Vincent, John A.. (1999) ‘Consumers, Identity and Old Age.’ Education and Ageing’ 14(2):141-158.

Consumers, Identity and Old Age.

Abstract.

This paper explores two related issues of old age and identity. Firstly, what is the relationship between age per se and identity. That is to say, what are the consequences for people’s identity of the duration of their life. The second theme is that of consumption. How do the cultural characteristics of consumer society impact on those whose identity has formed over a long period of time? Social life has an unfolding quality, and length of life (i.e. ageing) in this sense can have consequences for identity. Theories that we are what we consume have become popular. It is suggested that we take our identities from purchases which are made no longer for use value, but sign value. Older consumers have distinctive characteristics. The effects or potential effects of consumption on age related identities are firstly, the structure of merchandising - what is sold to whom and how? - and secondly, consumer history both personal and collective. Consumption plays a key part in identity but those with a long personal history and limited future also have to make their identity meaningful from other sources.

Old Age and Identity.

This paper explores two related issues of old age and identity. Firstly, what is the relationship between age per se and identity. That is to say, what are the consequences for people’s identity of the duration of their life. These ‘age’ consequences can be contrasted with biological or historical processes, which although they may be time-dependent or related to particular epochs, are not in and of themselves the length of life. The second theme is that of consumption. The cultural characteristics of contemporary society and its key social cleavages can be seen to be less related to modes of production than to modes of consumption. Characteristic themes associated with consumer culture are novelty and display, and as a consequence, transient and ephemeral social identities. How do the cultural characteristics of consumer society impact on those whose identity has formed over a long period of time?

“Ageing” is an organisation of time, a sequence of stages. It refers to the timing and sequencing in some specified process. It is ageing which gives the individual’s life its rhythm, and links the duration, timing and sequence of stages. Individual life courses are patterned by the normative sequences of the life cycle, but this is not all they are. People are not ‘cultural dopes’ programmed to slot into culturally expected roles, rather they actively make choices and struggle to create new roles and life courses for themselves. However, these choices are made in contexts where others are also making choices thus mutually creating and restricting choices for one another.

Social life has an unfolding quality, and length of life (i.e. ageing) in this sense can have consequences for identity. Age related identities are not simply a sequence of roles adopted or ascribed. The classificatory schemes which are used in the metaphor of life as a cycle or series of stages (‘the ages of man’) do not form an adequate explanation of the link between age and identity. Images of ageing should contain the elements of duration and opportunity for change, and like the seed contains the flower, possibilities for the end of the lifecourse are embedded in the beginning. The lifecourse is not a pathway or route which suggests a preplanned or predetermined course. A better formulation would involve metaphors of process - career, trajectory, unfolding, dialectic, etc. The traveller at the start of the journey of life, could not know where they would end, but can in hindsight give an account of how and why they arrived where they did. People make their life history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Identity emerges out of what has happened to people previously, and the consequent choices that remain open to them.

The unfolding character of the lifecourse, in which earlier choices influence the range of subsequent possible choices, can be illustrated in the sphere of work. Employment-career sequences are more than just normative successions of roles. Being a student and then a lecturer, in most cases, is a necessary but not sufficient precursor to being a professor. Becoming a post-graduate student does not automatically cut off other career choices, but makes the choice of an academic career more probable. Similarly, you had to be a nurse before you became a matron. The same interplay of choice and structure unfolds through family ‘career stages’. Setting up a household, marriage, child-birth, divorce, grand-parenthood, have an ‘ageing’ quality whereby the duration and sequence of the preceding steps have necessary consequences for the subsequent ones. The move from being a young firebrand to a conservative elder statesman or the show business moves from ‘one hit wonder’ to ‘all round media personality’ are not predetermined ‘careers’, but nevertheless have a recognisable developmental pattern. For the individual, these life course sequences are not compartmentalised but add to the unfolding dynamic. To use work and family careers as an example - women taking career breaks to raise children carry the consequences of that interruption through their working lives, and into their post retirement standard of living. Similarly, location and housing options are mutually structured by the sequences of household formation and dissolution. The seaside retirement option is more readily available to those owner-occupiers with a paid-up mortgage, than, for illustration, Council tenants, or those who as the result of late household formation took the option of buying on a mortgage at an older age.

This argument that there is a distinctive ageing effect to social life, suggest that duration of accumulated life choices must affect a personal identity. I would like to argue that duration, the length of someone’s life, has intrinsic consequences, in terms of identity for people of different ages. There are both consequences for the lived in identity - the consciousness of ones-self, and the public persona which is perceived and responded to by others.

Defining/Finding an identity for ‘Identity’

Social identity is the aggregate of similarities and differences recognised in the social world. It has an interior quality, who we think and feel we are the same as, or similar to, and who we feel we differ from. It also has an exterior quality, the similarities and differences which others attribute to us. The idea of the interior self, the real ‘me’ talking from inside the head can be distinguished from the public persona or socially-given identity. Popular poetry on old age frequently draws images of the inner-self distanced from the outer body by age:

“...

I’m an old woman now

and nature is cruel,

‘Tis her jest to make

old age look like a fool.

The body it crumbles,

grace and vigour depart,

There now is a stone

Where once I had a heart:

But inside this old carcass

a young girl still dwells,

...” (Carver and Liddiard 1978:ix)

This image of identity is tied up with the distinction between mind and body and identified using concepts such as ‘individuality’, ‘personality’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘the mind’. The individual self is distanced from the corporeal entity in which it is housed. Of course, these two elements are deeply intertwined. The nature of identity is highly social, both at the level of construction and the level of attribution.

