Old Age

sociological perspectives on when old age begins and the norms surrounding later life.

There is no universal biological age at which ‘old age’ or ‘later life’ begins, rather there is variation across societies and historically within societies, so the concept of old age is at least to some extent a social construction.

mind map on the social construction of old age.

The social construction of old age

In Europe before the industrial revolution old age began whenever individuals reached that stage in life when at which physical or mental deterioration reached the point at which they became dependent on others to look after them, and thus ‘old age’ didn’t begin at a particular age, rather it varied from individual to individual. (1)

The concept of a universal retirement age/ old age which started at the same biological age for all people came much later…

European societies started to introduce state pensions in the early 20th century and over time the age at which people qualified for a pension came to mark the point at the ‘old age’ started, and so from this point forwards we’ve had something of a social consensus about when a ‘universal’ stage of life known as ‘retirement’ begins

The concept of retirement based on pensionable age marks out ‘later life’ or ‘old age’ as the time at which individuals are no longer required to do paid-work, rather they are entitled to sate -benefits based on their biological age, the amount they receive being dependent on what they have paid in to the pension pot during their working lives.

The retirement age is subject to change depending on social policy. For example in Britain the state pension age stood at 65 for men and 60 for women for many decades, but today the state pension age is being put back, depending on what year you were born in.

Similarly, the state pension age is now being increased: it is currently 66 and will increase to 67 for those born after April 1960, from 2026, and then it is set to increase to age 68 in the 2040s, and all of these ages and dates are subject to possible change in the future.

screen capture of pension age calculator UK

All of this demonstrates that the concept of the final stage of life is a social construction because:

  • It is mainly based on government defined notions of when people are formally allowed (though not obliged) to quit work.
  • The retirement age has changed overtime and is subject to potential age in the future.

Of course the concept of the retirement age is not the same as old-age, only related to it and one problem with conflating the two concepts is that most people live 20 years beyond the state retirement age and some live 40 years beyond it.

For this reasons some sociologists break up the stage of ‘old age’ into further sub categories. For example Jane Pilcher distinguishes between:

  • Young old – aged 65-74 years
  • Old elderly – aged 75 84 years
  • Very elderly – aged 85 years.

Laslett (1989) distinguishes between the Third Age at which retirement begins and people have fewer responsibilities and the Fourth Age when you become limited physically and or mentally.

One problem with this later conception of old age is that ‘decline’ is often gradual and by degree so there is no clear dividing line between third and fourth age.

Variations in old age between societies

Every known society on earth defines some people as old, but the age at which ‘old age’ begins varies, based on either biological age, physiological and/ or mental conditions/ capacities or generation.

The social norms and expectations of old age also vary. There are variations in how active/ passive old people are expected to be, how dependent or independent and whether they have high or low status within a society.

image of village elders having a meeting
Older people are often treated with more respect in traditional societies.

Why does ‘old age’ vary between societies?

Social organisation: nomadic societies tend not to value the elderly (based on their physical capacity) as they may be a burden when the group has to move on, and thus may be abandoned or encourage to commit s**cide for the good of the group. Non-nomadic societies tend to value older people more as physical capacity isn’t as essential to survival.

Preliterate societies tend to value the elderly more as they are repository of knowledge and skills and are vital to the passing down of those skills and knowledge to younger generations. In literate societies knowledge and skills are stored in text form and so this function of the old becomes redundant, thus they are valued less.

If society is organised in such a way that it is mainly the elderly who control wealth and resources then they may gain more respect if the younger generations have to pander to them to benefit from their wealth.

Cultural attitudes towards death and the afterlife also affect attitudes to ageing. in some societies withe ancestor belief systems the very old are seen as being closer the the spirits of the dead and so may gain status because of this. However in more secular societies which value life over death and there is no belief in the afterlife the old are more likely to be seen as more useless because their ‘best days’ are behind them!

Variations of Ageing within societies

Social class, gender, ethnicity and cohort all affect the experience of old age, and according to conflict perspectives there are stratifying effects based on these factors.

These stratification effects accumulate over the life course and so the effects of being in a relatively disadvantaged social class, cohort, ethnicity or gender will be greatest in old age.

Social class and old age

There is considerable variation in the income of pensioners across the UK (3).

Pensioners are spread fairly evenly across the income distribution, with a slight tendency to be richer than working people.

  • 20% of pensioners are in the richest fifth
  • Approximately 22% are in the next richest fifth and third richest fifth
  • 21% are in the fourth quintle.
  • Only 14% are in the poorest quintile.
pension income distribution UK 2021

Those in the richest fifth are more likely to have had careers in professional occupations and to have private investment incomes.

Those lower down the income scale are more likely to have spent a life in temporary or insecure employment and so are going to be dependent on just the state pension for their income.

Life expectancy also varies by social class and so not only do the higher classes have higher pensions, they stay alive longer to enjoy them.

Gender and old age

Sexism and old age can combine to make the experiences of older women especially difficult.

Older women are more likely than men to be characterised as unattractive, and dependent and helpless victims, for example.

Sarah Arber (2006) notes the following differences in the social positions of older men and women.

  • Women live longer men and so tend to outlive their partners which means they are less likely to have a spouse to care for them in older age and are more likely to end up living in care homes than men.
  • Older women are more likely to be in poverty than men because of lower levels of economic activity during their working lives because of more childcare duties.

In contrast men are more likely to have partners to care for them in later life as they die younger, but those who end up single tend to have higher levels of pension wealth.

Older women have become more independent over time, and more are finding intimate partners in later life, although they tend to opt for living apart for them to avoid caring duties.

Ethnicity and old age

Minority groups tend to have lower occupational pensions. The average gross weekly income for pensioners in 2021 was £556, but for Black and Asian pensioners income was only £391 and £412 pounds per week respectively.

pension income by ethnicity bar chart, UK 2021

Despite their lower pension incomes members of all ethnic minority groups live longer than white pensioners (5):

Older members of minority groups tend to have more social contact with family members which may reflect the higher rates of multi generational households and they also stronger social networks so are less likely to be isolated.

Variations in the experience of age by Cohort

The current generation of pensioners were born mostly in the 1940s and 1950s and are most likely to be enjoying a long and well funded retirement which started at age 65 or earlier for many of them, and most have no mortgage payments as they own their own houses outright.

