Professor Higgs presented on the theme of Consumption in Later Life and the development of the Third Age. An author of several books on age and identity, social gerontology and cohorts and ageing, he spoke about the importance of looking at older people’s consumption patterns in understanding social change in ageing societies.

He charted the big generational differences between the “post-war boomers” who are now reaching retirement and the generations that went before and noted how this generational shift has an important part to play in how we now understand older age, challenging traditional approaches such as “structured dependency”.

The current generation of older people were part of a societal shift into a culture of consumerism unlike previous generations. Using a recent study examining consumption patterns in retired households in Britain between 1968 and 2005 he illustrated that older people were no longer a residual category of consumer but rather a consumerist force with considerable means.

 

He argues that this generation has now contributed to the formation of a whole new cultural field, "marked out by lifestyles and subcultures that evolved during the emergence of a mass consumer society, located in their most concentrated form within the lifecourse of a particular birth cohort, powered by the logics of consumption, delineated by the generational schism that arose during the long 1960s,’ and expressed through the exercise of agency, choice and freedom of expression and the rejection of the structuring identities of ‘old age".

 

 

This transformation from passive to active consumers and the cultural changes that came with it including a focus on individualism and personal freedoms, he argues, has changed what it means to be in older age for this generation and means that social gerontology must address consumption practices in later life if it is to better understand contemporary ageing.

 

 

The Ageing and Dementia Seminar Series is hosted by the Social Policy and Ageing Research Centre (SPARC) and the Living with Dementia Programme (LID) at Trinity College, Dublin.