The Sociology of Fun

Ben Fincham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780230358577
• eBook ISBN: 9781137315793
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference
• Index: Social Sciences

hat is fun? How is it distinct from happiness or pleasure? How do we know when we are having it? This book is the first to provide a comprehensive sociological account of this taken for granted social phenomenon. Fincham investigates areas such as our memories of fun in childhood, the fun we have as adults, our muted experiences of fun at work and our lived experiences of having fun. Using first-hand accounts and a new approach to interpreting fun, the paradox of fun as not serious or unimportant whilst at the same time essential for a happy life is exposed. Addressing questions of control, transgression and the primacy of social relationships in fun, The Sociology of Fun is intended to provoke discussion about how we want to have fun and who determines the fun we have.

© The Author(s) 2016

Ben FinchamThe Sociology of Funhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31579-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Ben Fincham¹

(1)

Department of Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

End Abstract

Towards a Sociology of Fun

Fun is taken for granted. In everyday talk people use the term anticipating that others will know what they mean when they describe something as fun. In fact it is so taken for granted that outside of dictionary definitions there is very little in the way of explanations for what fun is and how to discern it from other social experiences. What we know is that sometimes we have it and sometimes we don’t, one person’s idea of it is not necessarily another’s and having too much of it is often frowned upon. Much of the literature that is used in this book refers to fun as rooted in activities presumed to be fun—‘camping and water-based activities’ are ‘popular and fun’ according to a study of ‘rural family fun’ (Churchill et al. 2007: 282)¹—or conflates fun with things like play (Yee 2006; Churchill et al. 2007; Kelty et al. 2008), happiness (Cameron 1972; Jackson 2000; Sumnall et al. 2010), leisure (Scanlan and Simons 1992; Bengoechea et al. 2004; MacPhail et al. 2008) or deviance (Riemer 1981; Redmon 2003; Keppens and Spruyt 2015). Whilst it is the case that all of these areas may contain elements that people would describe as fun, there is precious little in the way of theorising or describing what it is. Fun pertains to other areas of life but is rarely viewed as a defining feature of it. The most pertinent example of this is found in the recent interest in issues of happiness and well-being. Opinions and expertise on happiness emanate from a wide array of academic disciplinary backgrounds. People working in psychology, psychiatry, economics, social policy, health studies, philosophy, geography and youth studies—to name a few—have been applying themselves to understanding what constitutes happiness, its relationship to well-being, how to measure it and importantly how to instil a sense of it in individuals and populations (Rodriguez et al. 2011; Bok 2010; Veenhoven 2009; Waite et al. 2009; Diener and Biswas-Diener 2008). At the same time as the world economic recession of 2008–2009 reverberated through economies several national governments became interested in measures of happiness in populations. In the UK the government decided to conduct a survey through the Office for National Statistics to assess how ‘happy’ the British population was in 2011 (Directgov 2010). The intention of officially monitoring happiness was to steer government social policy (Stratton 2010). Elsewhere, the governments of France and Canada developed national happiness measures at the same time as the UK (Stratton 2010). The discussions about happiness and well-being were generally centred on a few core themes, the most prominent being wealth and income, job satisfaction, feelings of community, relationships with friends and family, environment, cultural activities, health and education (Directgov 2010). The thinking is that if you can get a sense of these facets of a person’s life as successful or unsuccessful, attained or unattained, then you should be able to infer levels of happiness. However, the point for this book is not to dwell on the obvious difficulties in defining and then measuring something subjective like levels of happiness—or whether it is a worthwhile pursuit or not—but to note that there has been an important omission from almost all discussions about what makes people happy—namely, fun. The absence of fun perhaps relates to the conflation of happiness with well-being where fun is peripheral to the more weighty matters of physical health or economic security—but when considered alongside happiness, this absence is odd. During two particular studies I have been involved with, one looking at informal labour markets and the other into the relationship between mental health and work, the importance of fun to people became apparent. In interviews when asked what made them happy—particularly at work—many participants identified having fun as a fundamental reason for being happy. Obviously, this is not a novel observation, as Donald Roy points out in Banana Time several commentators in the 1950s had made similar points. As an interviewee in work on assembly line workers by Walker and Guest said, ‘We have a lot of fun and talk all the time … if it weren’t for the talking and fooling you’d go nuts’ (Roy 1959: 158). The role of fun for making situations at worst tolerable and at best enjoyable is clear—which is what makes the omission of fun as an object of serious study all the more perplexing. There is a general absence of any engagement with fun as a central feature of happiness; rather, fun is a by-product of activities that are supposed to make us happy. This book is an attempt primarily to acknowledge the central role fun plays in our lives and also to develop a sociological approach to fun.

