Careers in Serious Leisure

From Dabbler to Devotee in Search of Fulfilment

R. Stebbins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137399731
• Print ISBN:
  9781137399724
• Subtopic: Labour Economics

Using the concept of fulfilment and the framework of the serious leisure perspective, this book examines the signposts marking the fulfilment career. This career begins with an interest in a serious pursuit, leading to an efflorescence many years later in amateurism, hobbyism, volunteering, or devotee work - and ultimately deeper fulfilment.

1

The Serious Leisure Perspective

Serious, casual, and project-based leisure constitute the foundation of the serious leisure perspective (SLP). So far as we know in the interdisciplinary field of leisure studies, these three forms together embrace all leisure activities. The SLP is the theoretic framework that synthesizes three main forms of leisure showing, at once, their distinctive features, similarities, and interrelationships. More precisely the SLP offers a classification and explanation of all leisure activities and experiences, as these two are framed in the social psychological, social, cultural, geographical, and historical conditions in which each activity and accompanying experience take place.

The career has always been a central idea in this framework; it dates to the early studies of amateurs in archaeology, theater, and baseball (Stebbins, 1979). In principle, we could say the same for the idea of self-fulfillment, since the rewards comprising it were identified during the same research. Nonetheless, the term ‘fulfillment’ itself did not enter the serious pursuits’ lexicon until 25 years later (Stebbins, 2004a).

Three types of leisure

As far as we know at present, all leisure may be classified as serious, casual, or project-based. It will help in the discussion that follows to have a general understanding of these three.¹ Note that this is only an introduction, however, for I will examine each much more closely later in this chapter.

The serious type comes in two varieties: serious leisure and devotee work. Because of their similarity, we will occasionally refer to them together as the serious pursuits. Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity. It is sufficiently substantial, interesting, and fulfilling for the participant to find a career there by acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience. This career is experienced in free time, however, during which the individual gets better and better as an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer. It may be necessary to persevere when, for example, mastery of a skill or idea proves elusive. And because decline is possible in these activities (e.g., athletes who are past their prime), it may also be a part of this kind of career.

Devotee work is an activity in which participants feel a powerful devotion, or, in other words, strong and positive attachment, to an occupation that they are proud to be in. In such work, the sense of achievement is high and the core activity endowed with such intense appeal that the line between this work and leisure is virtually erased. Thus one way of understanding this level of appeal is to view devotee work as serious leisure from which a full or partial livelihood is possible (for some evidence supporting this proposition, see Walker and Fenton’s (2013) study of productive leisure researchers).

By contrast, casual leisure is immediately intrinsically rewarding and relatively a short-lived pleasurable activity. It requires little or no special training to enjoy it. It is therefore fundamentally hedonic, pursued for its significant level of pure enjoyment or pleasure. Examples are legion, including watching entertainment TV, observing scenery, drinking a glass of wine (no oenophile this imbiber), or gossiping about someone. Complexity in casual leisure increases slightly when playing a board game using dice, participating in a Hash House Harrier treasure hunt, or serving as a casual volunteer by, say, collecting bottles for the Scouts or serving tea and coffee in a religious gathering.

Project-based leisure differs in many ways from the preceding types. It is a short-term, reasonably complicated, one-off or occasional, though infrequent, innovative undertaking. But, as with the others, it is carried out in free time, or time free of disagreeable obligation. Such leisure requires considerable planning, effort, and possibly some skill or knowledge, but yet is neither serious leisure nor intended to develop into such. It is a leisure project when we volunteer to help out at an arts festival or sports event, develop the basement at home, or arrange a big celebration for a fiftieth wedding anniversary, assuming that these are not recurrent activities for the participant.

In the field of leisure studies, these three types and their subtypes are considered together under the heading of the SLP. Figure 1.1 offers a diagrammatic view of their interrelationship. It may also be viewed as a road map for our journey through this remainder of this book.

The serious pursuits

We will begin with a closer look at serious leisure and then move on to its counterpart at work. My goal for the rest of this chapter is to present enough detail about the three types to enable readers to understand how career and fulfillment are achieved in the amateur, hobbyist, and volunteer pursuits. Further, a certain amount of detail is needed to show just how critical career and fulfillment are for developing a positive lifestyle and a sense of well-being. Finally, career, in the language of the SLP, is not limited in application to remunerated work. Rather, careers both in leisure and in devotee work begin in the first, and for those who do wind up making a living at their leisure activity their careers often finish in the second. I say ‘often finish’, for some occupational devotees, we shall see later, find leisure in later life in applying gratis their skills and knowledge. Hence, the powerful appeal of the serious pursuit.

