Leisure

Tony Blackshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135146764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

No single introductory book has until now captured the range of thought appropriate for scrutinizing the idea of leisure. Beginning with a discussion of expressions in classical thought, etymological definitions and key leisure studies concepts, Blackshaw suggests that the idea abounds with ambivalence, which is unlikely ever to be resolved.

After analyzing the rise and fall of modern leisure patterns, the emphasis shifts from the historical to the sociological and the author identifies and critically discusses the key modernist and postmodernist perspectives. Drawing on the idea that leisure studies is a 'language game', Tony Blackshaw subsequently offers his own original theory of liquid leisure which asks some key questions about the present and the future of leisure in people's lives, as well as what implications it has for individuals' abilities to embrace the opportunity for an authentic existence that is both magical and moral.

Leisure is an essential purchase for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of Sociology of Leisure, Sports and Leisure Studies, and Popular Culture.

Part I
FOUNDATIONS

1
THE IDEA OF LEISURE

As we saw in the introduction the study of modern leisure is usually left to ‘leisure studies’. In their accounts, its roots tend to be in individual choice, freedom and self-determination (Rojek, 2005; 2010). As for the term itself, ‘modern leisure’ is standardly defined as a ‘relatively self-determined activity-experience that falls into one’s economically free-time roles, that is seen as leisure by participants, that is psychologically pleasant in anticipation and recollection, that potentially covers the whole range of commitment and intensity, that contains characteristic norms and constraints, and that provides opportunities for recreation, personal growth and service to others’ (Kaplan, 1975: 26).

This kind of definition elicits an understanding of leisure in modern thought, but the idea is also among the oldest in the history of ideas, and among the most fundamental. The Greeks argued that leisure is the very basis of culture (Pieper, 1998: 1948). As Aristotle saw it, the

first principle of all action is leisure … leisure of itself gives pleasure, happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure. For he who is occupied has in view some end which his has not attained; but happiness is an end, since all men deem it to be accompanied with pleasure and not pain. This pleasure, however, is rewarded differently by different persons, and varies according to the habit of the individual.

(quoted in Shivers and deLisle, 1997: 41)

At the heart of this idea of leisure is an imbroglio so complex and in many other respects so simple that it does not transfer so easily into words. However, a critical observation lies at the heart of Aristotle’s thesis: ‘we mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity. Of course, work may be creative. But only when informed by leisure. Work is the means of life; leisure the end’ (Scruton, 1998: xii). Such an understanding of leisure, we might respond, is no longer suitable for explaining modern realties: on the one hand it is utopian (a description of leisure, rather than leisure in the actual making) and on the other it evokes the kind of sanguinity that our more cynical modern age has forgotten. However, it is important to be aware of the understanding of leisure through the classical intellectual tradition, because not only does it identify two further family concepts – as we will see in Chapter 2 pleasure and happiness are affecting concepts from which we can still learn a great deal – that might help us to grasp the modern sense of leisure, but it also helps to explain why leisure is a part of our doxa (the knowledge we think with but not about).

ETYMOLOGICAL DEFINITIONS OF LEISURE

Another way in which we might try to understand modern leisure is by exploring the etymology of the word. In The Sage Dictionary of Leisure Studies (2009), I suggest that there are three distinct but not unrelated etymological sources of modern understandings of leisure. There is the more obvious old French term leisir, itself derived from the Latin root lic

re. Lic

re is especially interesting because in its duality it reveals that the idea of leisure abounds with ambivalence: on the one hand it relates to freedom but on the other it is also a term, which as its root suggests, that signifies permission or licence. There is also a sense of ambivalence reflected in the distinction between the two other etymological sources, both of which are less noticeably related to the modern word. The first of these is the term

ti

sus meaning ‘leisured’. Oti

sus is a transfiguration of the older Latin term

tium which until the eighteenth century simply means leisure. As we will see in Chapter 3, from this historical juncture, however,

tium and its derivatives become synonymous with leisure time which may or may not be used for self-improvement.

The other etymological source is the Greek term skhol

, which at its most basic level of understanding simply means to be free from obligation. As we saw from Bourdieu’s (1999) definition in the introduction, however, this idea is also another word for the spade work needed to fire what the Canadian cultural critic Northrop Frye (1963) calls the ‘educated imagination’, which, freed from the necessities of day-to-day existence, allows unbridled and original ideas to prosper, giving us a perspective on reality that we don’t get in any other way. What this suggests is that Bourdieu’s definition only just begins to account for the scope and the significance of the idea of skhol

, which as this second reading from Aristotle in the quotation below tells us, doesn’t just train the mind, to paraphrase Frye, but also affects our whole social and moral development.

