Making Leisure Work

Architecture and the Experience Economy

Brian Lonsway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415398015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134718368
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

Contemporary architecture of theme-based design is examined in this book, leading to a new understanding of architecture's role in the increasingly diversified consumer environment. It explores the 'Experience Economy' to reveal how everyday environments strategically and opportunistically blur our leisure, work, and personal life experiences.

Considering scientific design research, consumer psychology, and Hollywood story-telling techniques, the book looks at how the design of theme parks, casinos, and shopping malls has influenced our more unexpectedly themed spaces, from the city to the hospital.

Widely taking architecture as a social practice, this text is of relevance to all cultural and sociological studies in the built and material environment.

Part I

Stories about Our Themed Environment

Chapter 1: Work, Leisure, and the Architectural Everyday

MAKING LEISURE WORK

To understand the cultural processes of making leisure work, it would seem intuitive to immediately attempt some definition of both “leisure” and “work.” Yet, such an attempt presupposes the ability to provide unambiguous boundaries around work-like or leisure-like actions. A clear definition of each would result in the ability to assign something like reading this book as one or the other. It will shortly become evident, however, that such a denotative undertaking is remarkably futile. For what I attempt to examine in this book is a set of spatial operations, including the techniques of architecture, urban design, set design, and industrial design, which have blurred, either intentionally or by chance, the popular understanding of so-called “work” and “leisure.” This is not to claim that non-leisurely work has ceased to exist – the sad state of the assembly line or sweatshop – or that work-free leisure has disappeared – today’s manifestation of Thorstein Veblen’s “Conspicuous Leisure” (1934 [1899]). But the popular ideals of work and leisure, heavily influenced by middle-class desires, and under a curious pressure by the consumer marketplace, are on their way to an uneasy merger. The reasons for this are numerous, and have a historical lineage which parallels the very rise of the bourgeoisie. There have been pressures to make the management work of the middle class not appear laborious, and their commercialized leisure practices appear like the “simple” idle time of the gentry, both to reify and strengthen the bourgeois self-image. There have been moves to increase worker productivity by lessening the stigma of work by “dressing down” the workplace, perhaps most famously IBM’s switch from the requirement of wing-tip shoes to the embrace of the loafer in the 1990s (Berger 1995). And there have been strategies to grow national and corporate productivity through an economy based not on the labor of work but on the freedom of leisure (Postman 1985). The specific and detailed histories of work and leisure in the modern world have been vigorously studied, as any survey of the diverse and rich writing on this subject reveals. It is clear that the modern concept of leisure is closely imbricated with the modern definition of work, and most contemporary researchers on the subject acknowledge the difficulty in resolutely distinguishing the two. While we may, of practical necessity, define personal boundaries of work and leisure in our everyday lives, what we find in the modern global consumer marketplace is that not all work is so laborious, and that not all leisure is so carefree. A study of the operations which have contributed to this blurring will have much to contribute to an understanding of the evolution of bourgeois notions of work and leisure. But such a concern, per se, is not my goal in this book; I am instead more focused on the way in which the operations of blurring have drawn on architecture and its attendant disciplines to produce a new form of commercialized experience. This experience, the core of the so-called Experience Economy, is simultaneously work-like and leisure-like, and frames a commercially directed social livelihood for which we have few traditional models. Historical reformulations of work and leisure have generally occurred in step with variations of economic structure, social organization, or political philosophy (Applebaum 1992). The shift to a so-called post-service economy is clearly calling for such a reformulation.

What has been particularly significant about this to me, as an architectural theorist, is the way in which social space has become explicitly operationalized at the service of this work/leisure transformation. While work and leisure patterns are of necessity spatial (in that people work and spend leisure time in space), their spatial structures were, with rare exception, nothing other than settings for these activities to take place. Sites of work and leisure historically responded to the dominant demands of specific activities: shops, factories, and offices on one hand, parks, playgrounds, sport arenas, theaters on the other. Even the domestic household, particularly problematic in traditional work/leisure dualities, serves as a site where both the leisurely aspects of life and the gargantuan work of maintaining a family are clearly inscribed. Any of these architectural or spatial settings could (and did) host both work and leisure activities, but it was not so much work qua work or leisure qua leisure that motivated the creation of such settings, but a specific work requirement or structured play activity. As both individual and corporate financial demands on our social systems have changed, requiring more out of both our leisure and work commitments, this too has changed. And within the last half of a century, commercial attitudes have recognized the value of spatial configurations in the evolution of work and leisure practices. Leisure qua leisure, independent of the specific leisurely activity, is now an object of every working person’s desire. And work qua work, at least work of the industrial labor model, is increasingly seen as an obstacle to – rather than the financial enabler of – such leisure. This is a radical alteration of the fundamental constitution of the bourgeoisie: leisure is desired over work, creating a need in the late 20th-century service economy for the general “leisuring” of the workforce (Schor 1991) and a concomitant recognition of the role of spatial design in abetting such a transformation.