In contrast today’s Gen Zers are unlikely to get on the property ladder until their late 30s and face a possible retirement age of 70 or later, and the possibility of their mortgages carrying on into their mid 70s.

It is much more likely that a higher proportion of pensioners in 40 years time are going to be in poverty than today.

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the culture and identity module, one of the options usually taught as part of the first year in A-level Sociology.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources/ find out more

(1) Featherstone and Hepworth (1990) The Mask of Ageing and the Postmodern LIfecourse.

(2) Pilcher (1995) Age and Generation in Modern Britain.

(3) Gov.uk (accessed May 2023) Pensioner Income Series.

(4) Gov.uk (accessed May 2023) Ethnicity Facts and Figures: UK Pensioner Income.

(5) Office for National Statistics: Life Expectancy by Ethnicity.

(6) Check your State Pension Age.

Arber et al (2006) Changing Approaches to Gender and Ageing.

Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.

Age and the Life Course

ageing is socially constructed, to an extent, shaped by social norms, the age structure and generation experiences.

Ageing is a universal biological fact of life: everyone goes through physical transformations as they age: from conception to birth followed by a period of physical and mental maturation during childhood, puberty and adulthood, and finally physical decline leading towards eventual death.

While biological age and ageing are obviously linked to both physical and psychological development sociologists argue that age and ageing cannot be fully understood without looking at their social contexts: the process of ageing and the normal ‘stages of life’ which are associated with different ages vary enormously historically and across societies, and so many aspects of age are a social construction.

Norms surrounding childhood in Britain have, for example, changed drastically over the last 200 years. In the early 19th century it was regarded as acceptable for young people to do paid work, meaning that people as young as 12 were already taking on adult roles. Today people are legally required to be in school until at least 16 and most won’t take on full adult working responsibilities until finishing tertiary (university) education at 21 or 22 years of age.

Attitudes towards older people vary across cultures too: in China and Japan elderly people are treated with respect, regarded as having wisdom and worth listening to and seeking advice from. In Western European societies older people are generally seen as non-productive, dependent and out-of-touch, and the very elderly are often hidden away in care-homes, forgotten about by society.

Hence to an extent age and the life course are socially constructed, but we have to also recognise the role that biological or physical ageing plays too!

Factors affecting the experience of ageing

There are at least three broad factors which affect the experience of ageing:

  1. Biology and the physical ageing process
  2. The society we live in and the way society interprets the ageing process (and socially constructs age)
  3. The age structure of a society
  4. The historical period into which we are born (our age cohort or generation). 

Biology and ageing 

Although sociologists prefer to focus on how things such as ‘age’ and ‘childhood’ are not purely biological but rather socially constructed, we can’t deny that biological age has an affect on the experience of ageing. 

As mentioned above human beings start off totally dependent on older human beings and as they get very old their physical and mental capacities deteriorate. 

Society and the social construction of age 

Most societies have norms surrounding what people of different biological ages should be doing at those ages, and these norms are often codified into laws. For example, people aged below 5 in Britain don’t have to go to school, people aged 5-16 MUST go to school (or be home-school), and from 16-18 laws change to allow the transition to adulthood at 18. 

It is well established within sociology that childhood is socially constructed, but also at the other end of the life course the pension age is too because it is society that determines that (for younger people today) this starts at age 68, it is currently (for people retiring today) set at 65.

Most people would also recognise that there is a typical ‘life course’ in their society, or a broad set of norms which outline what it is socially acceptable for people to be doing at certain ages between childhood and retirement. For example in Britain we broadly have a transition from childhood (dependency) to adolescence (becoming adult 16-21) to early adulthood (21-35 dating/ renting/ finding career) to midlife (35-65: established career, home owning, children) to retirement (65+ children left home, stopped working).

Granted, the boundaries above do vary a lot, and MANY people diverge from this model, but the life course above is still possibly recognisable as ‘typical’.  

Age Structure 

The age structure of a population refers to the relative size of age groups within a population at any one point in time. 

The age structure is affected by the fertility rate, life expectancy and migration. 

Age structures vary enormously between countries. In Germany, for example, which has a low birth rate and high life expectancy there are relatively few young people, a high proportion of 50-60 year olds and then numbers gradually tail off after 60, but still large numbers of people aged 70 plus. 

In Nigeria, there are many more younger people and relatively fewer people aged over 70 because of higher birth rates but lower life expectancy. 

The typical age someone can be expected to live can have a huge impact on the social construction of age, especially the retirement age. 

Age Cohort or Generation 

A group born in the same historical period is known as an age cohort, and they will grow up and age experiencing similar historical events which will influence their experience of ageing. 

There are no objective dividing lines between one age cohort and the next, it depends how the observer decides how to split the ages up: in schools we refer to each year as cohorts, but other research models may look at the experiences of people born in the same decades, grouping all people born in the 1970s together, all born in the 1980s together and so on. 

One of the best known popular versions of this is the distinction between Baby Boomers, Generation X and so on…

  • Baby Boomers: 1946 – 1964
  • Generation X: 1965 – 1980
  • Millennials: 1981 – 1996
  • Generation Z: 1997 – 2012
  • Generation Alpha 2013 – present day. 

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether the groupings above make sense, but the general idea is that the historical period you are born in will shape how you experience the life course. 

One way this seems to be true is that Baby Boomers had an easier time buying their houses when they were cheap and are able to retire comfortably, Generation Z face much more job insecurity, global warming as more of a threat, unaffordable housing and a later retirement age (yes kids, life is getting worse, sorry!). 

Life course and life cycle 

Life Cycle refers to the stages of life which people usually pass through as they age, from birth to death. 

There are different models of ‘life cycles’ but one example, applicable to the United Kingdom, is from Bradley (1996) who Identified five stages of life: 

  • Childhood – when children are in a state of innocence and dependency, protected by their parents and (in the UK today) and by law. This is the stage of life when children are learning norms, values, skills and knowledge to prepare them for adulthood, but are free from many of the responsibilities of adulthood. 
  • Adolescence – a time of transition from childhood to adulthood which takes place from puberty onwards. During this time adolescents are given more freedoms and responsibilities as they get older. This is also typically regarded as a time of experimentation, exploration of identities, and maybe deviance and rebellion. 
  • Young adulthood – the period from leaving the adult home to full adulthood, so possibly from early 20s to mid 30s: the time when young adults find their first jobs, and find and move in with their long term partners. 
  • Mid-life – There is disagreement over when mid-life begins: somewhere between 35 and 50. This is the ‘churn’ of adulthood – full time careers, dependent and then maybe independent children. 
  • Old age – Formal retirement age, when you can claim your pension, is 65 in the UK, so that is the formal ‘marker’ of old age. In Britain it is the end of work which marks this point in life. 