Aristotle said that the aim of education is to equip us to make noble use of our leisure: and this fine sentiment implies that leisure is properly an opportunity to enjoy what makes us flourish: to pursue the arts, to reflect, to deepen understanding, to further friendships, and to pursue excellence. If work is concerned with securing life’s necessities, leisure is concerned with cultivating its amenities.

(Grayling, 2000)

It is important to note that skhol

was also considered by the Greeks to be an ideal state guided by the appreciation of moderation. Roger Scruton (2009) offers a precise account of this facility in his discussion of sex. What might be said about drinking or smoking applies equally to sex Scruton suggests: it is necessary to ‘acquire the right habit – in other words, to school oneself’ into having the right amount of sex, on the right occasions and for the right length of time. With an echo to Foucault (1979), who brings to our attention the fact that in classical Greek society adult men with wives and partners would on occasions have sex with their male apprentices, and this was considered to be normal, Scruton reasons that the Greeks defined the problem of sex as to want to have sex all the time, to want to have sex on the wrong occasions and for the wrong length of time. This makes for self-caricature and is to act like a clown; and to be a clown is to live an entertaining, though limited, life. What this shows is that the Greeks, in their rebuke to the

tiose life (any kind of sloth), considered every kind of leisure to be a serious business – both a privileged and studious occupation – which suggests that it also needs to be understood as a restrictive economy of pleasure.

As Thomas (2009: 78) points out, Greek elites also promoted the idea that life would be better if we had no work at all: ‘the best life was one of leisure: not idleness, of course, but virtuous activity of mind and body, involving no manual labour and unconstrained by the need to earn a living’. As this observation suggests, if seriousness was a vital aspect of skhol

what it also contained was the tacit acknowledgement of an affiliation between leisure and work; and not only that, but if leisure might be a serious, spiritual activity that bears all that is virtuous about humankind’s non-obligated endeavours, it is only the preserve of a small minority possessing the necessary education and economic freedom from having to earn a living.

From its very origins in Greek thought, then, we can see that there are a number of connections between leisure and work. Clearly the Greeks thought that work was an overrated virtue and that life would be better were people not to work at all. However, as Thomas suggests, for the Greeks, leisure was not really understood through its oppositional relationship to work, but in opposition to the sin of idleness. It is quite an historical jump to move from discussing leisure in the classical Greek world to the beginning of modernity in England. But here too there is a similar view about idleness, which emerges in the post-Reformation period. In Chapter 3, I shall pursue this connection by examining closely the specific way in which Christianity followed in the footsteps of the classical Greek world, by developing its own special reading of the Bible which understood that those ‘who followed the path of desires, pleasures, emotions and any feelings not unconditionally controlled by spiritually, were regarded not just as inferior men, but as sinners’ (Heller, 2009: 2). For the moment, however, we need to look in more detail at the important relationship between leisure and work.

LEISURE AND WORK

This seemingly indelible relationship has undergone considerable debate in leisure studies, to the extent that it is now readily understood as a conceptual couplet (Blackshaw and Crawford, 2009). Where was once a tendency to treat the relationship between leisure and work in over-simplistic terms, with the former understood as a residual category of, or an oppositional response to, the latter (Lundberg et al., 1934). That is, leisure is something that people do on an evening or at the weekend when they are not at work or it symbolizes an act of resistance to people’s dissatisfaction with work. In this view, leisure is seen as something that is ‘ostensibly private, individual and free as opposed to work which is public, social and regulated’ (Slater, 1998: 396).

As I explain in The Dictionary of Leisure Studies (2009), writing in the 1970s and early 1980s, Parker (1976; 1983) suggested that, although work takes up only a portion of people’s lives, their leisure activities are undoubtedly conditioned by the various factors associated with the ways they work. People who work together are not only assembled in the same time and space, but are also required to focus their collective attention on a common objective or activity, which means that they also share a common experience of work, whether it is positive, negative or neutral. Consequently, Parker concluded that, for most people, their leisure is shaped by how they react to work and its authority predominates over other influences, such as class and gender (Clarke and Critcher, 1985). What this suggests is that leisure cannot simply be understood as reflecting a particular form of work; it is necessary to understand the specific nature and conditions of that work experience, which are pervasive.