Contemporary leisure scholars are now able to claim that

conceptualizing leisure as time or “free time” is recognized as more complex than once assumed, i.e., deciding how free the time must be. It is also evident that discretion, spontaneity, creativity, and involvement, said to characterize leisure, may be found in work as well.

(Kelly and Kelly 1994)

While there is little leisure to be had in extracting ore or assembling toasters, and while there may appear to be little work to be done daydreaming at the beach, to the modern consumer in the late service economy, leisure practices are becoming instrumentalized with a new work of consumerism and work practices are being relaxed in accord with a traditional escapist model of leisure. This has been a slow and steady evolution, one I can only begin to touch on herein. In acknowledgment of the significance of this history to the contemporary consumer environment, I have taken Pine and Gilmore’s The Experience Economy (1999a) as both a point of departure and a summation and filtration of its rich complexity. At the core of their book is a straightforward argument: the dominant (and traditionally held) narrative which frames the opposition between work and leisure activities must be radically altered in order to profit from the demands of the 21st-century consumer. So transformed, this narrative can be recast (literally, as we shall see) to make work “fun” and leisure economically productive. (Consider consumption itself: while ostensibly a leisure-time pursuit, a substantial amount of work is put into the navigation of consumer options. And while consumption’s direct result is the acquisition of material goods, such an acquisition operates psychologically on similar terms to a salary or payment (Miller 1998).) What is so significant for architecture about the synthetic project of Pine and Gilmore is the weight they attribute to the role of space-making. Courtesy of a rich synergy of architectural, urban, and landscape design practices with Hollywood’s special effects industry, risk-taking real estate developers, and the scientific management ideals of the 20th century, they propose that the best way to alter these outdated narratives of work and leisure is to radically alter the experience of their spatial environments.

In the operations I seek to unravel, these new conditions of leisure-work and work-leisure have themselves become the design subjects for architectural, urban, and landscape designs. These resultant sites are unique in the way that they confront the traditional expectations of work and leisure environments. Stores have appeared to open up their storerooms for leisurely consumption; restaurants, their kitchens for dining. Workers work harder in these new spaces, meeting not only the labor obligations of their employer, but additionally performing whatever role may be asked of them by the environment’s design: a sports-team coach, a cartoon character, a mountain climber. Through their performances, these workers offer an experience to customers to turn their (mere) act of consumption into an active form of leisure. But in so doing, their work engages them directly in the leisure experience as well. When an employee at Mountain Equipment Co-op, a Canadian outdoor clothing chain, dons a harness and starts climbing the in-house climbing wall, are they still working? The real work of these performers (and performance of these workers) is to provide structures, institutions, and activities for leisure-seekers whose primary venue for leisure is the consumer marketplace. To accommodate this new form of work, work environments must of necessity change. Sporting goods stores like REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.) and Mountain Equipment Co-op have climbing walls and simulated hiking trails. Restaurants like Bucca di Beppo have extruded kitchens to accommodate dozens of simultaneous kitchen diners. Malls like the West Edmonton Mall and the Mall of America have amusement parks. Hospitals like Celebration Health have Disney-style attractions. In all cases, what is at the core of each of these is the deployment of what is best called a spatial narrative: a way of telling stories through the design detailing and spatial organization of an architectural environment. At the same time that these stories allow the workers to perform a kind of simulated leisure activity, they also “work” their intended audiences – the leisured customers – to immerse them in memorable experiences. These are the experiences of the Experience Economy, where the construction of experience supersedes the value of rote transactions for an individual consumer, merchant, or vendor. Rather than a burger joint, we have Johnny Rockets and Rainforest Cafe. Rather than a car sales lot, we have The Style by Toyota. And instead of post offices, we have the legacy of Postmark America.¹ At Samsung’s new Experience Store in New York City, you can’t in fact conduct any material retail transaction (Barbaro 2007). The Experience Economy seeks the transformation of the labor of work into the enjoyment of leisure and the apparent and romanticized idyll of leisure into the productive benefits of work. Using the metaphor of the stage, preconceived scripts are spatially superimposed on the background of speculative real estate, providing both the environment and the directives necessary to achieve this goal. Architecture serves as the armature for these new experiments in experience. Not only does it serve as a site to contain or host thematic elements to support the scripts, but it holds the potential to organize space at the service of these narratives and become an iconic brand in itself. Michael Eisner, past CEO of The Walt Disney Co., went on record in 1992 for saying, “architects are smart, well-educated, and recognize good ideas. I’ll trade a good investment banker for an architect any day” (Crosbie 1992). I’m intent on taking his implications quite seriously.

In the remainder of this chapter, I seek to bring together an array of disparate historical, philosophical, and sociological thoughts on the work/leisure dynamic as they form a basis for the architectural ideas of the Experience Economy. I do so at the service of understanding how architecture is understood as more than an act of creating buildings: it becomes a scientific mechanism for producing social effects. The chapter places three disparate considerations in close proximity: the spatial impacts of work (and leisure) management, the various engagements of individual leisure time by mass-marketing, and the development of a philosophical understanding of everyday life as a subject of study. These, then, are folded into an architectural discussion in order to lay at least some of the foundations for understanding why architecture (again, in the wider social context, beyond the design of a building or interior) has such considerable value for an experience-based retail economy.

