Introduction

The study of social change has always been at the heart of the sociological enterprise and the last decades of the 20th century have provided considerable material to work on. Not only did industrialisation and urbanisation reach unprecedented levels, but the integration of the world at economic, technological and cultural levels created the globalised conditions that transformed previous experiences of international linkages (Held et al, 1999). Within these macro social processes were contained many other transformations of social life, including education, health and social care and the control of fertility. Consumption must also be included in this list, given its extending role in everyday life and popular culture. Engagement in consumption is not just the epiphenomenon of production but has also taken on a significance of its own. The diffusion of mass consumer culture, as well as the lifestyles constructed within it, is one of the most arresting features of the transformed social world in which we live.

Less noticed but of equal significance have been changes to the nature of later life. With the rise of the modern retiree, the status of old age is no longer crystallised around that of the old-age pensioner. We have seen the emergence of retirement as a significant part of the lifecourse, a period that seeks to remove itself from the residual category of discarded labour to membership of a putative leisure class (Michelon, 1954). While these changes can be framed in terms of crisis and threat regarding the future of pensions or the burden of an ageing population on health and welfare services, this kind of ‘apocalyptic demography’ is but one side of the equation (Gee and Gutman, 2000). As Blackburn (2002) has pointed out, the longevity revolution is rather too conveniently presented as either a dystopian crisis or a utopia of health, wealth and vitality for all. The reality is more complex, reflecting the many processes of social and cultural change associated with the transformation of work, leisure and the family as well as the broader changes in peoples’ lives brought about by the rise of mass consumption.

The cohorts of people entering later life today are those who grew up in the midst of these transformations, and, perhaps more crucially, participated in their development. Earlier cohorts had entered old age with a very different (and much more limited) experience of affluence and consumer choice.