Leisure Identities and Interactions

John R. Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367133184
• eBook ISBN: 9780429655104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1983. Leisure has too often been approached as a set of activities that people do when everything important has been completed. This text provides a different analysis demonstrating the centrality of leisure to human development and to important relationships.

In Leisure Identities and Interactions the author analyses leisure in the context of role changes through the life course, but also as a social context in which we work out the identities that express who we really want to be. His focus is on the kinds of leisure that are both most common and most significant face-to-face encounters, family interaction, and episodes found in the midst of our roles and routines. Varieties of leisure styles are found to be developed out of available opportunities and in relation to cultural values, but also are chosen to express and negotiate our self-definitions. Leisure is both social and existential and can best be understood in the dialectic of role expectations and decision. Kelly utilizes symbolic interaction, interpretive, and dramaturgical metaphors to develop a different sociology of leisure one that brings together the concepts of role and identity. Expressive identities and intimate communities are as essential to leisure as they are to life.

1

Meanings of Leisure: an Introduction

In leisure the same activity may have many meanings:

• For one young mother, her art class is primarily a social event in which she is released for two hours from home and childrearing for conversation during the class and the coffee break that follows. For another woman of about the same age, her engagement with art is a demanding discipline begun in school and focused on a development of a mastery of techniques and styles that is both the aim and the satisfaction of painting.

• On the golf course at the same time there is a student striving to improve his game for tournament play, another young man using the outdoor environment for purposes of courting a young woman whom he expects to marry, a salesman courting customers for his new life insurance plan and a group of ‘regulars’ who take both the game and their friendships seriously.

• On a Friday evening at the local public house the crowd includes groups of men seeking the relaxation of a pint or two and conversation unimpeded by the noise of factory machinery, at least three groups of adolescent men and women who use the pub as a meeting-place and who will soon be off in their cars, and a large group of couples who come together more or less regularly in an informality and ease that does not require the preparation and scheduling of entertaining friends at home where space is more limited. On the fringes of the pub groups there are also a number of individuals who have come alone and who appear to be more serious about their drinking.

However, different activities may have much the same meanings to participants:

• For devotees of both ceramics and squash, the development of a measured mastery and skill may be central to the experience that draws men and women back for regular engagement.

And one event may include many modes of behavior:

• A social event such as a party may also be a demonstration of skill for the organizers, an opportunity to explore new relationships for some and to cultivate old ones for others, an experience of ease and grace in communication for some and of extreme effort bordering on anguish for others, and a mixture of meanings and experiences for most partygoers.

Further, the same activity may have different meanings at different times for the same person:

• A tennis player may be on the court in an intense skill-honing session one afternoon, in a parental combination of teaching and companionship the next morning and in a very social and non-competitive mixed doubles game that evening. The meanings move from competence-building and testing to relationship-building to social expressivity.

• Reading at home may be for the teacher a complement to work, sheer escape, general ‘keeping up with the world’ and an intense and engrossing immersion with the literature at various times depending on what is read, her mood and orientations.

• An encounter on Saturday at the shopping center may be a passing and relatively meaningless exchange of greetings, a pleasant opportunity for more prolonged conversation, or, for a group of teens, the main purpose of going to town.

In general, both activities and their meanings may vary in a seemingly limitless possibility of combinations.

‘Is It Leisure?’

Not only is there a variety of kinds of activity that may be leisure and of the meanings of those activities to participants, but leisure would appear to be diffused through time and space. When the question ‘is it leisure?’ is asked of an activity, be it reading or football, the appropriate answer would appear to be ‘sometimes’. Swimming may be primarily social interaction on the beach, fierce competition, hours of disciplined effort, physical conditioning, a job skill for the pool staff, or a relaxing experience of buoyancy. Walking may be a health-preserving regimen, transportation to the shops, a companionable stroll, or immersion in an absorbing natural environment. Conversation, the essential content of much social leisure, may take place almost anywhere. In fact, variety and diffusion would appear to be integral to the experience of leisure in our culture and era.

There is variety in activity – from daydreaming to scheduled cello practice.

There is diffusion in environments – from home to shopping center, from store and sidewalk to forest and concert hall and even from factory and office to beach and boat.

There is a multiplicity of social contexts – from solitary occupation to the coached meshing of positions in team sports, from one-dimensional interaction in an activity group to the complex relationships and expectations of leisure with a primary group such as the family.

There is variety in meanings – from the ‘pure’ experience of engagement in which all sense of time and place seem to disappear to a carefully adjusted set of communications and interactions responding to the complex requirements of an event combining social and action components, from autotelic and self-contained moments to conscious role complementarity.

Meanings of Leisure

In a number of research approaches people have been asked both directly and indirectly about the meanings they find in their leisure. In one of the earliest such studies Robert Havighurst and his associates asked Kansas City adults about their favorite activity.¹ The most common responses were:

‘I like it just for the pleasure of doing it.’