Jane Plicher argues that the concept of the life cycle is problematic because it implies that there are set stages through which all people pass. 

In reality, however, there is no universal life cycle through which everyone passes, and thus Plicher prefers to use the term Life Course. 

The concept of the life course recognises that in most societies there is a ‘socially defined timetable’ of behaviours generally seen as normal and acceptable for people of certain ages in that specific society, but also that people may experience their own individual life course in very different ways.

You can probably already see the above scheme of five stages is problematic because there is so much blurring between the boundaries of the stages, especially in the boundary between young adulthood and mid-life as there is so much variation in when people get established in their careers and have children. 

There is also considerable variation in experience within each age-group. For example, many people retire well before 65 and some continue working into their 70s. 

Ethnicity and gender can also affect people’s experiences as they age, another reason why ‘life course’ is preferable to ‘life cycle’. 

The De-standardisation of the Life Course 

Postmodernists argue that there is so much variation in the ‘Life Course’ today that it no longer makes any sense to talk of a life course anymore. 

Not only is there huge variation in the age at which people transition from adolescence to a state of independence in young adulthood, the age at which people have their first children spans 20 years, and many choose not to have children at all. Similarly it is hard to see when young adulthood becomes mid-life: many would argue 50 is still relatively young, and incredible diversity within all of these age brackets and especially in the way people experience retirement. 

Maybe there is no longer a social norm of the life course, just a series of individual choices around how to age? 

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the culture and identity module within A-level sociology, but also partly relevant to families and households.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

Age Pyramid: Germany: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Public_domain

Age Pyramid: Nigeria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria

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Nationalism and Modernity

Ernest Gellner argued that the nations, the nation state and nationalism had their origins in modernity, more specifically in the French and industrial revolutions of the late 18th century.

The origins of Nationalism and the feelings associated with it are thus not rooted in human nature, but in the social processes which emerged with the particular historical period of modernity.

Industrialisation led to rapid economic growth based on a complex division of labour and this required a large scale rational system to organise and direct it, hence the emergence of the nation state and its bureaucratic systems.

The modern state requires large numbers of people to interact with strangers, which in turn requires them to have some sense of connectedness to each other. Mass education based on an official language taught in schools helped to form the basis for this sense of unity on a large scale.

Map of europe late 18th century
Nations emerged with modernity and the industrial revolution in Europe.

Evaluations of Gellner

Gellner’s theory is a functionalist one, and it tends to understate the extent to which modern education systems create divisions and inequalities.

His theory doesn’t explain the persistence of nationalism: national identity extends far beyond schooling and the kind of nationalisms we see in political conflicts can’t be explained by people simply having been taught in the same language at school several years or decades earlier.

The longing some people have for national identity precedes the industrial revolution by a long way, and there have been ethnic communities which resemble nations in previous periods: such as Jewish communities which stretch back 2000 years. The Palestinian minority in Israel also claim their origins in a longer historical time frame and that they have been displaced by the creation of the modern Israeli state in 1948.

Formal nation state identities in Europe are not recognised by some ethnic minority groups in many countries. A good example of this is the Basque language and identity which spans the border of France and Spain. Basques claim a unique identity of their own, neither French nor Spanish.

Nationalism is still an important part of identity

Malesevic (2019) reminds us that nationalism still has very broad appeal and argues that it is a ‘grounded ideology’ that has mass appeal and has been part of the political projects of peoples across the political spectrum: from liberals to socialists throughout modernity.

When globalisation theory started to become popular in the 1990s some predicted that the nation state and nationalism would decline in importance.

For example, Giddens thought that the Nation State was too big to deal with local problems and too small to deal with global problems. He also thought we would see an increasing importance for a global, cosmopolitan identity.

However as examples such as Brexit, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the pro-American rhetoric of Donald Trump and Jo Biden show us, ideas of nationalism and national identity have remained a persistent part of modern society!

Signposting

This material is relevant to the Culture and Identity aspect of the A-level sociology specification.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

Siniša Malešević (2019) Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis

Nations without States

Many national identities do not have formal nation states with full autonomy: examples include the Welsh, the Basques, the Kurds and the Palestinians.

Nations without states consist of well-defined ethnic groups who identify together as a nation but lack an independent political community and autonomous self-governing body.

Nations without states exist within existing nation states, and sometimes across more than one already existing state. Examples include separatist movements in Israel/ Palestine and the Basque country in France and Spain.

Guibernau (1999) identifies two basic types of nations without states depending on the relationship the ethnic group has with the state or states in which it exists.

Map of Kurdish people in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
The Kurdish People are one of the larges stateless nations.

‘Nations’ recognised by nation states

An established nation state may accept the cultural differences of its ethnic minority populations and allow them some freedom to manage these. For example Scotland and Wales within Britain have the freedom to manage some of their own institutions.

Scotland has its own parliament and independent legal and education system. It also has the power to set a different rate of Income tax to England. Wales also has its own parliament and education system, and the welsh language is prominent in public institutions (formal documents are published in both English and Welsh), although Wales is not quite as devolved as Scotland.

Similarly the Basque country and Catalonia are both recognised as ‘autonomous communities’ within Spain and they have their own parliaments with some degree of autonomy.

But in both the cases of Britain and Spain most of the political power is located in the main national governments in London and Madrid: military power is controlled by these, for example, and not devolved!

Other nations without states have higher degrees of autonomy with regional bodies which have the power to make major political decisions without being fully independent. Examples here include Quebec in Canada and Flanders in Belgium.

In all of the above cases, these ‘nations without states’ have nationalist movements which advocate for full autonomy.

There is a possibility that Scotland will become fully independent in the future: there is a lot of support for the Scottish National Party who campaign for full independence, and although they lost their referendum on independence in 2014 they may well win another one in the future.

Nations not recognised by nation states

There are other examples where ‘nations’ are not formally recognised and the formal nation state in which they exist may use force to suppress the minority group.

Examples such situations include:

  • Palestinians in Israel
  • Tibetans in China
  • Kurds in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

The capacity for these groups to build their own formal nation states depends on many factors, but mainly the relative power of the nation state(s) within which they exist and any other nation states elsewhere in the world they may form alliances with.

