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Age as Original Sociocultural Construct in Tradition, Modern and Postmodern Societies: what does it mean to be a young person?
Abstract
The sociocultural construction of age with objective and subjective meanings has been changing along with the development of society. Traditional, modern, and postmodern societies all have their own challenges related to the life course of the individual. The individual finds themselves in transition from the institutionalization and standardization of the course of life to deinstitutionalization, individualization, and de-standardization. For this reason, age as a sociocultural construct can be analyzed as a dynamic and reflexive phenomenon. Analysis of the perception of age is important in the social sciences, as it has the potential to reveal various issues in our society. In particular, this is important in discussions about youth and adulthood – in contemporary society, age is not exactly the main variable defining the group of society an individual belongs to. The aim of this paper is to analyse changes relating to age as a sociocultural construct in order to reveal what it means to be a young person with respect to tradition, both modern and postmodern. The construction of age has been analysed with recourse to T. Parsons’s structural functionalism theory, A. Giddens’ structuration theory as well as Beck’s approach to modern and postmodern society, life cycle theory.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/kw.2013.8.117
Date of publication: 2015-07-07 04:48:53
Date of submission: 2015-07-07 04:23:50
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