Lifestyle and class

Social Selves

The question is so ubiquitous because finding out someone's relation to the job market tells us about the activities they engage in for the majority of their life, their skills and capacities - perhaps even their interests - how much a person might earn, their social class and status and their lifestyle. In other words, it tells us important things about that person's identity and they ways that others view, judge and value them. - p138

Lucien Seve the biography of an individual is determined by their place within the social relations of production, and, of course, it is within that biological trajectory that the self, or personality is formed" the capacities, skills, needs and characteristics of the person. For Sève, how individuals develop their own self is totally dependent on the social heritage they are born into, which they assimilate through work. p139

The development of the individual always takes place within a social logic constituted by the ensemble of social relations which form the matrices of activity in which a biographical trajectory takes shape and a self is formed - p 140 (LINKS TO AGENCY AND STRUCTURE)

Capitalist social relations will continue to structure the biographies of individual selves. They do so by structuring the activity and time that compose individual biographies. - p141

However, under capitalism, time spent on personal consumption and recreation is experienced as a temporary respite, often geared more to preparing people for a return to the labour process rather than the long-term development of self. However, as Victor Turner has pointed out, in industrial capitalism leisure time is not only freedom from institutional obligations, work times, routines and disciplines, experienced as a space in which to recuperate, it is also freedom to enter symbolic worlds of entertainment, hobbies, sport and games. p143

Turner