Parker’s research led him to conclude that the relationship between work and leisure tends to fall into three categories: the opposition pattern (e.g. those who are in physically hard and dangerous occupations often try to escape from hardships of work through drinking and gambling with work-mates), the neutrality pattern (repetitive or routine work has a tendency to lead to apathy and indifference in the work place and this is reflected in people’s leisure activities which tend to be monotonous and passive) and the extension pattern (those who have high levels of personal commitment to their work and get a good deal of job satisfaction are more likely to extend work related social networks and activities into their leisure time).

While such research was important to understanding how inextricably intertwined the relationship between leisure and work is in modern societies and how any adequate theory of leisure must take work into account, it has been criticized on a number of counts (Blackshaw and Crawford, 2009). First, there are simply too many exceptions to the work-leisure couplet, the most conspicuous being the non-employed, such as the elderly, and those people not in paid work, such as the unemployed and carers (especially many women), whose experiences of leisure are often fragmented and unpredictable. This leads to a second problem with the work-leisure couplet, that is that it marginalizes the extent to which the home is for many women a place of work (e.g. domestic labour, home-working) – albeit one that is not recognized by society as such. Third, the work-leisure couplet focuses its attention much less on what people do in their leisure time and more on leisure as a residual category of work; and to this extent it offers an overly functionalist understanding of leisure. Indeed, contrary to Parker (1976; 1983), and as we will see in the discussion of leisure and freedom below, many people today would argue that it is their leisure that is utterly bound up with who they are, and their identities, not their work.

This last point notwithstanding, it has been compellingly argued by a number of scholars that in a work-based society dominated by capitalist accumulation leisure itself has become functionalist in the sense that it is deeply commodified and used to accomplish the need to sell more consumer goods. Slater (1998: 401) asserts that it in this way leisure ends up being ‘ideologically sold to us as a sphere of freedom from work, from public responsibilities and obligations … it is part of a deal that in exchange for all this “freedom” and “pleasure” – it secures docile workers and citizens’. As we will see in Chapter 4, more recently developed theoretical approaches suggest that there has been a relaxing of the societal hold that the work ethic once had and it has been supplanted by an aesthetic of consumerism (Bauman, 1998). Rutherford (2007: 46) supports this view, arguing that religious anxiety about ‘How can I be good?’ has by now turned into the secular ‘How can I be happy?’

Moreover, there is increasing evidence to suggest that with the consolidation of what have been called post-Fordist working practices, whereby mass, centralized industrial (Fordist) working practices give way to more flexible, decentralized forms of the labour process, work and leisure have once again become de-differentiated (Rojek, 2010). Poder’s (2007) research, for example, suggests that it is increasingly the case that people do not so much value their leisure time over work, but think of work in similar ways to what they think and feel about consuming. That is, the point of being in work is not just about having a job: it should be exciting, stimulating and challenging and make us happy. One of the upshots of this is that work (like leisure) has developed an aesthetical significance, which not only means that it increasingly individualizes our experiences of employment so that they are not easily shared with others, but also therefore makes shared responses to discontent in the workplace more unlikely.

Work, unemployment and leisure

No discussion of the relationship between leisure and work can avoid the issue of unemployment. If work is the thing that gives you your sense of who you are or it simply makes you happy, or it provides the economic means for achieving these sorts of things in your leisure, what happens if you lose your job? As I have argued elsewhere, unemployment, otherwise known as the involuntary or voluntary lack of paid work, has considerable implications for people’s lives generally and their leisure opportunities specifically (Blackshaw and Crawford, 2009). Unemployment is a complex process but it can nonetheless be divided into a number of subcategories: frictional unemployment which arises as a result of movement in the job market as people move from one job to another; seasonal unemployment such as it occurs in the leisure and tourism industries as a result of changes in supply and demand; cyclical unemployment caused by the swinging pendulums that are the business and trade cycles; and structural unemployment, where significant changes in the global economy lead to large numbers of people losing their jobs.

On the face of it the major trend in Western economies since the mid-1960s has seen employment in services grow and employment in manufacturing decline. However, this trend masks the fact that the decline in manufacturing has also been accompanied by technological changes and changes in production associated with the substitution of post-Fordist work practices for Fordist work practices (see Harvey, 1989) and the global restructuring of industrial labour on neo-liberal lines, two processes which have increased productivity while dispensing with the need for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and sometimes even highly skilled workers. The upshot of these changes is that compared with the period o...