By way of an introduction to fun and sociology, this chapter establishes the parameters within which the rest of the book operates. Here a sociological definition of fun is, very broadly, outlined. There is a description of how fun has been conceptualised by academics historically—with specific reference to the 1950s literature on ‘fun morality’. There is an account of references to fun outside of sociology and many of these will be picked up in further chapters. Important for a sociological definition are the ways in which fun operates differently in various contexts—work, family, education, leisure, and so on—and this contextual aspect is highlighted here. It is also in the introduction that the distinctiveness of fun as performing specific social functions—and its relationship to power—is introduced. After the historical view, further debates that the book engages with are outlined. More generally, the book questions the ‘taken for granted’ nature of references to fun. Do people mean the same things when they talk about ‘having fun’? Why is one person’s idea of fun different from somebody else’s? The relationship between fun, happiness and well-being is also addressed. This is the first book that explicitly sets out a ‘sociology of fun’. As such it is an exploration of the different ways that fun features in everyday life and how sociology can bring something distinctive to that analysis.

The Importance of Fun

As I have indicated, the idea for a concerted study of fun emerged during 2010–2011. Carl Walker and I had just published a book called Work and the Mental Health Crisis in Britain (Walker and Fincham 2011) and it was also the period in which the UK government, under the premiership of David Cameron, was developing the ‘National Wellbeing Programme’. This initiative had disappeared from public consciousness fairly soon after an initial flurry of interest—but the aim, according to the Office for National Statistics, was to ‘produce accepted and trusted measures of the well-being of the nation’ (Office for National Statistics 2011). They went on to broadly define well-being and talk about why it was important to try and measure it:

Well-being put simply is about ‘how we are doing’ as individuals, as communities and as a nation and how sustainable this is for the future. Measuring National Well-being is about looking at ‘GDP and beyond’. (Office for National Statistics 2011)

It is worth noting that the government became interested in measuring well-being in the depths of the worst economic recession since the 1930s. A cynic might suggest that this interest was inspired by a government trying to suggest that GDP is not the best way to rate the success of any given society at a time when the economy was going from bad to worse. This view was hardly undermined by the disappearance of governmental concern in measuring well-being during the economic recovery. However, my interest was piqued by what I had noticed in the study of mental health and work and a significant absence in the well-being index survey. During the study of the relationship between work, employment and workers’ feelings of mental well-being, an interesting dichotomy emerged in interviews in relation to the idea of fun. On the one hand, interviewees talked about how important it was to have fun whilst at work and that it not only signalled good relationships between colleagues but was also a key factor for continued healthy engagement with work. On the other hand, when describing instances of fun, people represented it as frivolous, unimportant in relation to other aspects of being at work. It seemed to be something to be a bit embarrassed about (Walker and Fincham 2011). It was also clear that the way people were framing fun in their own lives was distinct, but related to, ideas of happiness.

In the ONS survey there was no mention of fun at all. There was no attempt to assess the role fun played in a person’s sense of well-being. In fact I could not find specific mentions of fun in any of the many well-being indexes being developed at the time (Canadian Index of Wellbeing 2015; Office for National Statistics 2015; OECD 2015; The State of the USA 2015). The implication was that well-being is predicated on certain aspects of life, but fun is not one of them.

