Living Alone

Globalization, Identity and Belonging

Lynn Jamieson, Roona Simpson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230271920
• eBook ISBN: 9781137318527
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Exploring the growing global trend of solo living, this highly original studyaddresses core debates about contemporary social change in the context of globalization, including individualization and connection, the future of family formation, consumption and identities, belonging and 'community', living arrangements and sustainability.

1

Introduction

This introduction begins by briefly summarizing why people who live alone are of interest to us all and an appropriate subject of research. The reasons given also explain how the book is structured. Next, we explore definitions of ‘living alone’, followed by further explanation of the scope, focus and sources of evidence of the book.

Three sets of reasons for studying and knowing more about people living alone

Popular stereotypes

The need for evidence to counterbalance the confusion of popular stereotypes and messages about this growing trend provides the first set of reasons for studying living alone. Living alone is increasingly common across the globe, thereby becoming an object of popular interest. In Asia, Europe and North America, for some commentators the trend is symptomatic of current problems and spells further threats for the future, but for others it is a harbinger of new freedoms and opportunities. Differences in viewpoint sometimes reflect perspectives of different generations and genders. Two negative stereotypes recur among a jumble of others: the carefree self-absorbed person who is oblivious to the responsibilities of family, kin or community and the sad, lonely, neglected and excluded person. The former is often depicted as a young person and the latter as an older person, albeit without any consideration of if or how these biographies might join up across an individual life course. Sometimes the former is also imagined as a young migrant to an urban area, and the latter as an older person left behind by the loss of a partner and migration of children without support in depopulating rural areas. Although negative stereotypes of people living alone can refer to both men and women in the popular culture of many parts of the world, particular disdain is reserved for a woman who lives outside of conventional family arrangements (Allerton, 2007).

This book draws together the existing evidence that comes mainly from Asia, Europe and North America and contributes our own research on people living alone in the United Kingdom at ages more conventionally associated with living with a partner and children. The first set of evidence to counterbalance stereotypes is provided in the introduction to Part I and in Chapter 2. International differences in reactions to men and women living alone are contextualized in Chapter 2 by discussion of variation across global regions.

Debate about identity and personal life

The second set of reasons for studying living alone comes from its significance to discussions within social science, particularly sociology, about the nature of personal relationships and the dynamics of personal life. While the text is written with the intention of being readable for any audience, it is structured by engagement with a number of academic discussions.

Those who live alone exemplify the separation of living arrangements and personal relationships and present an extreme case of considerable theoretical interest. The separation of living arrangements and personal relationships enables focused consideration of factors shaping identity, social integration and social isolation. People living alone may see themselves as ‘loners’ or in terms of the parts they play in the lives of others. In popular psychology, solitary reflection can be an aid to ‘knowing oneself’ and a means thereby to self-development and creativity, as well as laying the basis for reaching out to others. On the other hand, being alone too much and loneliness are routinely regarded as unhealthy for a person’s state of mind and sense of self. How people living alone experience this balance is a theme that runs through subsequent chapters. In cultures where there has traditionally been no respectable way of living alone, to do so without being an ‘outcast’ indicates fundamental social change. Do people who live alone tend to start with or develop a narrative of the self that incorporates living alone as part of ‘who I am’, for example, as ‘a loner’, ‘outcast’, a person who is more creative or productive because of time alone, or as ‘sad and lonely’?

People living alone have varying degrees of personal ties to kin, family and friends. Some maintain relationships across households with partners, children, parents and siblings who, for other people or at other stages of life, are within their home. For some, new technologies play an important part in sustaining connections. Understanding how connected people living alone are to others can be informative about the resilience of ‘family’, demonstrating whether and how such relationships are sustained across households. How they maintain ‘being connected’ contributes to discussion of the relative significance of face-to-face versus mediated communication and the impact of digital technologies on everyday life. The meaning of ‘home’ to a person living alone, and how they go about the business of transforming a dwelling into a home, is also very revealing. In many cultural contexts, the idea of home conventionally centres on family or kin, intimacy and belonging to a wider kindred or community. Are those constructing a home alone creating an individualized subjectivity and personal identity in preference to affinity with others? Is this symptomatic of the home becoming ‘a conduit of atomization’ as Richard Ronald and Yosuke Hirayama provocatively suggest is the case for younger generations in Japan (2009)? How people reflect on and manage eating in the context of living alone is another more specific focus that is theoretically interesting and sheds light on processes of social integration, given that eating with others is a universal means of sustaining and celebrating relationships. Similarly, there are lessons to learn from whether and how those who live alone participate in holidays and festivals that conventionally express family and community relationships.

