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Social class and consumption: employers as a special case
Author(s) -
TOIVONEN TIMO
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
journal of consumer studies and home economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.775
H-Index - 71
eISSN - 1470-6431
pISSN - 0309-3891
DOI - 10.1111/j.1470-6431.1990.tb00058.x
Subject(s) - consumption (sociology) , social class , demographic economics , social group , personal consumption expenditures price index , variation (astronomy) , economics , self employment , class (philosophy) , agriculture , consumer expenditure , labour economics , socioeconomics , personal income , sociology , economic growth , psychology , public economics , social psychology , geography , social science , market economy , physics , aggregate expenditure , archaeology , finance , entrepreneurship , astrophysics , computer science , artificial intelligence
During the last few years it has become popular to argue that the impact of social class on personal consumption and other aspects of social behaviour is declining. This paper has two basic objectives. The first objective is to ascertain the extent of variation in consumption patterns between socio‐economic groups, independent of income and type of household. As a number of studies of the class structure show, the long‐term decline trend in self‐employment outside of agriculture was halted or even reversed in many developed countries in the mid‐1970s. However, despite evidence for the ‘new rise’ of the self‐employed, and perhaps for reasons connected to the way social science has traditionally viewed it, little research has been conducted so far into the life styles and attitudes of this important group. Consequently, the second objective of this article is to analyse and compare the consumption pattern of the self‐employed with that of employees — especially where income levels are the same. The results of this analysis, based on the Finnish household survey, indicate the effect of the socio‐economic group is stronger than that of the income group and that the consumption pattern of the self‐employed does not diverge greatly from that of the ‘well‐off employee group. Nonetheless, the information on the detailed expenditure groups also reveals some interesting differences.