The Kurds for example have a ‘Parliament in Exile’ in Brussels, and also a ‘safe haven’ in Northern Iraq which was established after the Gulf War of 1990-91 and consolidated after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, so you might say they are on their way to establishing nationhood.

The Dalai Lama is the center of the movement for Tibetan Independence from China, based in Dharamshala in India, but the Tibetans have much less chance of having their autonomy recognised given the immense power of China, even though Tibet was once a distinct country before China took it over in 1951.

Signposting

This material should be relevant to anyone studying the nationalism and identity aspect of the culture and identity module, taught as part of most A-level sociology specifications.

Sources

Giddens and Sutton (2021) Sociology 9th edition

Montserrat Guibernau (1999) Nations Without States: Political Communities in a Global Age.

Where are the Kurds? Map

Nations as Imagined Communities

nations are socially constructed entities.

Benedict Anderson (1983) defines a nation as an imagined political community: imagined both as inherently limited and sovereign.

There are three defining characteristics of a nation:

  1. It is imagined because most members of even the smallest nations never meet most other members, yet they feel like they belong to the same community.
  2. It is limited because nations include some people and exclude others. No nation claims to include all of humanity.
  3. It is sovereign because nations claim political independence and the right to self-governance on the part of the people who belong to them.

The nation is a social construction: it exists in as far as the people who perceive themselves as part of it imagine it.

The origin of nations 

Anderson argued that the first European nation states were formed with the emergence of national print languages, in the early to mid 16th century, shortly after capitalist entrepreneurs started producing mass print runs of books in national languages rather than the more elitist Latin. 

One event which symbolises the start of this process is Martin Luther’s 1517 presentation of his religious views in German rather than Latin, and it was in the region around today’s Germany and also England that the first national languages were produced. 

Gradually greater numbers of people started to communicate with each other in national print languages rather than local dialects.

early printing press
The printing press laid the foundation for nations as imagined communities.

Nations as imagined communities 

National Print languages helped to develop early nation states, political entities which then went on to develop their own mass publications and further standardised national languages in doing so. 

Nation states also contributed to the imagination of national identity by developing maps (thus making visible the boundaries of nations), and standardising calendars and clock time. 

Also important was the decline of the idea of the Divine Right of Kings and the emergence of democracy: previously the Catholic church had power over large swathes of Europe, which had been something of a barrier to the formation of national consciousnesses. The gradual separation of the church from the state laid the foundation for the imagination of the nation as a sovereign, political community. 

As nations developed through the centuries more institutions and ceremonies were developed that further reinforced the idea of a shared national identity, some of them having their origins in government, some in the private sector.

Examples of things which enhance a sense of national identity include:

  • Great works Works of literature such as those by Shakespear, whose plays had a mass audience. 
  • Standing militaries and conflicts. War is a time when mass populations get behind their nations, the Falklands war in the 1980s may have been a good example of this. 
  • Many political parties in the 20th century came to power on the back of overtly nationalist ideologies, Nazi Germany is an obvious example of this. 
  • Sending national teams to global events such as the World Cup and Olympic Games. 

The industrial revolution and capitalism were essential to the emergence of nations and ideas of nationalism because without these the printing press and mass communications would not have been developed.

map of Europe 1740
Early maps of Europe reinforced a sense of national identity.

The difference between racism and nationalism

Racism is based on ‘dreams of eternal contamination’ an is based on certain peoples having fixed, biological characteristics which form the basis of inclusion and exclusion in terms of racial groups. It is not possible to become part of a race which one is not born into.

Nationalism is not based on ideas of certain people having fixed biological traits which automatically exclude them. Anyone can potentially become part of a nation, irrespective of who their parents or grandparents are.

Early ideas of nationalism may have been tied up with colonialism and racism, but nationalism and racism are not the same thing!

The nation as a positive source of identity

Anderson claims that we have lived in the ‘era of nationalism’ since the 16th century: since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in nationalist terms and we can thus say that nationalism is the most universal value of our times.

He argues it is difficult to dismiss as problematic an idea that has such importance to so many people and forms the basis for modern global political relations in the form of Nation States.

Certainly the idea of Nationalism is very relevant today as the examples of Brexit, and the United Kingdom’s recent immigration bill which puts the British Nation before the European Convention on Human Rights demonstrate.

He recognizes that the origins of nationalism may well have been racists, but his distinction between nationalism and racism reminds us that nations do not have to be imagined at all in racist terms. The idea of British Values possibly demonstrates this.

Evaluations

Anderson may understate the relationship between nationalism and racism: many nationalisms are based on ideas of ethnic purity.

Anderson did not apply his ideas to the mass media or the internet. Mass communications online may do more to enhance cross border global identities compared to national identities.

National Identity may be less important today given that many people’s sense of self is more tied up with their sense of gender identity or simply their interests!

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the Culture and Identity option, taught as part of A-level sociology.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

Benedict Anderson (1983) Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism

Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.

Printing press image source: By Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki – DANIEL CHODOWIECKI 62 bisher unveröffentlichte Handzeichnungen zu dem Elementarwerk von Johann Bernhard Basedow. Mit einem Vorworte von Max von Boehn. Voigtländer-Tetzner, Frankfurt am Main 1922. (self scanned from book), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17927966

Europe in 1740: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=767922

The Postmodern Subject

Postmodern subjects have fragmented identities.

Stuart Hall (1992) argued that ideas about identity have changed throughout history.

He argued there were three main concepts of identity which fitted three main historical eras:

  1. Pre-modernity – individual identities were not regarded as unique, but rather related to the great ‘chain of being’.
  2. Modernity and the sociological subject – individuals were seen as unique and their identities linked to broader class structures, genders and nation states.
  3. Postmodernity – postmodern subjects have multiple and fragmented identities.

Identity in Premodern societies

In premodern societies people’s identities were largely based around the position they were born into, and was determined by traditional social structures and religion.

People were not regarded as being unique individuals in their own right, but rather as part of the great chain of being and a person’s identity was ascribed dependent on their place in that chain.

Individuals thus had little scope to change their identities as they moved through life, they were largely set at birth, and established by their social class and gender.

The Enlightenment Subject

During the Enlightenment (16th to 18th centuries) a new conception of identity emerged with each individual coming to be seen as having a unique, distinct identity of their own which was not part of the great chain of being.