Such issues are of direct relevance to the theorization of the interplay between personal life, identity and the wider social fabric. These issues are taken up in Chapters 3–5. Chapter 3 focuses on the orientation to partnering and parenting of men and women living alone at ages more conventionally associated with living with a partner and children. Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning and construction of home by people living alone, and Chapter 5 focuses on their experiences of meals and eating, holidays and festivals.

‘Globalization’ and individualized consumers

The vision conjured up in academic discussion of the intersections between ‘globalization’ and individualization of self-absorbed consumers with no ties to any particular place or strong affiliations provides the third set of reasons for studying living alone. In this discussion, there is some suggestion of an ‘elective affinity’ between the residential arrangement of living alone and the mindset and self-image of a growing number of people. They do not see themselves as sad and lonely people living alone because they have been left behind, but as persons who are exercising choice. This sense of choice, nevertheless, coincides with being swept along by trends that are often seen as facets of ‘globalization’: late twentieth and twenty-first century patterns of development, mobility, communication and consumption enabled by interconnected systems of globalized capitalist mass production, petroleum-based rapid transport and instantaneous digitized communication. Commentators focused on the environmental consequences of globalization fear a trend towards living alone will escalate ‘carbon footprints’ in developing countries as well as in the richer parts of the world.

For some theorists, the trend of living alone is an outcome of an era that facilitates individual mobility and dislocation from moorings to place and people of origin without automatically severing connections to loved ones; however, for other theorists, disconnection is always a likely outcome, given 24/7 media encouragement of self-absorption in personalized consumption. Pessimistic accounts focus on social processes that separate individuals from each other, individualization, and individualism, an ideology that celebrates the individual above all else. Our own evidence of the social networks, connectedness and community integration of people living alone is the focus of Chapter 6. This discussion is extended through a more specific focus on place, mobility and migration in Chapter 7. Clearly, debates about the nature of contemporary personal life and relationships overlap with the more general discussions of ‘globalization’, dislocation, consumption and identity. So the contents of Chapters 6 and 7 are interconnected and build on the discussion in Chapter 3, which includes relationships with family and use of Internet dating, and to Chapters 4 and 5 focusing on the uses of home and patterns of consumption and their environmental consequences.

Definitions: A one-person household, dwelling and conducting domestic life alone

Our focus is on one-person households meaning not only a person who is the sole occupant of a dwelling but also a person who lives a domestic life alone. The term ‘household’ is used to describe a unit of people who live together, sharing resources as well as their living space, for example, food acquired from pooled effort or income. Occupants of a cluster of one-person dwellings who eat together in a shared dining hall or in the open air around a communal fire are not living alone as one-person households. In some cultures, everyday use of ‘living alone’ has a less restricted meaning than ‘one-person household’. For example, Yunxiang Yan (2003, p. 163) describes how in the Chinese rural village the term danguo, meaning living independently and living alone, was used to describe both an elderly couple living by themselves and a solo elderly person living alone because both are equally outside the traditional and once expected arrangement of living with a married son. However, only the solo elderly person is considered as living alone in the sense in which it is used here. The essence of the definition of living alone is simple: nobody else lives in the same living space or routinely shares everyday domestic life.

Fuzziness of ‘one-person household’

While it is possible to provide a clear definition of a ‘one-person household’,¹ like many categories of human arrangement, in practice the boundaries of the category are not so clear-cut but rather become fuzzy at the edges. Regular visitors create one form of fuzzy edge. Many people living alone, as the sole occupant of a dwelling most of the time, have others staying with them some of the time. Obviously occasional visitors and guests do not threaten the classification, but how do we classify routine arrangements that involve the presence of others for more than half of the time? For example, if children or a partner with another residence elsewhere regularly and routinely stay overnight, say up to three or four times a week, are they then part of the household rather than simply frequent guests? If seeking to resolve this sociologically, the perception of those involved might be given particular weight, rather than applying formal classificatory rules such as those used by governmental agencies when extracting taxation or delivering benefits.

