
generational shifts in post-war populations influenced by cultural and social change. The ‘birth of the
teenager’ (Osgerby, 1998) is widely seen as concurrent with the expansion of consumerism in the post-
war period. Hand-in-hand with new employment opportunities in the 1950s and a sense of optimistic
cultural openness (as a result of greater cosmopolitan, mediatised awareness of the world), came new
opportunities to express through consumption. Music, fashion, food/drink and cultural forms such as
film and magazines become central to the experience of being a teenager. It is hard to say that ‘age’
shaped this experience as a causal factor: more significant is that the particular age category of teenager
was forged alongside consumption. In this respect, the emergence of definitions of consumption are
co-terminous with the emergence of youth consumption, and this default position has affected later
attempt to provide more complex age-related understandings. This is a problem for the analysis at
large: certain kinds of consumption have been seen as so defining of age (but in particular ‘one’ age)
that it is impossible to separate them out. The debates about youth consumption and subcultures are
detailed elsewhere in this volume but in essence, if young people are being expressive, creative and
self-determining (rather than duped) in their consumption, then by default older people must not be.
This is because youth consumption was defined in debates on subcultures as deliberately ‘resistant’ to
parental cultures (both parents as ‘older’ and parents as ‘a different generation’). The acts of
consuming as a young person were seen as ‘symbolic’ of radical cultural breaks – if hippies and punks
consumer particular types of fashion it was because they were being young radicals. This means that –
by default – the more ‘ordinary’ consumption of their parents’ generation could not be defined as
radically symbolic. The parental generation – buying their mortgages, cars and food – could not
possibly be expressing radical or tribal identities thus within subcultural theory. The youth generations
were seen – in their fashion ‘bricolage’, their adoption of music and wider popular consumer cultures
and in their apparent tribalism – to be fast-moving, creative and meaningful in their consumption. The
subcultural notion of using the symbolic creativity of consumer goods in ‘tribal’ form thus excludes the
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9. ‘ordinary’ consumption practices of those who consume more prosaically from being seen as ’authors’
of their own lives.
Ageing and Old Age
Age has typically been conceived within marketing literature as a form of demographic stratification
which can be slotted into an explanation about differential consumer behaviour based upon numerical
age. The assumption is that ability, agency, capacity, preference and so on, can be ‘read off’ from age,
and that those of a similar age will have more similarities than differences. The focus here is on fairly
common-sense notions of generation intertwined with life-stage: that formative experiences at
particular ages, link up with key life moments at the same time in any cohort. Further, this feeds into
characterisations of typologies of age, usually clustered around easily-graspable labels which can be
used in marketing analysis to derive particular preferences and needs – such as ‘post-family’, ‘affluent
greys’ or ‘silver surfers’. As Hockey and James put it ‘age based distinctions of this kind are reflected
widely in the niche marketing which characterises contemporary systems of production’ (2002).
Recent market research (Euromonitor International, 2006, for example) describes market segments by
age such as Generation Xers (from Douglas Coupland’s book of this name) roughly born 1965-79,
contrasted with older groups such as baby boomers (1945-64) and the ‘Swing generation’ of over-65s
(named thus after their attachment to Swing music). Forecasts and trends are organised around such
age-related classifications, with global mapping of purchases, for example identifying improved
disposable incomes among both groups compared to previous generations, and associated rises in
discretionary spending on ‘functional’ food products such as vitamin drinks for the over-65s; or digital
imaging technology for the baby boomers, among many other examples. While it is undoubtedly true
however that we can ascertain ‘age patterns’ in consumer behaviour, one of the major changes in the
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10. way we think about age in the early 21st
Century is that we know it is not simply a matter of biological
changes, as discussed above. It is interesting that age only categorises definitively at the extreme ends
of the life course scale – children and older people are ‘defined’ as consumers by their age, whereas age
itself is a ‘non-category’ when it comes to explaining the rest of adult consumption. Moreover, until
recently the segmentation of older and younger consumers was deemed to be relatively undifferentiated
– this was particularly evident in marketing to the ‘over-50s’. Given that life expectancy can typically
add another 40 years to that cut-off point, and the recognition that people in their 50s are often in their
peak earning and spending power, marketers have recently begun to challenge this all-encompassing
category. Adults aged 24-65 are the default model in consumer marketing, explained and segmented
by other things – preferences, job, income levels, and cultural capital but not, particularly, by age. In
this respect, we see the denigration of the age category – as it is assumed to have ‘biological’ properties
– a direct link between cognitive and physical ability and agency or will, then it only has to apply to
and be analytically relevant for those apparently deficient in that agency (because they are too young or
too old). Yet, alternative models of ageing and age itself bring questions to bear on the overly simplistic
notion of age driven consumption – if the category age itself has to be problematised, then the
consumption that derives from it also has to be seen as more complex. And in turn, we also need to ask
in what ways age categorisations and conceptualisations derive from consumption itself.