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF WORK AND LEISURE

There are many possible histories of the co-evolution of work and leisure, each responding to varying perceptions of what constitutes the two domains. One theme, however, appears with great consistency: that the modern idea of leisure, particularly the leisure practices of the middle class, is firmly rooted in the standardization of work practices in the early industrial economy. In Closing the Iron Cage, political scientist Ed Andrew (1999) examines Frederick Taylor’s responsibility not only for instantiating the modern industrial work ethic, but also for fostering contemporary sensibilities toward the temporal organization of leisure.

Frederick Taylor was an American engineer who pioneered the time-based study of work practices. In his two major publications, Shop Management (1903), and The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), he promoted a new scientific form of worker management that he deemed necessary to increase industrial productivity. Taylor, and the generations of workplace managers influenced by his work, are committed to increasing job productivity through the efficient organization of the production line, determining a proper schedule for both work tasks and for activities engaged while away from work. Taylor studied individual workers to determine the duration of their productivity at certain tasks, in terms of their stamina (their ability to work for a given period of time) and their recovery (their ability to recover effectively from a day’s work to be fresh for another’s). In The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor enumerates four key “duties” of the new manager to assist in this process:

First.	They [industrial managers] develop a science for each element of a man’s work, which replaces the old rule-of-thumb method.
Second.	They scientifically select and then train, teach, and develop the workman, whereas in the past he chose his own work and trained himself as best he could.
Third.	They heartily cooperate with the men so as to insure all of the work being done in accordance with the principles of the science which has been developed.
Fourth.	There is an almost equal division of the work and the responsibility between the management and the workmen. The management take over all work for which they are better fitted than the workmen [that is, the planning of industrial labor], while in the past almost all of the work and the greater part of the responsibility were thrown upon the [work]men.

(Taylor 1911: 36)

Taylor’s analyses were not well received either by industrialists or laborers during his life, for the invention of a management class seemed an unnecessary diversion from productivity. But his work became nonetheless instrumental in the subsequent temporal organization of the worker’s schedule into shifts, rotations, and breaks. Non-working time, that is, the time not spent working directly for industry (“leisure” in only the most mechanical sense), was also seen as an essential part of workday organization. In the same way that Taylor’s research helped to determine the spatial organization of the production line through the segmentation of production tasks based on human capacity (or at least some idealized version of such), it proposed a no less instrumental segmentation of a worker’s day into “work” and “leisure” segments.

The second effect of scientific management is an enhanced time-awareness and an increased concern for efficiency in our time off work … In short, it costs more to do nothing in a high-wage economy than in a low-wage economy. Increasing affluence and time off work may make people less prodigal and more careful of how they “spend” their time.

(Andrew 1999 [1981]: 46)

While “work” and “leisure” most accurately describe states of activity rather than units of time, the Taylorization of the American industrial workforce enforced a temporalizing of these activities, and dictated what sorts of activities were acceptable at work (i.e., service to and obedience of management) and what sorts could be done at one’s leisure (i.e., recuperation for other days at work). Leisure time, or that part of a worker’s day spent away from industrial work was expected to be used “properly,” making recovery for another day’s work paramount. Moonlighting or performing intensive domestic chores were not considered acceptable activities. In this way, leisure time was constituted as an integral part of the work day. Improper leisure-time expenditure was perceived as a detriment to industrial productivity. Necessarily accompanying the spatial and temporal management of the work day, thus, appeared what has been called avocational education: the explicit education of individuals for leisure-time expenditure. Taylor’s legacy led to a sociology of work and leisure which actively advocated – ostensibly in the interest of the overworked laborer yet more accurately in the interest of the technocratic social organizer – the use of formal and informal education to better the conditions of productive leisure.

Within the sociology of leisure, there is widespread acceptance of the proposition that our civilization of leisure depends on the efficient performance of the productive collectivity. The leisure-as-compensation thesis regards Taylorism not only as inevitable, but also as desirable, as the goose that lays the golden eggs. Thus the function of leisure is seen to reinforce or support the organization of production that maximizes leisure time and the income to enjoy it. To endure the perpetuation and growth of leisure time, leisure activities, subject to the education and organization skills of the leisurist, become socially productive recreations. Leisure activities, like productive activities, serve to enhance the productive collectivity. Productive and recreational activities are integrated within a system of total management.

(Andrew 1999 [1981]: 151)

THE CHANGING LEISURE ENVIRONMENT

The segmentation of a worker’s time was being institutionalized at the same time that the landscape of American retail was radically transforming. By the onset of the 20th century, the new service industry was blossoming with department store and shopping center prototypes, sales and advertising (due to heightened industrial production) were ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Stories about Our Themed Environment
• Part II The Experience of Experience
• Part III Narrative Agitations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index