However, there are also difficulties with taking vernacular definitions as a starting point rather than an objective definition of ‘one-person household’. In parts of Asia with long traditions of multi-generational and extended family households, even couples alone together are sometimes described using language signifying ‘living alone’ (Yan, 2003), but their experience obviously differs from one-person households. Cultural taboos against the idea of choosing to live alone are sufficiently strong for some people doing so temporarily to deny a categorization of ‘living alone’. Among interviewees living in one-person households discussed as living alone in Chapter 3, Kapoor (a young professional migrant from India) claims ‘it’s not living alone’ because he knew his marriage would be arranged and that he would be living with his spouse by the age of 30.

Sharing some aspect of space or household facility creates another form of blurred boundary. People living in one roomed apartments, including the form of cheap rented accommodation that the British call ‘bedsits’, with a bed, sitting area, sink and cooking facilities, would generally be classified as living alone, even if they share a bathroom. Similarly, residents of ‘single room occupancy dwellings’ such as those in low-budget hotel residences accommodating poor people in some parts of the United States are so classified even if they have a shared bathroom or laundry facilities. More ambiguous cases include some types of hostel, and rented space within a household or multiply subdivided dwelling in which all cooking and washing facilities are shared. Residents might be regarded or regard themselves as living alone if each has the exclusive use of their own room and their access to shared space does not lead to a sense of forming a household, connection or common cause with others. However, for lodgers within family households, some incorporation into the landlord/landlady’s household is common and undermines the categorization of living alone. In lodgings and hos-tels, people are often subject to additional rules and regulations limiting their control over even their private space, making them institutional settings rather than collections of one-person households.

The fact that people move in and out of living alone across time (Chandler et al., 2004; Glanville et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2005; Wasoff et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2008) creates another sense of fuzziness around the category of living alone. For example, when re-contacting a sample of 140 men and women aged 25–44 who were identified as one-person households in a household survey, by the time of our interviews, about a year after this initial survey, 9 per cent were no longer living alone because they were now living with a partner, one was now living with her mother, and one had an unofficial lodger.

Solo-living versus going solo, choice versus constraint

Finally, note that living alone should not be confused with ‘being single’. Although solo-living is often used to mean living alone, sometimes being so used in this text, this can be confusing since ‘going solo’ sometimes means living without a partner or leaving a partner. Solo-living, living alone, need not mean being solo in this sense of without a partner. Partnership status and living arrangements are analytically separate dimensions of human arrangements and in some circumstances they are physically separate. It is perfectly possible to live alone and be partnered, just as it is possible to be single and living in shared arrangements. ‘Single’ itself, as a term for partnership status, can have several meanings, two using legal classificatory systems, ‘never married’ or ‘not currently married’ (never married, widowed, divorced) and it is also used in the more experiential sense of ‘currently without a partner’. As Chapter 3 discusses at length, some people who live alone are in couple relationships with partners, whether seen as potential life partners or short-term sexual relationships who live elsewhere, and some who live alone have no partner. Some who have no partner and live alone have a legal partnership status of single but others are divorced or widowed; some have never experienced living with a partner and others have exited from cohabiting relationships.

It has been suggested that people living alone can be usefully classified as two groups, those who elected to live alone and those forced to do so (Bennett and Dixon, 2006). Understanding the routes people take into living alone and the factors driving their move to this living situation is very important as these routes and drivers clearly impact on the experience of living alone. Living alone because of bereavement in a space that was previously shared with a long-loved partner is clearly a different experience from setting up home alone prior to any partner relationship. These circumstances are also likely to be encountered at different ages and stages of the life course, compounding experiential difference. It is not necessarily easy or helpful to reduce differences among people living alone into those who choose versus those arriving by accident or constraint. Something of the difficulties and dubious helpfulness is illustrated in discussion of whether to classify those who are single or childless by whether or not it was ‘chosen’. ‘Choice’ is in itself a notoriously misleading concept often signalling individualized decision-making as if the wider social context could be safely bracketed off even though individual choices are typically socially shaped. As is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, even those who use the language of choice in describing setting-up home alone prior to partnering in younger adulthood can also feel that this is something that they have to do. This is not generally because they are being forced out of their family home by violence or adverse circumstances, although that can also happen, but because of normative understandings of being too old to continue to live with parents that are part of the cultural context of much of northern and western Europe.

