ABSTRACT
In this chapter the focus will be on leisure, a concept which, as you will by now have realized, is, along with work and unemployment, a term with a number of possible definitions, and which is far from being easy to apply to concrete individuals and their actions. One reason why leisure is a difficult concept to define firmly, as we saw in Chapter 1, is precisely because of the close links between work, leisure, and unemployment, especially once we move away from regarding work as just paid employment. Thus, for a woman or man in a 9am to 5pm job and with no household responsibilities, leisure might be activities and interests occurring outside the hours of paid work – dancing, watching TV, holidays, going to the pub, walking, or playing pool. If you are the parent of a very young child some of these activities would be more difficult to carry out – even watching TV
becomes less enjoyable if it is constantly interrupted. Or the activity might take a different form, such as walking with a baby buggy round the park rather than going for a ten-mile walk in the hills. For those outside of formal employment many leisure activities might prove too expensive: the pub, dancing, holidays are a few examples. Other activities this group do could become ways of filling time rather than being enjoyable ways to relax: walking aimlessly round the streets or watching TV all day because it’s cheap, but without really wanting to watch anything in particular. For some people whose work is mainly in the informal economy, going to the pub or playing pool might be a way of developing contacts which lead to casual work rather than a way of recuperating after employment is over for the day. Historically, as we saw in Chapter 1, paid employment and leisure have been heavily interconnected in industrial societies, with (mostly male) workers struggling to gain leisure time from their employers. But more recent research has suggested that leisure is also something that people outside formal employment struggle over – housewives for example – and there is nothing like rising unemployment rates for bringing about a rash of books and articles about ‘the leisure society’ and ‘has work a future?’.