Serious leisure

I coined this term to express the way the people I interviewed and observed viewed the importance of these three kinds of activity in their daily lives (Stebbins, 1982). The adjective ‘serious’ (a word my research respondents often used) embodies such qualities as earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness, rather than gravity, solemnity, joylessness, distress, and anxiety. Although the second set of terms occasionally describes serious leisure events, they are uncharacteristic of them and fail to nullify, or, in many cases, even dilute, the overall fulfillment gained by the participants. By way of example, an amateur actor loves performing theater, but battles stage fright before every performance.

Amateurs are found in art, science, sport, and entertainment, where they are invariably linked in a variety of ways with professional counterparts. The two can be distinguished economically in that the activity in question constitutes a livelihood (full or part-time) for the pros but not the amateurs. The part-time professionals in art and entertainment complicate this picture; although they work part-time, their work is judged by other professionals and by the amateurs as of professional quality.

Figure 1.1 The serious leisure perspective

Source: Diagram formulated by Jenna Hartel.

Hobbyists lack this professional alter ego, suggesting that, historically, all amateurs were hobbyists before their fields professionalized. Hobbyists can be classified in five subtypes, which we will discuss at length in Chapter 4: collectors, makers and tinkerers, noncompetitive activity participants (e.g., fishing, hiking, orienteering), hobbyists in sports and games (e.g., ultimate Frisbee, croquet, gin rummy), and liberal arts enthusiasts. The latter are enamored of the systematic acquisition of knowledge for its own sake. Many of them accomplish this by reading voraciously in a field of art, sport, cuisine, language, culture, history, science, philosophy, politics, or literature.

Volunteers perform, even for short periods of time, volunteer work in either an informal or a formal setting (Smith, Stebbins, & Dover, 2006, pp. 239–240). It is through volunteer work that these people provide a service or benefit to one or more individuals, usually receiving no pay, even though people serving in volunteer programs are sometimes compensated for out-of-pocket expenses. Moreover, in the field of nonprofit studies, since no volunteer work is involved, giving (of, say, blood, money, clothing), as an altruistic act, is not considered volunteering. Meanwhile, in the typical case, volunteers who are altruistically providing a service or benefit to others are themselves also benefiting from various rewards experienced during this process (e.g., pleasant social interaction, self-enriching experiences, sense of contributing to nonprofit group success). In other words, volunteering is motivated by two basic attitudes: altruism and self-interest. The hobbyists and the amateur, on other hand, are motivated significantly more by self-interest than by altruism.

Volitionally speaking (Stebbins, 2013a), volunteer activities are motivated, in part, by one of six types of interest: interest in activities involving (1) people, (2) ideas, (3) things, (4) flora, (5) fauna, or (6) the natural environment (Stebbins, 2007a). Each type, or combination of types, offers its volunteers an opportunity to pursue, through an altruistic activity, a particular kind of interest. Thus, volunteers interested in working with certain ideas are attracted to idea-based volunteering, while those interested in certain kinds of animals are attracted to faunal volunteering. Interest forms the first dimension of a typology of volunteers and volunteering.

But, since volunteers and volunteering cannot be explained by interest alone, a second dimension is needed. This is supplied by the SLP and its three forms. This perspective, as already noted, sets out the motivational and contextual (sociocultural, historical) foundation of the three. The intersections of these two dimensions produce 18 types of volunteers and volunteering, exemplified in idea-based serious leisure volunteers, material casual leisure volunteering (working with things), and environmental project-based volunteering (see Table 1.1).

The conception of volunteering that squares best with the leisure theme of this book is that volunteering is a distinctive type of leisure. Volunteers engage in enjoyable casual leisure, fulfilling serious leisure, or enjoyable or fulfilling project-based leisure doing activities that they may choose to accept or reject on their own terms. A key element in the leisure conception of volunteering is the feeling of not being coerced, moral, or otherwise, to participate in the volunteer activity (Stebbins, 1996).