Scope and sources of evidence

Some notable previous American studies have been published with titles designed to challenged negative views of living alone such as: Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (Klinenberg, 2012) and Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (de Paulo, 2006). While we share the intention of counteracting inappropriate stereotypes, it will become clear throughout the subsequent chapters that there is never only one story to be told about living alone. Experience varies with resources and by age and stage in the life course. This in turn is connected to the intersecting demographic and biographical circumstances that precipitate living alone. It makes a difference whether living alone is caused by the loss of a partner through death or divorce or whether by running away from, forced exit from, or planned and scheduled departure from a family household or transitional lodgings entered in lieu of living with a family. In most cultures, these different routes into living alone will also be reacted to and experienced differently according to the gender of the person living alone and will be navigated differently by the economically advantaged and disadvantaged. Different regions of the globe, and different rural and urban contexts within the same region, offer specific combinations of locally and globally generated social, economic and cultural conditions. These in turn modify the potential quality of life of a person living alone. In many Asian cultures, women suffer social death as well as bereavement with the death of a husband, and a poor woman with no independent means of support has to rely on and is vulnerable to abuse from kin. In European and North American contexts, when older people have economic independence and women have traditionally been the ‘kin keepers’, connecting kin and bringing families together, men losing their wives in older age can be more at risk of isolation than widows. Social scientists have become increasingly attuned to the intersection of different dimension of social differentiation and inequality in individual biographies, such as age, social class, ethnicity, gender, health, region and sexuality. We avoid the rather awkward phrase ‘intersectionality’ that is now sometimes used as shorthand for analysis that focuses on the consequences of such intersections but, nevertheless, remain mindful of this approach in our use of evidence.

Age, generation and gender

This book focuses more on men and women of working age but also discusses those living alone at older ages. Our reasons for more strongly focusing on younger ages and on both men and women address some particular concerns. Popular worry and excitement about the trend of living alone focus on possible shifts in power between generations and gender, particularly in cultures that afford significant respect to the authority of the old over the young and of men over women. Surprisingly, there are continuities of concern in cultures which formally celebrate equality. Here the trend is sometimes associated with the fear held by some that women are matching men in pursuing their own interests rather than devoting energies to family life, amplifying the fragility of personal life and making everyone a casualty. However, there is a mismatch between the idea that women are now pioneering this social change and the statistical reality that a larger number of men of working age live on their own than women across countries leading the trend. In order to address these issues strategically, we have focused our own research on both men and women choosing the age span 25–44, conventionally associated with being partnered, giving birth to and nurturing the next generation. Our discussion also turns back to the evidence of researchers studying other age groups. It is important to contextualize our focus by also looking across age: experience at younger ages may influence what happens in later life, while experiences at older ages may portend what is ahead for those who are younger.

Locality, regions and globalization

Chapter 2 shows that there are very significant differences across the globe in the proportions of people living alone. We draw on Göran Therborn’s (2004, 2011) division of the world into a small number of regions with distinctive ways of organizing personal life. This categorization by historical and geograp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Living Alone, Life Course and Life Transitions
• 2. Geographies and Biographies of Living Alone
• 3. Solo-living with and without Partnering and Parenting
• Part II: Home, Consumption and Identity
• 4. The Meaning of Home Alone
• 5. Living Alone, Consuming Alone?
• Part III: Networks, Community and Place
• 6. Solo-living and Connectedness
• 7. Place, Mobility and Migration
• 8. The Future of Living Alone
• Appendix 1: The Rural and Urban Solo Living: Social Integration, Quality of Life and Future Orientations Study
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index