Hall suggests this concept first came from Descartes who had a dualistic conception of humans, with each individual mind being separate from every other mind, as evidenced in his well known phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’.

From the Enlightenment onwards individuals were seen as having unique identities with distinctive consciousnesses and were seen as capable of working things out for themselves on the basis of logic and reason.

The Sociological Subject

As modernity progressed a number of complex social and political structures emerged, such as companies and nation states.

Individuals increasingly became connected to these complex local, national and increasingly global structures and the concept of identity started to become more social, as individual identities were more an more related to things such as class structures and nations.

For much of modernity these structures stitched the individual into them, stabilizing both individual identities and the societies which they inhabited.

We see this approach in the Functionalist theory of identity, although this may have been over romanticized and uncritical, and we also see it in the symbolic interactionist approach to identity, the latter perspective allowing for much more individual freedom than the former.

The Postmodern Subject

With the shift to postmodernity identities become more fragmented. Individuals no longer have a clear sense that they have just one identity, rather they see themselves as having multiple, overlapping and sometimes contradictory identities.

According to Hall identity has become decentered: individuals can no longer find a core to their identity. Identities are more likely to be constantly changing, fluid, and thus more uncertain.

Social changes and the fragmentation of identity

A number of social changes have lead to the increasing fragmentation of identity:

Globalisation means that people are now increasingly communicating with others in faraway places and, even if they are unable to leave their location, individuals no longer have to construct an identity based on the specific place they are in.

Individuals living in Asia are able to identify with bands or sports teams in Europe and America, just by adopting dress styles and the appropriate ways of speaking.

Granted, the spread of consumer culture may have lead to more homogenization of culture globally, but from the perspective of the individual constructing their identity there is certainly more choice than in modern times, and the capacity to construct multiple identities at once, combining both the local and the global.

Politics has changed to become less about social class and nation states and more about identity politics. New Social Movements have emerged around such issues as ethnicity, gender and identity and green issues, which has fragmented the political landscape.

Feminism has played an important role in changing identities because it opened up the historically private realm of the private sphere to scrutiny, debate and ultimately change.

In modernity men and women largely accepted their given gendered identities, but since early Feminism challenged domestic roles such as the ‘housewife role’ as an identity that had to be linked to women, and also challenged it for being inherently unsatisfying, every aspect of identity linked to sexual relationships and family life has come up for ongoing negotiation.

Reaffirming identities

Hall argues some individuals and groups respond to the above postmodern fragmentation brought on by globalisation by reaffirming national identity.

We see numerous examples of this ranging from civil wars which want to break up countries along imagined ethnic lines (Yugoslavia for example) and we see it, possibly, in Brexit.

Signposting and Relevance to A-level Sociology

Hall’s conception of identity means that traditional sociological perspectives such as Functionalism and even social interactionism will struggle to explain the nature of identity in postmodern society.

This material is mainly relevant to the Culture and Identity option.

Sources

Hall, S. (1992). The Question of Cultural Identity. In: S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (Eds.), Modernity and Its Futures. Milton Keynes. Cambridge: Open University Press.

Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.

Identity and Difference

A summary of Kath Woodward’s theory of how identity is constructed.

Identity is to do with how an individual answers the question ‘who am I?’. This is not just a psychological question but also a social question because it involves an individual in deciding what social groups they identify with.

The individual has agency over which groups they identify with and can choose to act in a way that confirms that identity.

Identity is a matter of making decisions about similarities and differences. It is about deciding which groups you share things in common with and which groups are different to the groups you identify with.

This post is a summary of some of the key ideas in Kath Woodward’s (1997) Identity and Difference.

Structural constraints on individual identity

Identity is both subjective and objective. It involves how I see myself and how other see me.

With some identities it is relatively easy to synchronise how I see myself and how others see me, such as with being a football fan or being a metalhead. As long as you support the team, wear the strip, and attend matches or listen to heavy metal music, where a leather jacket and grow your hair long, most other people in the football or metal groups will probably accept your subjective definition of yourself.

With other identities syncing the subjective and objective dimensions of identity may be more difficult as other people may contest your own self-definition. Consider the recent debates over trans-rights for example: the British government does not accept that a person who is a biological man has the right to subjectively identify as a female, even if that is their subjective definition of their self.

Thus in some cases there are structural constraints which limit the capacity of individuals to self-identity in certain ways.

Examples of structural constraints on identity

  • biological sex – even in Britain in 2023 the government doesn’t recognise the legal right of trans people to identify as a different gender to their biological sex
  • social class – in many of the highest paid professional jobs such as Medicine, Journalism and Law the working classes lack the cultural capital to fit in with work culture and may well be excluded from equal opportunities.
  • Economic – some people may lack the money to purchase the products to signify the identities they wish to.
  • nationality – some immigrants may be prevented from adopting formal identities as citizens because of racist immigration policies.

Structure and individual identities

Following Althusser, Woodward argues that we are recruited into identities through a process of interpellation, or hailing.

As individuals go through life they are surrounded by a number of signs and symbols which call to them, they look at these symbols, interpret them and recognise themselves in some of them, with which they come to identify.

Pre-existing symbols often interpellate different groups differently, so there are different hailings dependent on age, gender and ethnicity for example.

For example, media images are far more likely interpellate women to wear short skirts and sexualise their bodies compared to men.

These symbols are a pre-existing part of the social structure and different symbols call out to different types of people depending on their class, gender and nationality, and thus interpellation links structure to agency in the formation of identities.

Developing identities

Woodward drew on the work of Mead, Goffman and Freud to theorise about how individuals developed their identities.

Mead

Following Mead, Woodward argued that an individual develops an identity by imagining how others see them, and this involves visualising ourselves in social situations and thinking through what ways of acting are appropriate for those situations.

For example, when we attend a job interview, we tend to plan ahead and think about what to wear, how to introduce ourselves and what questions to ask the interviewers at the end of the process.

When attending a job interview an individual does not have total freedom of choice over what to wear or how to act. They have a range of clothes, speech styles and demeanours (symbols) they can choose from which are limited by the pre-existing culture of the job they are applying for.

Thus while we have to employ agency when we visualise ourselves in the job interview and are making choices about what to wear and how to act those choices are limited by the culture we are going into.

An individual goes through a similar process when deciding what social roles to adopt.

