ABSTRACT

On 18 July 2000, representatives of the marketing industry gathered in Amsterdam for an event hosted by the Lifestyle Network (an organization based in Slough in southern England). On the agenda was no less a matter than ‘Mapping the lifestyle genome’. In commercial quarters, as this somewhat fanciful title suggests, ‘lifestyle’ is widely regarded as offering an unprecedented degree of ‘marketing precision’.1 In sociological circles, however, the concept has seldom been viewed in such terms. Warde (1994, 69), for example, has judged it ‘a far from precise notion’. Indeed, most attempts to define the term seem to resolve themselves in truism and tautology (Chaney 1996). Thus, for instance, Veal (1993, 247) concludes an exhaustive survey of the concept with the striking banality that ‘lifestyle’ ‘is the distinctive pattern of personal and social behaviours characteristic of an individual or group’. This underlying sense of meaninglessness is reinforced by the rampant expansionism of the term, which has caused Sobel (1981, 1) to fear that it will finally ‘include everything and mean nothing’. Since ‘lifestyle’ is clearly such a nebulous concept, is it possible to pin down its meaning at all? In a determined attempt to impose some clarity of thinking on the matter, Warde (1994, 69) has distilled five distinct senses in which ‘lifestyle’ is typically employed:

1 Market research uses the term to indicate market segments, that is groups of people with a higher than average probability of purchasing particular kinds or qualities of goods.