ABSTRACT
The centrality of work has been one of the predominant assumptions of industrial sociology, and a wealth of research material now exists on ‘the world of work’. This chapter suggests that the constraints arising from social structure profoundly affect people’s leisure behaviour, as they do their work and family life, and that the factors are often neglected by policy-makers and planners. Part of the increasing diversity and variety of leisure values may be due to the declining significance of social class as a basis of people’s behaviour. Liberalism suggests that in the area of law social class position should not give some individuals greater claims than others, but that all should be treated impartially, as citizens. Manual working-class women, considered as a group, have not been regarded as particularly ‘visible’ or problematic from the point of view of social policy, in the sense that as a group they do not attract the attention of social agencies.
