Lifestyle
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In sociology, a lifestyle is the way a person (or a group) lives. This includes patterns of social relations, consumption, entertainment, and dress. A lifestyle typically also reflects an individual's attitudes, values or worldview.
Having a specific "lifestyle" implies a conscious or unconscious choice between one set of behaviours and some other sets of behaviours.
In business, "lifestyles" provide a means of targeting consumers as advertisers and marketers endeavor to match consumer aspirations with products.
The term "lifestyle" apparently first appeared in 1939. Alvin Toffler predicted an explosion of lifestyles ("subcults") as diversity increases in post-industrial societies. Pre-modern societies did not require a term approaching sub-culture or "lifestyle", as different ways of living were expressed as entirely different cultures, religions, ethnicities or by an oppressed minority racial group. As such the minority culture was always seen as alien or other. "Lifestyles", by comparison, are accepted or partially accepted differences within the majority culture or group. This tolerance of differentiation within a majority culture seems to be associated with modernity and capitalism.
Within anarchism, lifestylism is a belief that by changing one's own personal lifestyle, and by retreating from class struggle, an anarchist society can be formed.
The term "the lifestyle" can also mean what is more commonly called swinging. Also called the "alternative lifestyle", people in "the lifestyle" most commonly are part of a couple; often a married couple. They meet other like-minded couples or occasionally singles to engage in sexual acts. People in the lifestyle meet on various different websites, as well as in private and public clubs.
Some people do not consider the term "lifestyle" to be an accepted "word".
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[edit] In politics
The term lifestyle in political terms is a reflection of the modern liberal idea that society ought to accept a variety of different ways of life, and hold people to no higher values than the minimum necessary to prevent the violation of the rights of others. Thus it implies a rejection of the idea that our actions are to be judged against some higher, stricter standard of religious belief or faithfulness to tradition. Our choices of how to live, rather than being rooted in something far beyond us either in the immensity of its age or its nature, become little more than the choices of fashion: our deepest values become equated to the latest trends in clothing.
However, while the term does have the liberal uses outlined in the previous paragraph, it is also used in their own ways by conservatives. For example, conservatives are prone to label homosexuality as a 'lifestyle'. In doing this they seek to depict it as a choice yet at the same time deny any notion of it being an authentic choice, a choice rooted in a connection to higher values.
Thus, the term lifestyle cannot be seen as belonging purely to either the left or the right, but rather it is a sort of common property used and manipulated by many different political views; part of the furniture, as it were, of postmodern politics.
[edit] Lifestyle classifications
A number of lifestyle classifications have been proposed by market researchers, including the following:
'AIO (Activities, Interests, Opinions)' This approach seeks, via long questionnaires (such as those proposed by Joseph T. Plummer), to measure respondents' positions on a number of dimensions spread across these categories (as well as the more usual demographic groupings). Based on their responses, they are then allocated (using sophisticated computer analysis techniques) to the AIO (life-style) groups.
'VALS (VAlue Life-Styles)' Arnold Mitchell (of SRI International) developed similar groupings. He drew up four main categories subdivided into nine life-styles, again based on long questionnaires:
- need-driven groups: "survivors" and "sustainers"
- outer-directed groups: "belongers", "emulators" and "achievers"
- inner-directed groups: "I-am-me", "experientials" and "societally conscious"
- combined outer-and inner-directed groups: "integrated"
According to this framework, the outer-directed groups, `belongers' (conventional, conservative and so on), `emulators' (ambitious, upwardly mobile and so on) and `achievers' (leaders who make things happen and so on) account for two-thirds of the US population. Thus the 'Times ' newspaper, to take a UK example, might expect to target `achievers', and possibly to address a larger total market segment than the 'Guardian ', which might be looking to the `societally conscious' for its most ardent supporters. Less widely reported is that the VALS typology also suggests that there is a possible progression within the life-styles --from `survivors' through to `integrated'.
Lifestyles can apparently even be used by a range of non-profit organizations. One Wisconsin blood centre reportedly turned a deficit of 7000 donors into a surplus of 7000, by concentrating its attentions on people who were affluent, and had close-knit families.
[edit] References
- J. T. Plummer, The concept and application of life-style segmentation, Journal of Marketing (January 1974)
- A. Mitchell, The Nine American Lifestyles (Macmillan, 1983)
- D. Mercer, Marketing (Blackwell, 1996)
