ABSTRACT
The terms work and leisure are likely to be extremely familiar ones to you, since they are in common use in our everyday lives. What this book hopes to do is to take you beyond your own experiences of these two phenomena into a sociological exploration of the meanings, structures, and patterns of work in contemporary societies, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom. It will look at the relationship between working and being involved in leisure, different varieties of work including employment in the formal economy, casual work, and forms of unpaid work, the effects of unemployment, and varieties of leisure. There will also, in the final chapter, be a discussion about change in work and leisure. In so doing there will be a particular focus on empirical studies, although theoretical perspectives will not be forgotten altogether. If however you are wanting very basic information about sociological perspectives and the sociology of work, you would be well advised to precede your reading of this book with a prior reading of a standard
introductory textbook such as Haralambros (1985), because lack of space will prevent this book from dwelling on topics like bureaucracy, industrial conflict, and occupational associations, amongst others. However, what the book will do is to relate the study of work and leisure to a considerable number of other areas including class stratification and other social divisions, culture, the state, the family, and education.
