Lifestyles is a term found in both popular and scholarly literatures, most often referring to health-related behaviors such as drug use and "unsafe" sex, various forms of deviance, and consumption choices. Two of the earliest uses of lifestyles are in the work of psychologist Alfred Adler and sociologist Max Weber. Unlike Freud, Adler viewed human behavior as oriented toward future goals rather than driven mechanistically by the past. In The Science of Living (1929), he employed the concept of "style of life" to describe the individual’s way of striving toward a goal of perfection within his or her particular social context. In contrast to Adler’s focus on the individual, Weber viewed lifestyles as socially structured, introducing lifestyle to differentiate between class and status. Weber argued that classes are defined by their relation to the production of goods, while status groups are differentiated according to their consumption of goods; the various ways in which groups consume goods cluster into distinctive lifestyles.
The common use of lifestyles in popular culture as well as in studies of health and deviance shares Adler’s focus on the individual to explain behavior, often connecting deviant behaviors such as drug use or unsafe sex to individual life decisions. In the scholarly and policy literatures, variables such as nutrition, housing, risk-taking behavior, health attitudes and beliefs, and preventative health behavior are used as primary indicators of lifestyles. In particular, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, diet, and sexual and intravenous drug practices (e.g., prostitution, needle sharing) are used to predict negative health outcomes. Experts in this field agree that individuals who abstain from smoking and drug use, consume alcohol in moderation, eat a healthy diet, refrain from violence, and practice safer sex have better survival rates than those who do not.
While the use of lifestyles in the health and behavioral sciences centers largely on individual practices, a vibrant social science discourse, in the tradition of Weber, points out that risk factors such as those listed above are only proximate causes of disease. A more sociological approach thus examines these lifestyles in terms of the social factors that put certain groups at greater risk for these behaviors in the first place. For example, in A Plague on Your Houses (1998), Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace argue that living conditions in low-income areas—such as overcrowding and persistent displacement due to urban renewal—result in outbreaks of substance abuse, violence, and contagious disease. Similarly, Carol Cunradi et al. (2000) demonstrate a causal link between neighborhood poverty and intimate partner violence. Other sociologists argue that deviant behavior does not inhere in particular individuals but is learned through social interaction. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the time, Howard Becker, for example, in Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), finds that marijuana smokers do not naturally adopt deviant behavior because of flawed personalities or psychological problems but instead have to learn from others how to smoke marijuana. Later work in the sociology of deviance led to the concept of subcultures, which are characterized by the social organization of deviance as distinctive lifestyles.
The concept of lifestyles also appears prominently in the "culture of poverty" debate (see Lewis 1966). The culture of poverty thesis, widely disseminated in the Moynihan Report (1965), holds that the qualitatively different values held by the poor result in deviant lifestyles, which in turn lead to continued poverty. This argument has been criticized by sociologists such as Herbert Gans (1972, 1995), Ann Swidler (1986), and Elijah Anderson (1999), among many others, for its lack of attention to structural factors such as unemployment, inequality, and discrimination.
The socially structured nature of lifestyles is also emphasized in the sociology of consumption. In his famous study, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen argued that the wealthy translate their money into symbols of prestige through "conspicuous consumption" and leisure. Veblen connects lifestyles to social hierarchy and explains that the lower classes emulate the "scheme of life" of the upper class. For Veblen, lifestyles are always observable, external, and conscious— in other words, conspicuous—that is, primarily enacted as vehicles for status and power.
Along these lines, economists, psychologists, and demographers explain lifestyles as sets of shared preferences. Tracing the development of American consumer culture, Lizabeth Cohen in A Consumer’s Republic (2003) reveals that after World War II, merchants and advertisers moved away from treating consumers as a homogeneous group. Instead, marketers sought to "identify clusters of customers with distinctive ways of life and then set out to sell them idealized lifestyles constructed around commodities" (p. 299).
Target marketing both reflected and indeed created particular consumption patterns, defined not only by material goods but also by cultural frameworks for how to live, particularly through techniques such as "slice of life" advertising.
Another seminal work in the consumption literature is Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984), which argues that the tensions of late capitalism are played out through consumption as social practice. In contrast to Veblen, Bourdieu emphasizes the habitual, internalized, and largely unconscious cultural practices implicated in lifestyles by explaining that people’s class positions predispose them to certain lifestyles, which they experience as personal and freely chosen. Thus, Bourdieu creates a map of ostensibly natural and individual lifestyles—centered on taste—and reveals their socially patterned, cultural logic. His use of lifestyles is radically anti-individualist: Even seemingly idiosyncratic qualities such as ways of walking and talking are rooted in socially structured material inequality. Bourdieu’s approach thus marks a significant advance over sociologists whose use of lifestyle as a secondary marker of class position draws superficial correlations between lifestyles and other variables such as race, ethnicity, political orientation, education, and urban/suburban/rural residence.
More generally, social theorists of contemporary culture, such as Lears (1983), Campbell (1987), and Bauman (1998), do not see a tight connection between class and consumption, instead linking lifestyles to the growing identity crisis of modernity, thus marking a shift from Bourdieu’s structural analysis of the role of lifestyles in class reproduction. For instance, Don Slater contends in Consumer Culture and Modernity (1997), that "In theorizing pluralization and identity crisis, two terms keep appearing: ‘expertise’ and ‘lifestyle.’ Both denote features of modern life which manage, assuage, and organize anxieties about modern identity and at the same time can be used to exploit and intensify them" (p. 86). Lifestyles, which center on consumer goods, services, and experiences, thus become a vehicle for the modernist project of realizing the self. This centrality of lifestyles indicates, for some theorists, the instability of modern forms of social membership. Anthony Giddens, for example, argues in Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1991) that the consumption of goods replaces the genuine development of the self. Since the 1980s, lifestyle has become increasingly detached from traditional demographic variables—class, race, or gender, for example—and has come to represent personal, voluntary choices about how to consume.
