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163 Pages·2015·0.76 MB·English
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Leisure and Positive Psychology DOI: 10.1057/9781137569943.0001 Other Palgrave Pivot titles Simon Massey and Rino Coluccello: Eurafrican Migration: Legal, Economic and Social Responses to Irregular Migration Duncan McDuie-Ra: Debating Race in Contemporary India Andrea Greenbaum: The Tropes of War: Visual Hyperbole and Spectacular Culture Kristoffer Kropp: A Historical Account of Danish Sociology: A Troubled Sociology Monika E. Reuter: Creativity – A Sociological Approach M. Saiful Islam: Pursuing Alternative Development: Indigenous People, Ethnic Organization and Agency Justin DePlato: American Presidential Power and the War on Terror: Does the Constitution Matter? 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Stebbins Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary, Canada DOI: 10.1057/9781137569943.0001 © Robert A. Stebbins 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saff ron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Th e author has asserted his right to be identifi ed as the author of his work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fift h Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–137–56994–3 PDF ISBN: 978-1-349-56496-5 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. www.palgrave.com/pivot doi: 10.1007/978-1-137-56994-3 Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 1 The Serious Leisure Perspective 11 2 Positiveness in the Serious Pursuits 41 3 Interpersonal Relationships 57 4 Contemplation and Spirituality 70 5 Altruism 82 6 Contributions to Community and Organization 96 7 Quality of Life and Well-Being 110 8 Casual and Project-Based Leisure 123 9 Play and Creativity 133 Conclusion 144 Index 149 DOI: 10.1057/9781137569943.0001 v Acknowledgments My sincere thanks go to Vidhya Jayaprakash and the production team at Newgen Knowledge Works and to Palgrave Macmillan’s editors Harriet Barker and Amelia Derkatsch for efficiently shepherding it through the vari- ous stages of acquisition and production. vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137569943.0002 Introduction Abstract: Leisure plays a key role in positive psychology, though it would be difficult to reach this conclusion from the infrequency with which the idea surfaces in the field’s publications and intellectual discussions. This book shows how theory and research from the interdisciplinary field of leisure studies, more specifically from the serious leisure perspective (SLP), can be used to join the two fields, which have so much to offer each other. Thus, positive interpersonal relationships and positive emotional and cognitive states and processes – the stuff of positive psychology – are expressed or realized in myriad leisure activities (i.e., sets of particular behaviors). These activities are highly appealing, thereby providing their own motivational push. Leisure is defined and conceptualized as a kind of activity. General activities include the pursuit of certain core activities, which constitute powerful reasons for engaging in such leisure. Keywords: activity; agency; leisure; positive psychology; role; serious leisure perspective Stebbins, Robert A. Leisure and Positive Psychology: Linking Activities with Positiveness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137569943.0003. DOI: 10.1057/9781137569943.0003   Leisure and Positive Psychology Leisure has a central role to play in positive psychology, though it would be difficult to reach this conclusion from the infrequency with which the idea surfaces in the latter field’s publications and intellectual discussions. This is odd, for many of positive psychology’s most vibrant ideas are equally prominent in the domain of leisure and its analytic home, leisure studies. These ideas include flow, fulfillment, altruism, well-being, and interpersonal relationships. Moreover, there should be much greater discourse between the two fields, since leisure studies has a variety of well-validated conceptual tools that can help positive psychology find its proper and rightful place in the domain of free time. Indeed, until positive psychology came along, leisure studies could justifiably claim to be the only positive social science. This may sound audacious, coming as it is from a sociologist, albeit one whose minor in graduate studies was psychology (I also took as an undergraduate a double major in sociology and psychology). More to the point, however, is that my intellectual base for the past 40 years has been in leisure studies. It is a broad interdiscipline composed primarily of psychology and sociology as well as geography, education, economics, history, and philosophy. As I intend to explain in the following pages, leisure is a vast domain, and with two other more or less equally vast domains – work and nonwork obligation – covers every aspect of human existence. This domainal framework is set out elsewhere (Stebbins, 2009, chap. 1), where I also present a positive sociology as inspired by the advances in the study of positiveness made in positive psychology. What has become clear to me over the past 40 years is that leisure is an important feature of many areas of life, some of which might appear at first blush to be unrelated. By way of example, consider therapeutic recreation, where leisure is used to help people with disabilities find an agreeable lifestyle. Consider arts and science administration, where volunteers make significant contributions as instructors and members of boards of directors. Consider library and information science, where leisure theory is helping specialists understand how information is gath- ered and disseminated in that domain of free time. Consider tourism studies and event analysis, where participants, all in search of some kind of leisure, have a range of different motives for spending their free time here. In brief, the study of leisure has since around 1970 resulted in a solid and widely applicable body of knowledge. This book shows how theory and research from the interdiscipline of leisure studies, more specifically from the serious leisure perspective DOI: 10.1057/9781137569943.0003 Introduction  (SLP), can be used to join the two fields, which have so much to offer each other. In this regard the present book may be seen as a next step following on Teresa Freire’s Positive Leisure Science (2013). Her anthology shows generally the critical role of leisure in the study and application of positiveness. In the present volume I want to link, in more particular fashion, the SLP, its central concept of activity, and positive psychology. Bear in mind that this is in no way an attempt to merge the two fields theoretically and empirically into one overarching conceptual frame- work. This would be an immense undertaking and, at this stage of their development, very probably an impossible one. Why use the SLP to meet this goal? One reason, perhaps selfish, is that I have been its prime mover since its inception in 1973 (a short history is available at www.seriousleisure.net). We academics find much positiveness in promoting our own ideas. More important for this book, however, is that this perspective is the only theoretic framework in leisure studies that bears in some way on most, if not all, of that field. It offers the widest lens for viewing leisure, even while a number of other theories offer more detailed looks at certain aspects of it (e.g., leisure constraints, recreational specialization, and social-class analysis). I will argue that positive interpersonal relationships and positive emotional and cognitive states and processes – the stuff of positive psychology – are expressed or realized in myriad leisure activities (i.e., sets of particular behaviors). These activities are highly appealing, thereby providing their own motivational push. The more complicated of them (the serious pursuits) are, in turn, rooted in surrounding social worlds of people, groups, organizations, services, and a unique history. A powerful personal and social identity typically follows from involvement in these activities. What is leisure? Leisure is uncoerced, contextually framed activity engaged in during free time, which people want to do and, using their abilities and resources, actually do in either a satisfying or a fulfilling way, if not both (the definition of leisure is considered at length in Stebbins, 2012, p. 4). “Free time” in this definition is time away from unpleasant, or disagreeable, obligation, with pleasant obligation being treated of here as essentially leisure. In other words homo otiosus (Stebbins, 2013), leisure man, feels DOI: 10.1057/9781137569943.0003

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This book explores, from a leisure studies perspective, the central role that leisure has to play in positive psychology, exploring themes such as flow, fulfilment, altruism, well-being, and interpersonal relationships.
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