Social practices and population aging

Abstract

The process of socialization continues throughout person’s life, but at different stages of development, individuals give preference to different social practices. With age, the importance of various types of practices changes. In a postindustrial society, there are significant changes in the criteria for choosing and configuring social practices by people of the “third age”.The article presents the original structure of social practices for analyzing the aging of the population in modern conditions. The authors identified three types of social practices: procreation practices, production and labor practices, as well as supra-natural practices. They can complement or substitute each other, as well as overlap each other. In different historical conditions and cultural contexts, these relationships between these practices change significantly.With regard to individuals, the authors propose to use the short names of the three types of social practices — family, work and leisure. The most obvious way of replacing and complementing these social practices is manifested at different stages of an individual’s life - in childhood, adulthood, and old age. Until recently, reaching the retirement age presupposed the termination of labor practices. Today, more and more retirees can, should and/or want to continue working. This basic change has had a significant impact on the interrelation of social practices in the “third age”. At the intersection of work and leisure practices, educational programs for pensioners began to actively develop, which until recently was perceived as an “exotic”. Family practices are also changing for working pensioners: they are increasingly able to provide financial assistance to children.In the postindustrial society, the leisure practices of pensioners have become extremely diverse. Along with those which have already taken their place in the life of older people for a relatively long time (attending various kinds of cultural events, sports and travel), practices related to active participation in social and political life, as well as a healthy lifestyle, began to develop.The triad of social practices proposed by the authors makes possible not only to identify peculiarities of modern pensioners’ life strategies, but also to determine the dimensions in social work with them that require improvement.