Kontynuacja i zmiana w stylach życia polskiego społeczeństwa

Abstrakt

The way of life is the total of needs, values, goals, likes and dislikes as well as behaviour characteristic of an individual and of a social group. Social groups only are the transmitters of the way of life. Thus changes in the society decide upon changes in the way of people’s lives. After World War 2nd, in result of exterminations and the repressive policy of the Nazis with regard to certain social groups, in result of the changes in the political system, industrialization, urbanization, and large-scale migration of people a new social structure emerged while some old fashions of living disappeared altogether and some other started to change. Least has remained of the bourgeoisie way of life; considerably more has remained of the way landed aristocracy lived despite the fact that both social groups ceased to exist in Poland. Not even the working class’s way of life has been preserved in its original, pre-war form. However, the peasants', townspeople's and intelligentsia’s ways of life have remained prseerving their ori- ginal forms. Nevertheless they underwent certain far-going changes so that today, they can be labelled as rural, no-townspeople’s, and elite’s respectively. These are already new styles of life but they still constitute a continuation of the ways of life formed in the past.

The changes in the ways of life of Polish society during the period of last several years had two tendencies: on the one hand with old fashions of living becoming decomposed the differences between specific ways of life blur and a new way of life for different social groups emerges forming mass society's way of life. On the other hand, however, there grows the number of social groups accompanied by the growth of the differentiation in society’s ways of life. The differentiations appear in the plane of dissimilarity of types, level of education, kina of work, dissimilarity of the environment of origin and place of living. It seems that by no way complete unification of Polish society’s ways of life can take place.

Thus, in Polish society of today, we deal with a process of ways of life’s integration towards forming a mass society way of social life. This develops on the basis of a new macrostructure and. at the same time, with the specific individualization of ways of life on the basis of the developing differentiation of social microstructures. It can be presumed that the former process took place until recently and the latter intensifies now.