Introduction

In this book we have traced a growing engagement with consumer society among the older age groups over the last 40 years of the 20th century. While this engagement has been both varied and uneven, the overall trend has been one of increasing ownership of and expenditure on key consumer goods during this period (from a low baseline). These changes in the consumption patterns of the older population reflect other deep and lasting transformations in British society that have left their mark on the landscape of British social, economic and political life. These include the long-term decline of mass employment in manufacturing industries, changes in educational achievement and occupational mobility patterns, changes in gender relations and a freeing up of the public and private spheres. We have suggested that it is in the context of a shift towards late modernity that we are best able to understand the implications of these transformations for later life. The trends of increasing heterogeneity within the older population and the latter's increasing similarity with the general population have profound consequences for the experience of ageing in late modern society. In particular, the conditions of late modernity have given rise to increasing individualisation and a late modern sensibility based around the construction of individual identities through the pursuit and maintenance of lifestyles. These lifestyles are themselves increasingly commodified and framed by a consumer culture. In terms of levels of income and expenditure, therefore, it would appear that older people in Britain are not dissimilar in their profiles and habits to the rest of the population. Hence, these trends have a wider resonance within the study of ageing and later life. In this concluding chapter, we focus on the connections between lifestyles and consumption in later life in three important respects: first, a third age based on generational habitus; second, the contradictions of later life in consumer capitalism; and third, worlds of welfare and the ‘consumer citizen’.

The third age and generational habitus

In the opening chapters of the book, we chartered the social and economic changes that occurred in the latter decades of the 20th century. In so doing, we highlighted the importance of period, cohort and generation for understanding later life. Previous work on generations has been hampered by confusion surrounding the term.