The major issue relating to age and consumption, however, is not about age or ageing per se, it is about
old age. The marketing literature has seen age as a category to be understood and managed: old age is
a seen as a period of cognitive and physical decline and consumption behaviour is assumed to relate to
this process. So older people are assumed to be more rigid in their decision making, to be less able to
process information and to be unchanging in their preferences. The corollary of the model that ‘fixes’
consumption choices at the definitive moment in people’s youth, also assumes that they remain fixed in
later life. This idea does not necessarily argue that people maintain the same cultural preferences
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11. throughout life, but more that innovation is not associated with increasing age: so older people are
perceived to be less adaptive, whereas it is young people who are assumed to be influenced by
‘newness’.
Evidence from the marketing literature has traditionally suggested that ‘careful’ marketing to older
people needs to reflect their lower cognitive abilities and their more rigid decision making. This is
broadly reflective of wider age stereotyping, in which, according to social gerontological approaches,
relies on a ‘warm but incompetent’ model (Cuddy et al 2007) of older people. In this version of
stereotyping – which contrasts with the cold but competent stereotype of younger people – older people
are seen as deserving of warmth but seen as not full beings. Advertising and marketing therefore are
seen to need to make up for the ‘deficit’ in knowledge and agency. In this respect, the double jeopardy
of ageism in advertising is evident: both generic ageism in society is seen as untroubling and acceptable
as advertising ‘material’ (images of older people characterised as funny and stupid abound); and the
more intrinsic ageism of the form of ‘address’: the advertising equivalent of shouting a little louder and
calling someone you barely know ‘dear’, because you assume she’s deaf and like your grandma…
However, this intrinsic ageism has come under challenge in recent years from a number of
developments. Perhaps the most significant challenge is generational or cohort change. Under
pressure from those who grew up as mass consumers, the model of age inherent in the consumer world
is shifting. The deficit model of old age has built within it assumptions that older people may be the
‘slowest’ to access innovation and new consumer products; however, some research suggests that the
baby boom generation were typically the ‘first’ consumer generation, exposed to the expansion of mass
consumerism in the post-war era. Moreover, research by Jones et al (2008) suggests that successive
cohorts of older people are increasingly familiar with consumer goods as they ‘carry’ their early
consumption experiences with them. As such the assumptions about ageing being an inevitable
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12. ‘decline’ including the decline into non-consumption or ‘flawed’ consumption become more complex.
If the research is correct, the baby boom generation are the ultimate consumers – the first youth cultural
consumers, the first global travellers, in large part the first early adopters of some technology.
We don’t fully know the impact of the expansion of this consumer cohort as they themselves age – not
least because the analysis of age is difficult. For one thing, the intersection of age, generation/cohort
and period (the ‘identification’ problem) is very difficult to unravel. It is impossible to say for any set
of social phenomena whether it is each, any or all of these three factors which has generated the
change: for example, although we can surmise that generation/cohort is important to describe what
baby boomers do, we cannot truly be sure it isn’t the case that everyone behaves in the same way
because society has changed (a period effect) or that they do what they do because they are a particular
age. Recent research into consumption has sought to provide greater depth to this problem, partly to
counter the simplistic assumptions of marketers who over-rely on generation as a category without
sufficient interrogation. However, no methodology has been able to ‘solve’ the identification problem
yet in ageing research, so we can only approximate answers. The best model we have is comparative
cohort analysis (found often in political science research) but because of the lack of good longitudinal
data on ageing and social change, and the neglect of older respondents in many surveys, research
linking old age and social change to consumption patterns has been relatively recent.
Ageing: connecting youth with old age
One of the key features of the identification of youth consumption as the only form of ‘radical’
consumption is in its ‘growing older’. As the cohort defined as subcultural consumers have themselves
aged, and as youth (as a cultural practice) has apparently shifted upwards to encompass older groups as
Gilleard puts it, ‘middle age became the new cultural battleground as a ‘post-youth’ transformation of
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13. consumer culture began to gather momentum’ (2005, 158). Focused on ‘staying young’ the emergence
of new consumer territories such as a fitness culture and anti-ageing products began to challenge the
notion that only youth cultures were consumer cultures. Gradually, since the expansion of
consumption in the 1980s, older age groups have increasingly engaged in consumer cultures, in which
the consuming body expanded its repertoire of not only youth fashions but fashion for wider market
segments, in which home consumption became a key feature of expressive lifestyle, in which lifestyle
travel become normalised and in which the body became a consumer battleground for wider age
groups.
