ABSTRACT
As developed in the sociology of the 1960s and 1970s, ‘lifestyle’ referred to the patterns of consumption and use (of material and symbolic goods) associated with different social groups and classes. As developed in cultural studies, lifestyles may be understood as a focus of group or individual identity, in so far as the individual expresses him or herself through the meaningful choice of certain items or patterns of behaviour, as symbolic codes, from a plurality of possibilities. The choice of lifestyle may be seen as a form of resistance to the dominant social order. However, the analysis of lifestyles has also to address the problem of the degree to which choice of lifestyle represents a genuinely free and creative choice, and the degree to which it represents the influence of advertising and other mass media over everyday life, and thus the incorporation of the individual into the dominant social order. [AE] Further reading. Chancy 1996; Giddens 1991.