Some approaches to the study of identity emphasise the sources of individuality - these approaches will tend to look at issues of mind and body and how each of these may come to be considered to have unique or individual characteristics. The Sociological question then becomes - how is each person’s uniqueness enacted? How do they accomplish their various identities in social settings? We can further ask ‘Are these accomplishments different or more problematic for older individuals?’ Other approaches emphasise how social similarity is produced. These emphasise, on the one hand, historical and cultural features which impinge on the possible range and variety of meaningful social identities. On the other hand, they draw attention to the production of institutionalised and administered identities associated with powerful groups such as the state, commercial and administrative bodies.

Jenkins (1996) argues that individual and collective identities are both essentially social and are, for most practical purposes, inextricably entangled. Identities are neither chosen at will by individuals, nor rigidly determined by the social order; they are the consequence of a process by which internal and external events generate identities in particular contexts. So both the ‘interior’ and the ‘exterior’ processes of identity formation are social.

“One interacts retrospectively with one’s younger selves, recalling earlier states of selfhood in the productive functioning of memory, and interacts prospectively with one’s older selves, anticipating conditions, actions, goal realizations, and the like, of later states of selfhood.

This conceptualisation of “person” as an ensemble of interacting aged states has a number of useful properties. One is that it invites explicit attention to the premises we make in regard to analytic issues of “change and stability”. The traditional conception of “self” as built around a stable self-identical core (often named “the will”) - a conception deeply nourished by the egocentric bias that renders for each of us the world just as it is sampled from each’s perspective - ...” (Hazelrigg 1997 p.119)

It is useful to think of identity as a process, not a category. Identity is not a list of attributes, for example, black, female, old, Jewish. There are various cultural schemas which can allocate people into sets of category boxes, there are other social processes which can be examined to see how such schemas develop and change. This argument about identity as a process can be made whether the category scheme is seen as primordial ( e.g. age, racial or gender categories given by God or science) or one which is seen as socially constructed ( teenager, yuppie, or European). Classifying and labelling people by their age is a feature of modern bureaucratic procedures, for example in educational and social welfare institutions. However, if the concept of identity is to encompass both agency and structure - the lived in quality of choice and the ascriptive quality of social labelling - it has to be a process. Identity cannot be understood simply by what it is, but how it came about.

For older people, their identity has had an unfolding history. They are not the same person as at the start of their lives but, but in an essential sense, neither are they a different person. The change is not encompassed by listing their traits which have changed or those which have stayed the same. Rather it is the continuity of their life history and the inter-linked parts of its development which give identity to the person. Accumulation of life history, having more experience of life simply by having lasted longer, is a necessary characteristic of older people. Duration, therefore, has consequences for identity. In terms of research change and continuity of identity is difficult to study and requires longitudinal strategies. Life-history research is highly illuminating, however, what is remembered and recounted, and what is forgotten or omitted is, of course, a function of current identity. A person’s recounted life history is a construction; the identification of a range of significant others and significant events which define moments of change or self realisation. They demonstrate the progression through life as viewed from the present. However, there remains a factual base to the underlying sequences of events by which the individual has become the person they are. Although life histories are not an objective description of life events, they are frequently the best evidence for understanding a person’s current identity.

Claims made by groups to an authentic identity are derived from common experience. Pronouncements are frequently made in the form - ‘we are a real group, and you would know this had you lived the same experiences as us’ or ‘you don’t know what it is like unless you are a woman/ black/ working-class/ Jewish/ disabled/ gay/ Serb/ etc.’ These claims to authentic experience are also claims for independence or autonomy by the group. They justify why others should not legislate for them. Those who do not share the same experiences, it is claimed, cannot therefore fully understand or represent the group. Cohort experience, common, lived-through history, can provide authentication of identity. The ‘pre-war generation’ is united by its experience of the Great Depression and the Second World War. The experience of longevity can be used in the same way. Identity can be linked to those experiences of life which necessarily require the passing of the years such as - grand-parenthood, great-grand-parenthood, or the acquisition of grey hair, wrinkles or other markers of old age.

Consumption.

It has been suggested that identity in the contemporary or post-modern world is mediated through consumption.

“...Bauman argues, citing Bourdieu, the mode of domination alters, the new one distinguishing itself ‘by the substitution of seduction for repression, public relations for policing, advertising for authority, needs-creation for norm-imposition. What ties individuals to society today is their activity as consumers, their life organised around consumption’ (1987: 68).” (Warde 1994.p.59)

There are at least three kinds of discussion about consumption which represent theoretically different approaches and identify different substantial issues to be addressed. Firstly, there is the political economy approach to social structure which attempts to understand consumption in terms of the cleavages it creates in modern society. Secondly, there is the cultural studies approach which seeks to understand the symbolic meanings of consumption for a post-modern world. Thirdly, there is a social policy orientated debate over the ideology of choice which overlaps into marketing research (Sherry 1995) and behaviouristic studies of shopping. Although these three areas clearly interrelate, they each have a different object of study. The first is concerned with consumption as a social structure - a set of social relationships. The second sees consumption as a semantic structure - a set of symbols and meanings that are attached to goods, services, and lifestyles. The third identifies a structure of preferences, revealed through choices in a market.