Very recently still, the apparent health and wealth of the baby boom generation has led to an increase in
the ‘addressing’ of middle aged and older consumers driven by their perceived purchasing power. In
attempts to better understand their interests, preferences and practices, greater attention has been paid
recently to more complex segmentation of the ‘over-50s’. This is not without its own problems. The
perception of the baby boom generation as uniformly wealthy and able to consume requires
qualification, not least because of the variance in size of the post-war boom in different countries: while
it is clear that cohort size will almost certainly have an impact where there is a large and sustained
boom in the birthrate – such as in the US and Canada – it is less evident in the UK and Northern
European countries where the demographics are less definitive.
This apparent generational effect, in concert with the gradual colonisation of age as a consumer market
has led to a distinct double bind for older people in relation to consumer cultures. As Gilleard puts it
‘old age has become an outcome acknowledged primarily through actions designed to refute its
presence’ (2005, 159). What is meant here is the new ghettoisation of age within a model of
‘successful’ ageing: consumer products which stave off age or present it as part of a lifestyle choice
abound. So, for example, the controversial but widely admired Dove Pro-Age campaign is a recent,
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14. more progressive version of addressing older women in the market; yet what this serves to do is remind
older women they may ‘only’ be old within the normal standards of beauty and slimness: more
‘ordinary’ models of the ageing body are not permissible. In many advanced capitalist countries, the
insurance and travel industries recognise mid- and later-life consumers are key targets, and so their
message is often another model of ‘successful’ ageing: the active, fit, cosmopolitan and wealthy
consumer who makes the most of their retirement by travelling or snowboarding or other ‘lifestyle’
pursuits.
In other words, on the one hand, older people have been neglected in the field of consumer culture,
suffering stereotypical forms of address or simply complete invisibility. Yet on the other hand, in order
to engage with consumer culture, the demands of ageing require conformity to particular models of
consumer agency. This notion of successful consumption and its corollary – the failed or flawed
consumer – can be found in Bauman’s work more generically, although a broader notion of ‘successful
ageing’ (not limited to the consumer sphere) is developed within social gerontology, with varied
reception. If consumption is – as Bauman suggests – part of what it means to participate in the modern
world, then failure to do so renders people ‘outside’ of normal life. This intertwines with ideologies of
‘successful ageing’ which demand older people not only age, but do so gracefully, beautifully and
ideally healthily – or at least without displaying any infirmities to the outside world. The ‘successful
ageing’ model has become the new dominant stereotype, constrasting with the isolated, poor, sick older
stereotype. Recently, social gerontologists frame this popular view of ageing as one of the major
problems. In essence, this provides a double jeopardy for all older people: not only do they face the
varied challenges of ageing and the social exclusions and inequalities that emerge, they also face
increasing pressure to hide all signs of ageing or indications that it might be in any way difficult. In the
context of consumption, this double jeopardy is telling: on the one hand, consumers have the right to be
addressed fairly and appropriately, and not to have their consumer identities subsumed under a ‘deficit’
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15. model; yet in doing so, there becomes no imaginary alternative to the form of address, and what
remains is a ‘tyrannical’ (Blaikie, 1999, Katz, 2005) model of ‘positive’ ageing. For women in
consumer cultures, we might argue there is therefore a triple jeopardy. Older women are already
‘outside’ any model of successful social participation, suffering the double inequality of age and gender
(Woodward, 1999). So the successful ageing demand in consumption terms requires impossible
contortions.
Some of the more helpful contributions attempting to integrate age and consumption analysis have
come from cultural gerontologists, such as Katz, Blaikie, Gilleard and Jones et al, who have attempted
to drive social gerontology to move beyond a ‘structured dependency’ model. This model places lack
of access to work as the driving force of economic, social and cultural ageism, and renders
consumption as a by-product of capitalist structures, much as other ‘economically determinist’ models
do. As they point out, this model neglects the work on consumer cultures and identities that has grown
up in the later part of the 20th
century, in which alternative frames of consumption as social exchange,
as symbolic capital, as cultural text and identity formation, all provide counterpoints to the notion of
ageing driven by simplistic notions of economic necessity. Although it is a controversial idea, notions
of ‘lifestyle’ have been developed in the context of older people to partially explain their
identifications, agency and communities. Laslett’s notion of the ‘third age’ is probably the most lasting
and influential version of this type of analysis, in which the label of old age is moved away from focus
on ageing as a ‘social problem’ requiring policy solutions, and towards conceiving of it more as a
collection of demographic, cultural and individual characteristics which allow new lifestyles to emerge.
