ABSTRACT
So far we have considered formal employment, work carried on outside the formal economy (whether paid or unpaid), unemployment and patterns and experiences of leisure. In this final chapter I want to spend a little time looking at some of the wider issues raised by the earlier discussions of work and leisure. One of the most obvious questions raised by looking at the present and recent past is ‘how are things changing and what will happen in the future?’ Although it is an important question, it is also one which is difficult to answer. Predicting the future is not an easy task and even informed guesses can be totally wrong. In the 1880s some commentators thought compulsory education would produce better, more compliant employees and make industry more efficient and more
able to compete with other countries in trade. But today people are still searching for ways of improving the links between industry and education and there are still complaints that schools don’t produce good workers. In the 1930s when there was mass unemployment, many texts and books were written about how this shortage of work could usher in a new form of society where everyone had more leisure. Similar books have been written in the past decade. In the 1960s many were predicting that automation would totally change the future shape of paid work; but it did not. In the late 1980s people are saying that computerization will drastically alter both employment and leisure; it may or it may not. At the moment it is still too soon to tell.