Goffman

Following Goffman, Woodward argues that there is a performative element to social roles. People imagine what behaviours are appropriate to the roles they are in (or wish to go into) and try to act in ways which will convince people they are fulfilling that social role (at least when they are visible, or on on the social stage)

If you think about a teacher, for example, there are a number of behaviours they need to display every day to convince people they are performing the teacher role successfully, such as smart dress, punctuality, prompt and fair assessment, inclusivity, enthusiasm, and so on.

This process of developing a social identity is complex. Goffman distinguished between the back stage of social life where we prepare for and practice our social roles and the front stage where we perform them.

Teaching is a good example of how these two work together. The backstage is the lengthy teacher training process, lesson planning, thinking through how to deal with difficult students, there is a lot of planning and preparation before the teacher goes into school and plays their role on the front stage.

Freud

Finally Woodward draw on Freud and recognised that the repression of sexual desire in early childhood plays an ongoing role in the formation of identity in adulthood.

People have an unconscious which contains repressed feelings and desires they are not aware of. Sexual desire and sexuality are large part of this and gender is a huge part of our identities. Our sense of who we are is fundamentally tied up with our identities as men and women.

Uncertainty and identity in the UK

Changing social structures in postmodern times mean that identities are increasingly insecure and uncertain today, and there are several example of this…

The decline of traditional masculine and female identities

The decline of heavy industry such as mining in the U.K. has lead to men going through something of a crisis of masculinity. Traditional working class masculine identities in industrial areas were based on men doing physically demanding labour, such as mining, and adopting the breadwinner role within the family.

Men in traditional working class areas increasingly face a choice between unemployment or jobs which aren’t particularly masculine and much more likely to be insecure, which compromises their ability to express their masculinity through physical labour and to be effective breadwinners.

At the same time women’s job opportunities have increased and more women have gone into the labour market, changing their traditional roles as housewives and mothers, and meaning that the typical relationship today will involve a negotiation about the respective roles men and women will play, the old certainties are gone.

Family is also an uncertain source of identity today as marriage is less likely, and for those who do get married, more than 40% will end in divorce. The result is a family landscape that is more diverse with more single people, more cohabiting couples, more step-families and thus the family today is much less likely to be a stable source of identity, and more likely to be one in which identities shift as relationships breakdown.

New technologies have also challenged traditional biological constraints on when women can have children. The oldest person to have a child is now over 65 thanks to IVF, and so women don’t necessarily have to switch off the idea that the parent-hood identity is over by their mid-40s, and the same goes for their male partners too.

The decline of national identities

There is also more uncertainty over national identity today. Just look at the painfully insipid list of characteristics which the government calls ‘British Values’, these are so vague and can be interpreted in so many different ways that they can never act as a source of collective identity.

Add to this Brexit which divided the nation, the death of Queen, the main symbold of British identity in many people’s eyes, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all wanting to go their own way, and it’s clear there is no real idea of what ‘Britishness’ means anymore, if there ever was.

New Social Movements such as the green movement also offer new sources of identity linking the global and the local around specific political issues, which overtly challenges the failure of the Nation State to tackle such issues.

Identity and Consumer culture

Consumer culture now allows people to express their identities in a huge variety of ways.

Individuals have a huge amount of choice over the material products they can buy which signify something about themselves: from clothes to cars and gadgets and the way in which they style their houses.

The body has also become a project in postmodern society with more people working out and sculpting their bodies becoming a major source of identity, and body modifications such as tattoos or more drastically plastic surgery.

Kath Woodward’s theory of identity: Evaluation

Woodward offers us a useful insight into the complexities of identity construction in postmodern society.

She draws mainly on action theory to describe how people actively construct their identities but she also recognises that there are objective, structural limitations which limit the identities individuals can carve out.

However despite the existence of objective structural barriers which limit the free expression and construction of identity increasing amounts of people forge forward to construct new identities in postmodern society.

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the Culture and Identity option within A-level sociology.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

Kath Woodward (1997) Identity and Difference.

Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.

Gender Socialisation in Schools

Barrie Thorne used observations in two primary schools and theorised that children played an active role in constructing their own gender identities.

Children play an active role in ‘doing gender’ and constructing their own gender identities. Differences in gender identity are developed dynamically as children interacted with several other children and adults throughout their childhoods.

There are not simply two sets of male and female gender roles or identities, there is a much more complex variation: not all boys respond in the same way in the same situations, and neither do girls.

However, despite their active role in the process, children still tend to adopt existing gender roles and thus reproduce gender inequalities.

The material below summarises the work of Barrie Thorne, primarily her 1993 book Gender Play. Thorne was a feminist researcher who developed her interest following her experience of attempting to bring up her own children in a gender neutral way, which didn’t quite work out.

Feminist theory applied to gender socialisation

Thorne argued that gender is not just something we passively receive through socialisation, rather gender is something that we actively do in our day to day activities. There are thus multiple different ways of interpreting and expressing masculinity and femininity, and the construction of gender identities is fluid.

This theory of the development of gender identity broadly draws on Ervin Goffman’s work on the presentation of the self in everyday life.

She discusses her theory in the context of wider power relations, particularly those of men, but believes there is no fixed patriarchal structure and emphasised that groups of women can have different interests to others and follows the theory of postmodern and difference feminism.

School organisation and gender relations

Thorne found that some primary school classes were organised by teachers into boys only and girls only tables, but even in those classes where pupils were given freedom of choice, boys tended to sit with boys and girls with girls. So in terms of the organisation of the classroom it was either teachers or pupils who chose to reinforce gender segregation.

Some teachers, but not all, further reinforced gender differences by organising teams for games into boys and girls or having boys and girls lunch queues, and such situations could lead to antagonism or rivalry between the two genders.

However at other times children would work in mixed gender groups and generally got on with it and worked co-operatively when gender was not brought to the fore and made an issue out of.

Peer groups and gender socialisation

At play time children had much more freedom of choice over who they could hang out and interact with and children chose to organise themselves in a gender segregated way.

Friendship groups tended to be either all male or all female and you could visibly see in playgrounds that there were distinct boys and girls games, with boys being in one area and girls another.

Boys tended to take up most of the space in the playground, playing football and baseball while girls tended to play closer to the school buildings and play games such as skipping and hopscotch. Boys also actively excluded girls who wanted to play football and vice versa with girls who wouldn’t allow boys to join in with skipping.

Borderwork

Thorne developed the concept of borderwork to describe the active process of marking out the boundaries between male and female social groups.

