ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors explore the problems in the use of the leisure that technological and organizational development have brought within their reach. In a society where most men work, the job furnishes a metronome-like capacity to keep in order one’s routine of waking and sleeping, time on and time off, life on and life off the job. An ironic commentary on the pressure toward a reduction in the work week is provided by a study in which industrial workers were asked what they would do if they had an extra hour a day; most of them responded: “Sleep.” In comparison with the organizational forms developed for the integration of effort at work, there barely exist the social forms within which the energies of leisure might be developed or even illustrated. When leisure is absorbed in this way, one can only wish momentarily that television, ordinarily the greatest single occupant of leisure time, could draw these people back to the Westerns, melodramas.
