Everybody’s Life is Like a Spiral: Narrating Post-Fordism in the Lifestyle Movement of the 1970s

Abstract

What has been variously termed the post-Fordist turn in the social and economic organization of Western societies describes (among other things) the demise of a middle class professional culture and the emergence of a new lifestyle morality of expressive self realization. This study examines the role played by selection of lifestyle innovators in this process: through an interpretive study of narratives of moral change, the shift from the old professional morality to the new lifestyle morality is interpreted as a story of learned relaxation and impulsive release. Drawing material from over 83 lifestyle publications and 34 open-ended biographical interviews, the importance of this vanguard lifestyle movement is related to a wider historical consideration of the moral culture of the American middle class, and to an overview of theories of the post-Fordist turn.