These two trains of thought led to a very simple existential question. What would a life without any fun be like? Just asking the question summons up a terribly bleak scenario. If the absence of fun is so bad, then it must be important. If you think through the implications of the question, and where an absence of fun impacts, it is squarely in the realms of happiness and well-being—it is a very bad thing to have no fun.

In terms of well-being and happiness people are happier than they would otherwise be if they have fun.

It became apparent quite early on that fun is complicated. It is a multidimensional, multifunctional social phenomenon. It defines experiences, characterises people, embellishes memories; it feeds moments with positivity, establishes the conditions for good relationships; it draws distinctions between good and bad times and it enhances life. It is curiously ambiguous—we know when we are having it, but struggle to define it.

Do We Know What Fun Is?

As is often the case, in books like this dictionary definitions are only useful in as much as they provide a starting point but little else. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes fun as ‘diversion, amusement, sport; also, boisterous jocularity or gaiety, drollery. Also, a source or cause of amusement or pleasure’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online 2011). This clearly does not encompass our experience of fun. The semantics of experiences are difficult, and as an approximation dictionary definitions are always reductive—but for something as profound and significant as fun, the OED inevitably lacks depth. My disquiet about this definition is in part because of the etymology of the word fun. Its meaning has diversified over the centuries from describing cheating in the seventeenth century to a pejorative description of low wit or mockery in the nineteenth century to its modern meaning, associating fun with ‘exciting goings on’ (Blythe and Hassenzahl 2004: 92). The history of the word fun is suffused social class, judgement and transgression. Blythe and Hassenzahl give a particularly illuminating and concise explanation of the role of the industrial revolution in shaping contemporary notions of fun. They explain that in the routinisation and mechanisation of work the boundaries between work and leisure—or not being at work—became clear, but more importantly, the processes of rationalisation in work leads to the development of fun as a mode of resistance to routine and regimentation. This, and an association of a lack of middle- or upper-class sophistication with fun, made it a working class, subversive activity. To a certain extent this can still be seen today, particularly in the rhetoric of ‘taking the piss’ or ‘having a laugh’. As will be explored later in the book, there is often a transgressive or subversive element to the ways in which we have fun—and this is still often associated with a lack of sophistication. This chequered past echoes in contemporary settings, and this in turn needs to be factored in to any account of what fun is today. These echoes do not necessarily have to refer to industrialisation and class specifically, but make sense of the outside or transgressive element that is often a component of fun. As will be addressed later, the trivialisation or marginalisation of fun—when it is so important to feeling good—may have closer ties to social control and productivity than we care to imagine.

Despite sporadic interest in fun in a variety of contexts, there has never been a sustained attempt to pin down what is meant by fun. There are a number of reasons as to why this might be. For example, Goffman suggests in Encounters:

Because serious activity need not justify itself in terms of the fun it provides, we have neglected to develop an analytical view of fun and an appreciation of the light fun throws on interaction in general. (Goffman 1961: 17)

Blythe and Hassenzahl (2004) are rare for their attempt to systematically address how to theorise fun and whilst there are many references to it in various places, there is rarely any attempt to explain what the phenomenon is. Rather, it is up to the reader or listener to fill in the gaps by inferring fun from references to other things—happiness, laughter or whatever. So, whilst many people refer to fun, few try to pin down what they or—in the case of empirical research—their participants/informants mean when they talk about it. As I say, these oblique references mean that we have to infer from the points of reference used by writers when they talk about fun.

For example, the relationship between leisure, culture and consumption gives clues as a hegemonic construct of fun through capitalist provision of leisure spaces/activities and the development of leisure industries. Whilst not directly addressing fun they, nonetheless, often called upon fun as the motivation for the consumption of particular leisure activities and/or products. The relationship between sporting activities and fun, particularly when encouraging youth participation, predominates references to fun and leisure (Fine 1989; Seefeldt et al ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theorising Fun
• 3. Fun and Games: Childhood
• 4. Fun and Frivolity: Adulthood
• 5. Fun at Work
• 6. Phenomenal Fun
• 7. Fun and Recollection
• 8. Conclusions
• Backmatter