This fluid notion of a new old age is based on the idea of ‘stages’ of life, but contrary to earlier
accounts, these stages are not fixed or dependent upon biological ageing. If childhood and youth are
the first age, and economically-active, parenting adulthood is the second age (although cultural
gerontologists are at pains to stress the rejection of the third age simply being defined by retirement),
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16. then the third age is the age of new opportunities wrought by the demographic changes discussed
above, in concert with consumer notions of social engagement. There is also a further debate about the
emergence of a ‘fourth age’ of physical decline, economic and social withdrawal, and dependency,
sometimes couched in terms of the ‘oldest old’, since increasingly the age at which such dependency
emerges is getting later. However, the recognition of – and arguably expansion in – the third age is
central to understanding the role of consumption.
In particular, consumption as lifestyle plays a part in shaping the choices and opportunities in the third
age, in which greater continuities are thought to exist between the lives of older people and younger
cohorts. In contrast to models of the older consumer as isolated, making faulty or rigid decisions and
consuming niche products, instead ‘third age’ thinking reminds us of the consumer agency used in
precisely the same socially-embedded ways as used by younger groups. What Laslett, and later
commentators such as Featherstone and Hepworth, Turner, Hockey and James are identifying is the
intrinsic link between the emergence of consumption as a central process in late or ‘second’ modernity,
and therefore the reconfiguring of old age in the light of this is necessary. One of the key contributions
to the debate linking age and consumer culture has come from Featherstone and Hepworth, whose work
has highlighted not only the significance of modern consumer practices in the social construction of the
ageing identity and body, but in turn, the potential ‘critical turn’ in consumer culture which allows such
constructions – as in other fields - to be both dominating and the source of social agency
simultaneously. By reminding researchers that consumer culture dominates almost all sectors of late
modern life, and by introducing notions of consumer culture to ageing studies, their work has provided
a starting point for recognising that older groups are not simply disengaged from consumer culture but
heavily defined by it. In particular, they have used ideas of cultural capital and symbolic identities to
debates on ageing, in ways which have led to new research agendas – for example, on the significance
of the birthday industry and holiday marketing to the discourse of ageing.
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17. Despite an emerging agenda for studying consumer culture and ageing there remains relatively limited
research and systematic intellectual engagement from either social gerontologists or theorists of
consumer culture. Where there are significant concentrations of research exploring age and consumer
culture, they tend to be in psychology and marketing journals, focusing on how best to target ageing
consumers, or on consumer ‘deficits’ which feed into purchase decisions or consumer citizenship (such
as the avoidance of scamming). While these nodes of discussion are useful in building up the field,
there are very few sociological and ‘cultural studies’ approaches which link empirical work to the
broader questions of older people’s consumption as a form of social agency, network or material
culture.
Recent exceptions to this come from those social and cultural gerontologists who wish to enrich the
theoretical agenda of gerontology and from particular studies within consumer culture studies in
specific empirical areas. For example, the study of travel and home (as dimensions of consumer
culture) is attracting more empirical and theoretical interest because it is a salient commentary on the
move to more global and ‘mobile’ cultures. Older communities, in particular those in mid-life with
considerable wealth are playing a large part in this global mobility – and not only in the Western
frameworks of ‘snowbirds’ and baby boomer travellers. The anthropological question of older ‘virtual’
migration – in the transfer of funds and people from post-colonial settlements to build homes and
relocate in ‘indigenous’ settings is just one example of this new kind of consumer ‘flow’.
Conclusion
While the broader sociological questions of the relationship between age and consumption are now
emerging in research, there is more work to do exploring the ‘material cultures’ of older people and
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18. transformations within midlife. There is some research exploring the material cultures of older people,
which might be seen to blend into questions of consumer culture – since much of the material culture
we surround ourselves with is, by default, made up of consumer objects. In the context of older people,
some work has been done on the relationship between home and ageing in this light – for example,
Marcoux’s work on the ‘caisser maison’ in which older residents who downsize dispose of objects in
various meaningful ways, which links to Ekerdt’s work (in Jones et al, 2009) on similar themes.
Further, broader work on the meaning of home in later life highlights the ways in which material
cultural dynamics around home ownership, possessions and investments in material notions of home
construct the environment of being an older person. Further research might include the adaptation of
‘quality of life’ research found in policy circles to explore whether consumption
‘investments/divestments’ are central in older groups – for example further considering the role of
material goods (collections, disposal of memorabilia and display) in the ageing process. The area with
least engagement is the notion of older people’s consumer identity: there is scope for the adaptation of
consumer research to fully explore the worlds of older people, uncovering their richness and the
salience of cultural communities via symbolic consumption/material culture.
See also: Childhood; Life-course; Generation; Retirement; Single Person Households; Youth
Consumption; Leisure; Markets and Marketing.
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