Work & Leisure Ils 166

Nels Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136256059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

First Published in 1998. This is Volume XVII of the eighteen in the Sociology of Work and Organization series. This study on work and leisure looks at present materials that point to the fields of study of non-work obligations, family and home leisure centredness, declining worker interest in the job, passivity and the cultural level.

1

Western Society Faces Leisure

LEISURE is best understood against the background of. work. It was begotten of work and is rooted in work, but I the two have parted company. Man has always lived by work and with it, yet only modern man, because he has worked so well, also has leisure and his task is learning to use it. In this chapter we shall consider how modern man, the worker, through the force of labour has created a kind of society that is rich in things, conveniences and what has always been rare, free time. Let us look at that society.

In the next chapter we will define leisure more in detail. For the moment we think of it as the time a man (or woman) is free from work, when his work makes few or no demands on him. We will think of work as the purposeful effort a man expends to earn his livelihood. Or we may think in more direct terms of work as time given to a job, for which one is paid.

Leisure’s Ambiguous Position

As Domenach observed, work and leisure in our society reflect and supplement each other. He sees Western man working that he might have leisure, and enjoying leisure as a diversion from work.¹ While this is true, it is equally true that traditionally Western man works to get ahead. In the ideology of his work we find no intent to create leisure. Rather, leisure turns out to be an unprepared-for by-product of work.

Although leisure reflects and supplements work, it is also used as a release from work. Some are of the view that unless a man has worked he cannot really enjoy leisure. They hold that while a man is working to earn a wage or salary, he also ‘earns’ leisure. It is only work, they assert, that can put one in a frame of mind to enjoy leisure.

Leisure, that elusive anomaly about which books are written, comes on the scene, not in a region where life is lived easily, but in Western society where life is strenuous. No trait of Western man is more evident than his determination to load himself with work, to find in work the main values of life and to use his gains to extend his work into wider areas. His main interest in science and technology is to use them in advancing his work, so to get more gain out of the labour expended. With each gain he widens the scope of his activity.

Not only has Western man forced work upon himself and learned to like it, he tries with missionary earnestness to stimulate others in accepting his strenuous way of life. Those who do not respond with energy are regarded as backward. Because of this global encompassing urge, Toynbee speaks of ours as a ‘world-wide Westernizing Society’.² All industrialized and urbanized Western countries are identified with these missionary objectives, but the term ‘westernizing’, extending our way of life, applies especially to the United States.

It is precisely in this hard-working society that leisure comes out in the open and confronts its creators with baffling problems. Here more than elsewhere man tries to build more efficient factories, to create more effective cities, to improve his networks of communication and transportation; all so he can work to greater advantage. Inadvertently, he also gives himself more leisure, and this leisure in different ways gets between him and his work.

Working, building, and then rebuilding the structural side of our civilization, man also changes the social milieu. More people who must become urban oriented, also adopt the radically new urban way of life. As the organization of life becomes complex, the tempo of life quickens, which again is disturbing. More than ever people find themselves mixed into urban agglomerations, becoming part of ‘life en masse’. And all the while this society with its level of culture achieved through organized and strenuous work finds itself confronted with leisure.

Leisure was always present in our work-conscious society but earlier it was the privilege of a small upper class. Now this unplanned-for gift comes to the many who, as some believe, lack the background for making use of it. However, as we look about we find they are learning, but in the meanwhile the position of leisure in our society is ambiguous.

Our Industrial Culture

When we speak of Western man as a machine-user, this applies also to the Western farmer. We chronically think of making things with machines. If we own things made entirely by hand labour they are apt to be heirlooms. We organize machines into networks, called factories and factories are formed into networks called industries; steel, rubber, textiles, automobiles, farm machinery and so on. The cynic says we do it as work to make money, but in the process man is served. The more efficient he is with machines the better he is served.

While creating these mechanized networks, Western industrialized man adds to the natural environment a man-made environment, which is nearer to him most of the time. The effectiveness of this man-made environment, which man himself manipulates, is seen in his ability to produce more with less labour. That is, he can produce for himself more goods and services and yet give himself more free time.

Meadows reminds us that industrial society is more than machines and factories, it is the whole complex of technics and techniques and even more. Thus industrialism includes the mechanisms, the labour force with its skills and the social organization which is adapted to this milieu.³ Such a society must possess such traits, among others, as these:

1. Man no longer lives in cherished isolation, as in the old-time village, but must five in contact with large agglomerates, co-ordinating his interests and efforts to the wider group. This is a new form of collective living. The city man is extremely collective in both work and play.
2. The mass production needed to keep industry vigorous demands mass consumption; that is, behaviour and taste uniformities over wide areas. Millions sleep on the same sort of mattresses, own the same kind of radio sets and listen to the same programmes, read the same newspaper, wear the same kind of shoes, etc. Yet with all the conformity and uniformity one can achieve variety.
3. In the mechanized man-made environment one must be acquainted with the use and potentialities of hundreds of mechanisms and be alert to them every waking hour. Being alert and informed is to co-operate in their proper use, whether the mechanism be an automobile, a street traffic control, a building elevator, a vending machine, a juke box or gadgets in the home.⁴

Modern man has created such a civilization that he can neither work nor play without being producer nor consumer in one industrial process or another. He can do no other than to accept standards and uniformities, and he is being educated every day so to do. In his study of village life among the Equadorean Indians, Salz tried to foresee the problems of industry establishing itself in such a culture and the problems the people would have in adapting to industry. He recognized that the change would be quite disturbing for they would have to learn urban ways as well as industrial ways. Very little of their semi-primitive culture could be transferred.⁵

Equadorean village life is one sort of collective living, industrial life is quite another and involves a different situational discipline. Only as man is disciplined to machines are the machines able to respond effectively to his discipline. For man to live to advantage in this industrial environment of his own making, and which he continually re-makes, he must be competent in at least three different respects; ways of adjustment.

