Changes in Farmers’ Modes of Work in Podlasie

Over a long time, a unique peasant mode of work developed in rural areas, which has been described in substantial detail by scholars including ethnographers, historians and rural sociologists. It was largely based on concentrating on the process and not the result, affirming work as such, cooperation with family members and neighbours, and work being embedded in a social context. This model underwent substantial change already under communism, but recent decades have accelerated the process. In the face of the structural transformation of rural areas, but also wider changes related to the sphere of work in late modernity, values once fundamental to peasants no longer play such an important role in the lives of present-day farmers. They have been replaced with other attitudes; different skills have become necessary, different attitudes have become valuable. The reasons for this include the fact that farmers realise that their children will probably seek their life’s path outside agriculture, and therefore they bring them up differently. The paper discusses not only new modes of work in agriculture and the system of values behind them, but also the sources from which farmers draw such new models.