‘It’s a welcome change from my work.’

‘I like it because it brings me into contact with friends.’

‘It gives me a new experience; I learn something from it.’

‘It gives me a chance to achieve something.’

‘I feel I am being creative.’

‘I like to do things that will benefit society.’

‘It makes the time pass.’

More recently research into leisure roles and environments in three North American communities produced the following ranking of satisfactions among adults for the five or six activities they valued most:²

‘I like it.’

‘I enjoy the companions.’

‘I feel relaxed.’

‘It strengthens a relationship.’

‘I grow as a person.’

‘It’s restful.’

‘It’s exciting.’

‘It’s my self-expression.’

‘It’s healthful’.

‘I like doing it well.’

‘It’s different from my work.’

It’s active exercise.’

‘I like developing a skill.’

‘I feel I belong.’

‘I like being of help to others.’

Reasons expressing a sense of obligation or duty to family or friends, enjoying the contest or being outdoors, receiving the approval of others and taking up time were less important to the respondents. In general, social satisfactions, rest and relaxation, and engagement with the experience or mastery of an activity, were all found to be significant meanings of leisure.

A compilation of motivations identified from the employment of social-psychology scale items by several investigators yields the following list of meaning dimensions not ranked by importance:³

(1) Enjoying nature, escaping civilization; (2) Escape from routine and responsibility; (3) Physical exercise; (4) Creativity; (5) Relaxation; (6) Social contact; (7) Meeting new people; (8) Heterosexual contact; (9) Family interaction; (10) Recognition, status; (11) Social power; (12) Altruism; (13) Stimulus seeking; (14) Self-actualization, feedback, self-improvement; (15) Achievement, challenge, competition; (16) Killing time, avoiding boredom; (17) Intellectual aestheticism.

While the results of research on the meanings, motivations, or satisfactions of leisure reflect both the methods employed and the cultural setting of the population, the main point is clear: leisure has multiple meanings as well as a wide spectrum of activities and environments. It is multidimensional and multivalent.

Then Just What Is Leisure?

Leisure may be a complex phenomenon. Nevertheless, any use of the term presupposes some agreement on its parameters. At least in a general way, there must be characteristics that distinguish leisure from other human action. Several models of leisure provide approaches to grasping the dimensions of leisure as a human phenomenon. However, there are two dimensions that call for prior attention.

Leisure as an Existential Reality

The persistent element in defining leisure throughout the history of Western civilization has been relative freedom of choice.⁴ From Aristotle⁵ to contemporary analysis, the perennial defining dimension of leisure has been freedom. Leisure is existential in this insistence on ‘chosenness’ in its realization.

Sociologists usually part from philosophers on the issue of the purity or absolute nature of that freedom. Kenneth Roberts offers a brief definition of leisure as ‘relatively self-determined nonwork activity’.⁶ Freedom from role expectations, environmental constraints and resource limitations is seldom total. Leisure as activity is usually socially situated with impinging role expectations and implicit structural elements.

Aristotle combined intrinsic meaning with freedom in his later definition in book VIII of the Politics. Leisure is not only time free from obligations and therefore not realized for slaves, but is done for its own sake with the outcome of ‘intrinsic pleasure, intrinsic happiness, intrinsic felicity’. While such a classic approach may presuppose freedom for choice, leisure cannot be limited to activity chosen and carried out totally without constraint. Rather, on a freedom-constraint continuum leisure would be located at the freedom side. If something ‘has to be done’, then it isn’t leisure. On the other hand, leisure is more than choosing between tending the garden and washing the dishes. Choice alone does not define leisure, but leisure is existential in requiring choice and catching up that quality of choice in its outcomes.

According to Joffre Dumazedier, when it challenges constraint, ‘Leisure assumes the character of an existential reality’.⁷ Leisure is not residual, but is a social space in which we not only retain, but insist on some freedom to choose. That choice may culminate in various parameters that constrain and limit the activity. We may well choose a setting laden with both rules and conventions for behavior. We may choose a social context in which there are strong sets of expectations placed on our interaction. However, the selection of those parameters is still existential, a choice of an environment that has the potential for satisfying leisure as well as some limitations.

Leisure as a Social Reality

Leisure, however, is social as well as existential. It takes place not in the mind alone, but in the social world. The most thoroughgoing analysis of the social nature of leisure was presented by Neil Cheek and William Burch⁸ in The Social Organization of Leisure in Human Society. They argue that leisure is embedded in the biosocial nature of humankind. In modern social systems leisure has the particular purpose of providing the interaction context for tying together primary groups. Leisure i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Meanings of Leisure: an Introduction
• Part One Styles of Leisure: Variety and Meaning
• Part Two Social Contexts of Leisure
• Index