Abstract
The rising importance of dimensions such as age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, political attitudes, and multiple choices to organize the notion of “life course” has made the older class concept appear obsolete to the research sociologist. My thesis is that the current expanding discussions of lifestyles are not necessarily a substitute but a valuable supplement to social stratification theory. Lifestyle research can contribute to the question of the relevance of the class concept. The result of my investigation shows that lifestyle research, when connected to the writings of Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, can enrich research in the social sciences.
Bögenhold, Dieter. Social Inequality and the Plurality of Life-Styles: Material and Cultural Aspects of Social Stratification, in: The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 60, 2001, pp. 829–847.
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Notes
- 1.
However, Max Weber was not the first who paid attention to the cycle between production and demand. The same issue can be found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1937, p. 625), where we read that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.” In respect to modes of consumption, Daniel Bell maintains that a new stage of capitalism was already observed in the 1920s: “The ‘new capitalism’ (the phrase was first used in the 1920s) continued to demand a Protestant ethic in the area of production (the realm of work)—but to stimulate a demand for pleasure and play in the area of consumption” (1996, p. 75).
- 2.
- 3.
Theodor Geiger’s work does not rank as a classic in the international discussion. It is thus even more interesting that Aage Soerensen (1991) refers to parallels and divergences between Geiger and Goldthorpe (see Soerensen, 1991, p. 83 n.5). See Geißler (1985) for an in-depth discussion of Theodor Geiger’s (1932, 1949) present relevance.
- 4.
Talcott Parsons did a translation of Weber’s Protestant Ethics (first published in America in 1930, see Max Weber, 1988) to introduce the piece to American scholars. However, Max Weber and his American contemporaries were always aware of each other’s writings. For instance, Max Weber cited Veblen’s English-language works and Weber used some American phrases in the German original of the Protestant Ethics.
- 5.
Paul DiMaggio has put his observation in definite words: “The starting point for any discussion of life styles and consumption patterns must be the work of Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu” (1994, p. 458). For a recent discussion of Simmel, see Poggi (1993); for up-to-date relevance of Veblen, see Tillman (1996) and Penz and Wilkop (1996).
- 6.
As we know from the sociology of knowledge, human action is organized by systems of social relevance (Alfred Schutz, [1932] 1974). Therefore, consumption sociology has to ask for such patterns of social sense instead of taking economic behavior for granted. Baudrillard expressed this perspective in his “consumer society”:
Consumption is neither a material practise, nor a phenomenology of “affluence”. It is not defined by the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the car we can drive, nor by the visual and oral substance of images and messages, but in the organization of all this as signifying substance. Consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and message presently constituted in a more or less coherent discourse. Consumption, in so far as it is meaningful, is a systematic art of the manipulation of signs. (1988, pp. 21–22).
- 7.
This has been demonstrated by Granovetter and Tilly (1988) in their historically based study on “Inequality and Labor Process”.
- 8.
Thomas Kuhn (1962) described the internal academic controlling logic and semantics of topic-conjunctures as a “paradigm”. Kuhn refers in his book’s foreword to the fact that he is obliged to the German works of the Polish author Ludwik Fleck ([1935] 1980) for many of his ideas. Fleck described the formation of academic contexts in the semantics of “think collectives,” which are forced, by means of certain thought constraints, to definite forms of thought styles. In fact, Fleck had “pre-thought” many of Kuhn’s later arguments, a fact that has never been made obvious enough, neither by Kuhn (1962) nor in the ensuing discussion (see, e,g,, Baldamus, 1977). For a recent ambiguous discussion of intellectual change through a social network perspective, see the study of Collins (1998b).
- 9.
- 10.
This seems most obvious for economists and not worth an explanation. Zablocki and Kanter (1976) have associated the emergence of several lifestyles with the social loss of value coherence: “In so doing we have attempted to call into sociological question what the micro-economist tends to take for granted—the differentiation of tastes and preferences. To the extent that a person’s position in the markets for wealth and prestige still leave some degree of freedom of choice, differentiation of life styles results” (1976, p. 293). Michael E. Sobel concluded in his empirical pioneer work on lifestyles and social stratification: “While financial position is an initial condition for a lifestyle, lifestyle should not be treated as a mirror image of wealth and income” (1981, p. 170).
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Bögenhold, D. (2021). Social Inequality and the Plurality of Lifestyles: Material and Cultural Aspects of Social Stratification. In: Neglected Links in Economics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79193-3_2
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