1. Modern man must keep on learning; skills, habits and manners of yesterday may not suffice for today. As he must learn new work ways, so he must learn new play ways. Falling behind the procession is a mark of ageing. He must know the latest gadgets as he must also know about the latest songs.
2. He must be able to adjust to increasingly complex situations, since innovation tends to move from the simple to the complex. We see the complexity trend in the automobile; how it introduces variety in the work spheres, how it changes the use of leisure, how it affects public services, how it introduces innovations in family and individual life (courting practices, for example). Similarly we can see this complexity trend with the introduction of mechanisms in offices and in the household.
3. With the greater integration and development of the industrial order its area of contact and influence widens. People must learn to think in wider terms. Where the grandfathers were amazed that words could be telegraphed from San Francisco to New York in the 1860’s the grandsons are not impressed at all to hear voices radioed from the South Pole. We think casually both about global communication networks as well as of global transportation networks. Different industries; oil, automobiles, metals and many more are linked in global markets. Basketball has become a world game and, like boating and other sports, is uniformly so. As one becomes associated with the thinking that matches this global trend his mental reach must widen.

Globality of Urbanism

Meadows emphasizes that learning to live in the industrial environment calls for more than mechanical skills and knowledge. It ‘entails a community organization which requires living quarters and which demands behaviour patterns and controls for the human beings responsible for business and industrial functions: urbanism”.⁶ Urbanism, as Wirth put it in his classic article of that title, is a way of life.⁷

A way of life is a cluster of behaviour patterns (political, economic, social) to which a people conforms; values and beliefs they hold regarding these ways of behaviour, and the social inheritance from earlier generations. But a way of life also acquires its unique character from the material and social milieu in which a people lives, the things they use and the things in the environment to which they must become adapted. Industrialism is a major part of that way of life we call urbanism.

Industrialism may be found in areas far from cities, mining developments, for example, but the head office of the mining company will more than likely be in a great city and the ores produced will find their way into urban controlled markets. Urbanism itself existed long before the rise of powered industry, but it was a simpler type of urbanism. We can point to modern cities in which no industry is found, but these have status only as they are linked with other cities that are industrialized.

Insofar as work and leisure are concerned, and these embrace a good part of the whole of life, urbanism today is unique in several ways. This thought is illustrated somewhat in such characteristics as the following:

1. Urbanism is Highly Non-traditional. Anciently, in the Middle Ages or today, towns and cities have always been places of work, trade and authority. They have also been play centres where the leisure arts developed and changed. Whatever the work activity, its history as a part of urban life can be followed back into time, as seen in the handicrafts. Whatever the leisure activity, its development reaches far back, which can be seen in the stage, music, dancing, the sports and so on. We can also trace the evolution of the structures people have used either for work or for play.

Yet we must conclude that modern urbanism has moved so far, even from its recent past, that the evolutionary links are only lightly evident, and often they seem to be deliberately disregarded. Much of factory work is quite unrelated to the old handwork crafts. The old skills seem as far removed as the fireplace in the old-fashioned kitchen is from the modern kitchen. Consider man’s all-purpose use of the streets in the modern horseless city, how far removed it is from the uses of streets in the past.

We can find links with the past in the many types of leisure today, but leisure is now enjoyed under such different circumstances. The role of the individual in family life is not the same, and the role of the family in community life has changed. The relation of the individual and that of the family to both work and leisure have acquired new meanings. It all adds up to the observation that urbanism was probably never more free than today from the guiding hand of tradition.

2. Modern urbanism is highly sophisticated. One may say with truth that urbanism has always been more sophisticated than ruralism. But earlier forms of urban sophistication were limited to a small part of the population. That circle has been widening to include most of the population. Some will remind us, and correctly, that much of this sophistication, like learning the latest radio jokes, is mere shallow smartness at a low cultural level. Even when admitting that there are levels of sophistication, we must say there is more of it today and, as always, its creative centre is the urban community.

Sophistication finds expression in the various pursuits of fashion; in dress, manners, speech, reading and even in things one strives to possess. The pursuit is more of an interest today because we are more an urbanized people than ever before. We have more leisure than ever before, and it is in leisure that sophistication shows itself, especially in the competitive social phases of leisure.

3. Modern urbanism is highly dynamic and outreaching. Again we must say that this is not new. Cities came into being only because they were places advantageously situated that were dynamic and outreaching in their influence. Perhaps as they gained power they oppressed and exploited lesser places, thus gaining more power and wealth. As Turner postulates, cities grew not only because they were dynamic, but because they were able to garner the surpluses of other places.⁸ For their sustenance cities had to give something in return. They had to be creative and have continued so. Because they were creative they have attracted creative people, and because they have always been places of work they have attracted more and more people in search of work.

As cities have grown, and they have grown exceedingly during the past century, they became increasingly dynamic and outreaching. They have passed out of the stage of being exploiters of their hinterlands and must now be markets for the hinterlands. On the other side, the hinterlands are the markets for the goods and services produced in urban places. In this struggle for new and wider markets urbanism has become global.

Urbanism as a phenomenon of growth is one thing, but urbanism being dynamic, creative and imaginative that it might expand more is something else, for out of this creative-ness urbanism continually changes within itself. It remains a way of life ever different, ever sharper and more resourceful than the non-urban. To survive, this way of life must radiate itself outward, extending with a type of missionary energy to all places that are less urban.

4. Anonymity and Interdependenc...