Six distinguishing qualities

Serious leisure is further defined by six distinguishing qualities, qualities found among amateurs, hobbyists, and volunteers alike (Stebbins, 2007b, pp. 11–13). One is the occasional need to persevere, such as in learning how to be an effective museum guide. Yet, it is clear that positive feelings about the activity come, to some extent, from sticking with it through thick and thin, from conquering adversity. A second quality is that of finding a career in the serious leisure role, shaped as it is by its own special contingencies, turning points and stages of achievement or involvement. Careers in serious leisure commonly rest on a third quality: significant personal effort based on specially acquired knowledge, training, experience, or skill, and, indeed, all four at times. Fourth, several durable benefits, or broad outcomes, of serious leisure have so far been identified, mostly through research on amateurs. They are self-development, self-enrichment, self-expression, regeneration or renewal of self, feelings of accomplishment, enhancement of self-image, social interaction and belongingness, and lasting physical products of the activity (e.g., a painting, scientific paper, piece of furniture). Self-gratification, or the combination of superficial enjoyment and deep fulfillment, is a further benefit and also one of the main benefits of casual leisure, where, however, the enjoyment part dominates. Of these benefits, self-fulfillment – realizing, or the fact of having realized, to the fullest one’s gifts and character, one’s potential – is the most powerful of all.

Table 1.1 A leisure-based theoretic typology of volunteers and volunteering

A fifth quality of serious leisure is the unique ethos that grows up around each instance of it, a central component of which is a special social world where participants can pursue their free-time interests. Unruh (1980) developed the following definition:

A social world must be seen as a unit of social organization which is diffuse and amorphous in character. Generally larger than groups or organizations, social worlds are not necessarily defined by formal boundaries, membership lists, or spatial territory . . . . A social world must be seen as an internally recognizable constellation of actors, organizations, events, and practices which have coalesced into a perceived sphere of interest and involvement for participants. Characteristically, a social world lacks a powerful centralized authority structure and is delimited by . . . effective communication and not territory nor formal group membership. (p. 277)

The sixth quality revolves around the preceding five: participants in serious leisure tend to identify strongly with their chosen pursuits. In contrast, casual leisure, although hardly humiliating or despicable, is nonetheless too fleeting, mundane, and commonplace for most people to find a distinctive identity there.

Rewards, costs, and motivation

The main way that the serious pursuits are set off from other kinds of work and leisure is by the extraordinary rewards they offer. These rewards act as powerful motives for being involved in one or more of those pursuits. Still, the serious pursuits are also distinguished by the fact that participants sometimes encounter costs while engaging in them. It is this profile of rewards and costs that places the serious pursuits at odds with the popular images of work as drudgery and leisure as an unalloyed good time. To repeat, this is why my interviewees kept underscoring that their leisure was out of the ordinary, not like that of most other people, they said.

The rewards of a serious leisure pursuit are the more or less routine values that attract and hold its enthusiasts. Every serious leisure career both frames and is framed by the continuous search for these rewards. Moreover, this search may take months and, in some fields, years, before the participant consistently finds self-fulfillment in his or her amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity. Ten rewards have so far emerged in the course of the various studies of amateurs, hobbyists, and career volunteers. As the following list shows, the rewards are predominantly personal.

Personal rewards

1. Personal enrichment (cherished experiences)

2. Self-actualization (developing skills, abilities, knowledge)

3. Self-expression (expressing skills, abilities, knowledge already developed)

4. Self-image (known to others as a particular kind of serious leisure participant)

5. Self-gratification (combination of superficial enjoyment and deep fulfillment)

6. Re-creation (regeneration) of oneself through serious leisure after a day’s work

7. Financial return (from a serious leisure activity)

Social rewards

8. Social attraction (associating with other serious leisure participants, with clients as a volunteer, participating in the social world of the activity)

9. Group accomplishment (group effort in accomplishing a serious leisure project; senses of helping, being needed, being altruistic)

10. Contribution to the maintenance and development of the group (including senses of helping, being needed, being altruistic in making the contribution)

In the various studies on amateurs, hobbyists, and volunteers, these rewards, depending on the activity, were often given different weightings by research interviewees to reflect their importance relative to each other. Nonetheless, some common ground exists, for the studies do show that, in terms of their personal importance, most serious leisure participants rank self-enrichment and self-gratification as number 1 and number 2, respec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. The Serious Leisure Perspective
• 2. Starting a Fulfillment Career
• 3. Amateurism as a Route to Fulfillment
• 4. Finding Fulfillment in a Hobby
• 5. Fulfilling Careers in Volunteering
• 6. Professional Devotee Work
• 7. Hobbyist and Volunteer Devotee Work
• 8. The Positive Quest for Fulfillment: Shadows
• Notes
• References
• Index