One form of borderwork was ‘cross-border chasing’ the most well known form of which was ‘kiss chase’, ‘a ritualised form of provocation‘.

Girls chased boys and tried to kiss them, sometimes wearing lipstick so as to leave a visible mark on their ‘victims’, and boys tried to avoid being kissed to escape the embarrassment. Boys who were caught were teased by other boys complained about getting ‘cooties’, or germs from the girls who kissed them.

The lowest status girls were given the term ‘cootie queen’ to signify that spending too much time chasing boys (and thus being in boys’ territory) was not a good thing, not something that girls should be doing, other than occassionally to annoy boys.

A second form or borderwork was more deliberate cross-gender interrupting of activities, such as boys deliberately stepping on girls skipping ropes to annoy them.

Borderwork served to dramatise the difference between boys and girls, exaggerated the differences between them and reinforced the idea that the two were opposits.

Borderwork also tended to reinforce male power with boys being much more likely to use physical power to disrupt girls games and girls having to chase them off.

Why gender segregation?

Thorn argued that there was no one reason why boys and girls separated themselves along gender lines in school, socialisation alone certainly wasn’t enough to explain the obvious gender segregation, but she highlighted the following:

School playgrounds are crowded environments in which it easy for groups to police behaviour. Because of the relatively high population density it makes it easy for boys and girls to call-out those who don’t conform to their expected gender identities, and, following Foucault, it also means boys and girls are more likely to police their own gendered behaviour because they know they are under constant surveillance by their peers.

Some games in school involved public choosing, and under such circumstances boys tended to select boys and girls to select girls, reinforcing gender segregation. However with handball students tended to just line up behind the team leaders and here there was less gender separation.

Thorne noted that were adults were not present pupils tended to police behaviour along gendered lines more vigorously, but when adults were present, they were more likely to encourage gender mixing.

However some teachers could also reinforce gender segregation by warning boys off going into girls areas in the playground for fear that they might cause disruption.

Overlap between genders

There were plenty of activities in which traditional gender norms were challenged in the school, and there was not a straightforward duality of distinct male and female cultures.

Some games, such as handball, were gender-mixed and there were cases of ‘braver’ boys and girls crossing traditional gender lines to play games, with some boys playing skipping and some girls playing football, for example.

It was especially the more popular boys who could get away with playing girls games without being teased and the stronger girls who could get away with playing boys games and developing a ‘tomboy’ identity.

Evaluations

Thorne’s study challenges simplistic dualism behind early Feminist conceptions of dualistic gender norms, divided simply into masculinity and femininity.

Her concept of ‘doing gender’ reminds us that passive notions of socialisation are not sufficient to explain the very active and animated process through which the taking on of gender roles.

Her in-depth ethnography allows us to trace the subtle differences in interpretations and interactions through which gender identities are constructed.

On the downside she doesn’t really explore the role which structure plays in channelling pupils towards traditional gender identities, even though she makes such a big deal about how active the process of doing gender is.

Signposting

This material is primarily relevant to the compulsory education module taught as part of first year AQA A-level sociology.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

Barrie Thorne (1993) Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School.

Playground image source.

Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.

Dominic Strinati – A Critique of Mass Culture Theory

mass culture is not homogenous, its consumers are not passive and there are no distinct high or folk cultures.

Writing in the early 200s, Dominic Strinati is a contemporary cultural theories who developed one of the most comprehensive critiques of mass culture theory (1).

Strinati made four main criticisms of mass culture theory:

  • Mass culture is not homogenous
  • consumers of mass culture are not passive
  • There is no clear boundary between high and mass (or popular) culture
  • There are no authentic folk cultures.

Mass culture is not homogenous

Mass culture theory tends to see popular culture as being all the same, but Strinati disagrees, arguing that there is a lot of diversity of cultural products within popular culture.

Probably the best example of this is within popular music as there are several different genres, from rock to new wave, and from soul to trance.

It’s difficult to maintain the argument that the music industry churns out uniform products for mass audiences with so much diversity of musical choice today.

Consumers of mass culture are not passive

Mass culture theory tends to portray the ‘masses’ of ordinary people as cultural dopes who will happily and passively consume anything that the media churns out.

Strinati rejects this idea pointing out that the audience is not a ‘undifferentiated mass’, rather audiences are diverse groupings of people who interpret media content in numerous different ways.

Many consumers of mass (or popular) cultural products are discriminating and have mixed tastes. They are critical of aspects of the cultural products they consume, and some consumers actively reject some products altogether, hence why there are so many box office flops!

For example, the 2013 version of the Lone Ranger, one of the most popular television shows of the 1950s, was one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, losing $200 million.

Consumers of mass (or popular) culture can be discerning after all!

No clear boundary between high and mass culture

Mass culture theory rests on drawing a clear boundary between high culture and low or mass culture.

However Strinati argues that the boundary between the two is not objective, rather it is subjective and thus blurred and forever changing. It is after all, people with power who decided what high culture is and power in societies shift over time.

An example of this is with Jazz Music and Rock and Roll. Jazz used to be an integral part of working class culture in America, but today it has attained elite status, and there are hundreds of popular songs from the 1960s which have today attained the status of classics.

There are no authentic folk cultures

Mass culture theory also distinguishes between ‘authentic’ folk cultures which are somehow supposed to be better than ‘popular culture’ because folk cultures are rooted in the day to day lives of local peoples.

Strinati points out that this kind of face-face to face rootedness doesn’t necessarily make folk cultures any better than popular cultural products. In a way it’s a matter of who cares about authenticity? Popular culture is about enjoyment, that doesn’t necessarily make it inferior.

Strinati also questions whether folk cultures are actually authentic today – most cultures have been influenced by outside forces around the world, after all!

Cultural Politics and Power

Strinati argues that mass culture theory is a product of cultural politics rather than an objective assessment of the relative merits of so-called high and low cultures.

Mass culture theory represents a backlash by intellectuals who feel threatened by the growth of popular culture which threatens the hierarchy of taste by giving everybody equal power to choose what they think are the best books etc.

Effectively the rising popularity of popular culture threatens the symbolic power of intellectuals over the standards of taste which are applied to the consumption of cultural goods. They have thus labelled popular culture ‘mass culture’ and claimed it is inferior, when in fact it isn’t!

Signposting

This material has been written primarily for students studying the culture and identity option as part of their A-level sociology course.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

Strinati (2004) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture

Part of this post was adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives 8th Edition.

