A person’s lifestyle may refer to the set of values, beliefs and attitudes that characterise his or her way of life. In the context of business, it can also refer to the set of practices that a company or organisation uses to promote its image.
The concept of lifestyle has become a popular topic in many fields of research, from social science to health and marketing. It has been defined in various ways, involving an internal dimension, an external dimension and a temporal dimension. In the field of psychology, there have been two main perspectives on the concept of lifestyle:
Rokeach linked lifestyle to a personal value system, where values and interests converged and constituted an individual’s modus vivendi. This definition of lifestyle is still widely used in psychological research.
For Giddens, lifestyle was the expression of a person’s reflexive engagement with the sociocultural environment. It involved a process of de-embedding and reconfiguring social relations, in which the individual internalised social structures external to him or her (social and cultural conventions) and also incorporated his or her own inclinations, expectations and interpretations.
Another trend in the social sciences was to define lifestyle in terms of consumption, with Berkman and Gilson arguing that there were distinct behavioural patterns that characterised different groups. They argued that lifestyles were based on the choice of specific products and brands.
More recently, the concept of lifestyle has been linked to people’s membership in a status group, with Weber showing that this was primarily a collective social phenomenon. He identified a number of different lifestyles, such as Fitness/Body-centered, Materialist, Hedonist, Service/Spiritual and Technocrat. The individuals in a status group usually shared similar values, attitudes and behaviours.
A third perspective, largely related to sociology and the social sciences, was to consider the concept of lifestyle in terms of belonging to specific social groups. This approach was influenced by sociological theories of society and culture, including those of Bourdieu, Foucault and Marx.
This view of the meaning of lifestyle is very much present in current health research, where it is considered to be a dynamic, socially situated activity shaped by people’s everyday experiences. It is therefore a very complex concept, and one that requires further debate. Some authors have redesigned the concept of lifestyle in this area, identifying the key components of this concept and its relationships with other factors. For example, critical health psychology emphasises that a healthy lifestyle is not just about adopting a certain eating pattern or physical activity. It also means allowing space for the margin of tolerance toward environmental infidelities. This allows for the healthy subject to exercise his or her own positioning, avoiding uncritically following predefined rules.