Social Forces

"Shopping choices remain strongly influenced by factors including income, age, class and gender...

Yet at the same time it remains an individual and often peculiar activty".

• Assumed that something detrimental happens as they age (Kelly, 2009).

• Chronological age is used to assign responsibilities and social roles, as well as rights and privileges to an individual (Treysinger 1999)

• Infancy (birth - 1 year)
• Young childhood (2 - 5 years)
• Middle childhood (6 - 8 years)
• Late childhood (9 - 12 years) 
• Adolescence (13 - 17 years)
• Youth (18 - 24 years)
• Young adulthood (25 - 30 years)
• Middle adulthood (31 - 45 years) 
• Late adult (46 - 60 years)
• Retirement (60 - 75 years) 
• Old age (75+ years)

• Young people must negotiate a path between the competing realms of childhood and adulthood with independent access into social, cultural consumption activities becoming increasingly important to the self project (King & Church 2013) 

• Youth is a time for exercising autonomy and affirmation of the self through individual symbolic projects of the lifestyle & identity formation (MacRae, 2004) 

• Club culture: 30-40 uear olds are hidden consumers

• Reluctance to confom to the 'thirty something ideal' 

• Mainstreaming of youth culture

• Same sex marriages
• Blended families
• 'Sandwich generation'
• Young couples living with parents
• Child free marriages 
• Dual income households
• Sharp increase in the number of children living with one adult and fall in the number of couples with children
• Number of births outside marriage continues to rise
• Increase ub divorce rate and singles market

• Intense focus on quality of family life

Producing high quality children = 

• Intensive mothering

• Involved fathering

• Women carry out an overall of 60% more unpaid work than men... even those who are employed. 
• Created a market for more food bought away from home, convenience foods,  childcare & household services. 
• Women account for 80% of household buying decisions (Gardner 2008) 

• Changing role of fathers

• 'At the same time as fatherhood appears to be becoming more precarious, expectations about the fathering role are rising' (Kay 2006) 

"By the year 2050, for the first time, the world will contain more people over the age of 60 than under the age of 15. This will mean 2 billion people 60 as compared to 600 million in the year 2000".                                             (Pearce,2005)

Attwood (2005)

• Aggressive masculinity
• Sexual predatation 
• Compeetitive homosociality

LADBible - "A lad is someone who has manners, who can be a hero" 

• Adams, Anderson & McCormack (2010) - group of young british footballers seemed comfortable combining traditional performances of masculinity on the pitch with 'metrosexual' consumption practices off the pitch (Tuncay, 2006) 

• Ladette

• Mainstream objectification

• Kind, caring & mothering#

• Stressed & uptight

• Developing a taste for everything

• The ways in which advantaged socio-economic strata keep themselves distinct, able to exclude outsiders... it is cultural omnivorousness that seperates the present day middle classes from the rest. (Benett, 2009)

People who are secure in their middle class identities may individualise their characters by adopting or retaining some proletarian tastes. They know that they will not be mistaken for real (working class) workers (Skeggs, 2004)

People who are secure in their middle class identities may individualise their characters by adopting or retaining some proletarian tastes. They know that they will not be mistaken for real (working class) workers (Skeggs, 2004)

People who are secure in their middle class identities may individualise their characters by adopting or retaining some proletarian tastes. They know that they will not be mistaken for real (working class) workers (Skeggs, 2004)

• Age is more than a biological construct and a lifecycle approach may be more useful than age in predicting consumer behaviour
• Gender is a social construction which is continually produced and reproduced through consumptive practices
• Performances of masculinity and femininity in flux responding to changging societal concerns
• There is a debate over how traditional markes of age, gender and class are a predictor of consumption activities.