Postmodernisation

Postmodernisation is the process of modern culture transforming into Postmodern culture/ postculture.

Postmodernisation describes the transition of modern to postmodern culture. Modern culture was characterised by differentiation, rationalisation and commodification, but with postmodernisation these processes accelerate into hyperdifferentiation, hyper-rationalisation and hypercommodification resulting in postculture.

The concepts of postmodernisation and postculture were developed by Crook, Pakulski and Waters in 1992 in their book Postmodernisation: Change in Advanced Society (1)

Modern Culture

During modernity modern culture underwent three transformations:

  • Differentiation – the separating out of culture from other spheres of society and the development of specialist cultural institutions.
  • Rationalisation – the increasing application of science and technology to the production of cultural products
  • Commodification – increasingly turning cultural products into goods that could be easily bought, sold and consumed by the masses.

Differentiation

Differentiation is the separating out of different parts of society. It is where the economic, political, social and cultural spheres become more distinct and separate from each other and they come to be judged by different criteria:

  • Science comes to be judged by truth-claims
  • Morality and law come to be judged by justice and goodness
  • Art comes to be judged by beauty.

in the modern era, each sphere develops its own distinct specialist institutions and occupations.

In pre-modern times individuals were able to become musicians, artists and authors because of the patronage of the rich. With the onset of modernity specialist art schools developed to train individuals to become specialists in cultural production, and institutions such as theatres, art galleries and concert halls developed to make these products more widely available.

These specialist cultural institutions formed the basis for the emergence of high culture, which became distinct from folk culture which emerged from ordinary local peoples.

As modernity developed, new types of popular culture emerged also as specialist institutions separated out from other areas of social life, such as music halls and seaside holiday resorts.

Rationalisation

Rationalisation also shaped modern culture.

Music came to be more influenced by mathematical formula, leading to ‘harmonic rationalisation’ and there was also rationalisation in the mass-production of music.

Technology also contributed to the rationalisation of culture because it made it easier to copy complex forms of art and make them more accessible to wider audiences. Record players and radios for example made it possible to record complex forms of music meaning consumption of cultural products did not require people to be in the presence of a musician playing such songs.

Printing technology allowed for the mass production of artist and literary classics which enabled more people to access these works.

Crook et al argue that during modernity such mass production of high cultural products served to reinforce the status of high culture because it was mainly the classic high cultural works that were mass produced and consumed.

Commodification

The commodification of culture involves turning cultural products into commodities that can be easily bought and sold.

Arguing against mass culture theorists, Crook et al believed that the commodification of culture did not undermine high culture during modernity.

The commodification of culture served to reinforce the status of high culture because people had a choice over what to consume and most people came to regard high cultural products such as classical music and literature as superior cultural products.

High culture remains distinct in modern society.

Postmodernisation

In modern societies, culture is differentiated from other areas of life and high culture is distinct from popular culture. Postmodernisation reverses this trend.

Postmodernisation is where an intensification of differentiation, rationalisation and commodification leads to a reversing of some of the cultural trends evident in modernity and a new culture emerges which Crook et al call postculture.

Postmodernisation involves:

  • Differentiation being superseded by Hyperdifferentiation
  • Rationalisation being superseded by Hyper-rationalisation
  • Commodification being superseded by Hypercommodification

Hyperdifferentiation

With postmodernisation thousands of cultural products emerge and no one product is dominant. With so much variety it is increasingly difficult for anyone product to claim superiority.

For example

High culture is subsumed into popular culture, for example, classical music is increasingly used in adverts and thus high culture loses its elite status. Conversely aspects of popular culture are increasingly seen to have serious status in the eyes of those who enjoy them.

Ultimately though, at the societal level, culture in postmodern societies becomes de-differentiated: we end up with several different cultural styles each with its devotees who use their cultural products as sources of identity and see their culture as superior, but taken as a whole the idea that there is a cultural hierarchy when there is so much diversity seems increasingly ridiculous.

Hyper-rationalisation

Hyper-rationalistion involves the use of technology to privatise the experience of consumption of cultural products.

Digital technologies especially have allowed individuals to have much more freedom of choice over what music, television and films they watch, and over when they consume these products.

Such technologies have also made specific place-based venues such as concert halls and cinemas much less important as places where people consume music and film.

Following Baudrillard Crook et al argue that the hyper-rationalisation of culture erodes the distinction between authentic and inauthentic culture as media images come to dominate society. Media reproductions become more viewed than the underlying realities they represent and eventually their connection with reality is lost altogether and become what Baudrillard called Simulcra.

Hypercommodification

Hypercommodification involves all areas of social life becoming commodified.

In modern societies some areas of social life remained had escaped commodification, such as the family, community and class background. In modernity these spheres remained important sources of authentic, differentiated identity.

With postmodernisation, however, family, community and social class become increasingly subject to commodification.

Family life becomes increasingly invaded by the mass marketing of products and consumption increasingly takes place within the family-household. Part of this process is family members consuming different things. Parents and adults increasingly consume their own niche products, with children increasingly having their own T.V. sets in their bedrooms consuming their own children’s shows and adults watching adult shows in the living room.

This process drives families apart and results in the family no longer being a source of authentic collective identity as each individual family member increasingly chooses their own lifestyle.

Postmodernisation also undermines social class as a source of collective identity. With an increasing array of cultural products to choose from people from the same class increasingly choose different music, films, fashions and hobbies to indulge in which undermines traditional, modern social-class based identities.

Crook et al argue that with commodification identity is increasingly based on style which in turn is based on symbols rather than being rooted in shared experience based in the home or specific localities, thus identities are chosen and free-floating.

HyperDifferentiation, hyper-rationalisation and hypercommodification result in postculture!

Postculture

The end result of postmodernisation is postculture which is a culture characterised by diversity, choice and ultimately fragmentation, where lifestyle preferences replace a hierarchy of tastes based on social class and other social divisions.

At the time of writing, Crook et al saw postmodernisation as an ongoing process, believing that aspects of modern culture remained.

An interesting question to consider is whether we now live in a pure postmodernised postculture, 30 years on from their original theory!?!

Signposting

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

This material has primarily been written for A-level students studying the Culture and Identity option.

(1) Crook, Pakulski and Waters (1992) Postmodernisation: Change in Advanced Society (original misspelling of Postmodernization corrected here).

Adapted from Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives, edition 8.