Leisure for Leisure: Critical Essays

215 Pages·1989·19.965 MB·English

by  Chris Rojek (eds.)

LEISURE FOR LEISURE
Also by Chris Rojek
CAPITALISM AND LEISURE THEORY
SOCIAL WORK AND RECEIVED ISEAS
(with G. Peacock and S. Collins)
THE HAUNT OF MISERY
(editor with G. Peacock and S. Collins)
Leisure for Leisure
Critical Essays
Edited by
Chris Rojek
Senior Editor in Sociology, Routledge
M
PALGRAVE
MACMILLAN
© Chris Rojek 1989
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First published 1989
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Leisure for leisure: critical essays.
I. Leisure-Social aspects
I. Rojek, Chris
306'.48 GVI81.3
ISBN 978-0-333-46170-9 ISBN 978-1-349-19527-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19527-5
Contents
Notes on the Contributors vi
Introduction 1
PART I THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON
LEISURE
1 Models of Work, Models of Leisure 15
H. F. Moorhouse
2 The Figurational Approach to Leisure and Sport 36
Eric Dunning
3 Sigmund Freud and the Pursuit of Pleasure 53
Harvie Ferguson
4 Simmel and Leisure 75
David Frisby
5 Leisure and 'The Ruins of the Bourgeois World' 92
Chris Rojek
PARTII LEISURE,POWERANDPLANNING
6 Leisure Policy: An Unresolvable Dualism? 115
Fred Coalter
7 The Promise and Problems of Women's Leisure and
Sport 130
jennifer Hargreaves
8 Leisure and the Informal Economy 150
jeff Bishop and Paul Hoggett
9 Drugs and Leisure, Prohibition and Pleasure: From
Subculture to the Drugalogue 171
Nicholas Dorn and Nigel South
10 Leisure Time and Leisure Space 191
Chris Rojek
Author Index 205
Subject Index 208
v
Notes on the Contributors
Jeff Bishop is Lecturer at the School of Advanced Urban Studies,
Bristol Unversity.
Fred Coalter is Director. of the Centre for Leisure and Tourism
Studies, North London Polytechnic.
Nicholas Dorn is Researcher at the Institute for the Study of Drug
Dependence.
Eric Dunning is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology,
Leicester University.
Harvie Ferguson is Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Glasgow
University.
David Frisby is Reader in the Department of Sociology, Glasgow
University.
Jennifer Hargreaves is Senior Lecturer in Sports Studies, Roehampton
Institute, London.
Paul Hoggett is Lecturer at the School of Advanced Urban Studies,
Bristol University.
H. F. Moorhouse is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Glasgow
University.
Chris Rojek is Senior Editor in Sociology at Routledge, London.
Nigel South is Researcher at the Institute for the Study of Drug
Dependence.
vi
Introduction
Chris Rojek
I
In societies dominated by instrumental rationality and secularism,
where lives are suspended between deadlines and dead-ends, leisure
assumes extraordinary ideological significance. Paid employment and
family life may be regarded as the main part of 'normal' adult
existence. However, leisure, it is said, is the 'necessary' counterpart to
work, the 'reward' for effort, the prerequisite for a 'healthy' and
'balanced' lifestyle. It would be absurd to suggest that Western culture
presents paid employment and family life as a purgatory of self-denial.
On the contrary, it can be said safely that paid employment and family
life are widely seen as affirmations of adulthood - that is, people do not
think of themselves as real grown-ups until they get a steady job and
start a family. However, the pleasures of work and family life, great as
they may be, are moderated by the sense of responsibility and
self-discipline which both require. In work and family life we may
satisfy and surprise ourselves. However, only in leisure are we said to
be ourselves.
This is certainly the dominant position in academic sociology.
Leisure is consistently associated with positive experience: liberty,
fulfilment, choice and growth. For example, Dumazedier, writing in
1967, defined leisure as
activity - apart from the obligations of work, family and society - to
which the individual turns at will for either relaxation, diversion or
broadening his knowledge and his spontaneous social participation,
the free exercise of his creative capacity. 1
Kelly's definition, written twenty years later, errs on the side of
brevity, but endorses the same view. 'Leisure,' he writes, 'is the
freedom to be' (emphasis his). 2
All of the essays in this book take issue with this view. The book is
divided into two sections. The first section examines some theoretical
perspectives on leisure. The second section is devoted to a
1
2 Introduction
consideration of leisure, power and planning. H. F. Moorhouse gets
the collection oft to a rousing start and also captures the temper of the
book. His is indeed a critical essay which neatly dissects the pretences
of the dominant tradition and the acclamations of the neo-Marxist
'alternative' embodied in the work of Clarke and Critcher. His
conclusion raises some pertinent and searching questions about
conventional and alternative treatments of the 'work-leisure relation'
and the direction of 'leisure studies' as a field of academic enquiry.
In Chapter 2 a specific sociological perspective on leisure and sport is
outlined and defended. The perspective is figurational sociology, and
counsel for the defence is Eric Dunning. Figurational sociology
arouses strong opinions. Some writers argue that it explains
everything. Others maintain that it 'explains' nothing and that Elias's
'theory' of the civilising process is merely an empiricist exercise. Eric
Dunning begins by considering some of the leading criticisms made of
the figurational approach to the study of leisure and sport. Using
textual material from Elias's own writings, he disentangles the
approach from charges of idealism and evolutionism. Dunning
believes passionately in the promise of figurational sociology to
produce a genuine, objective understanding of leisure, sport and many
aspects of social life besides. In this essay he uses figurational studies of
foxhunting and football hooliganism in Britain to illustrate how the
approach has been applied.
The work of Sigmund Freud has been neglected in leisure studies.
This is careless. The middle-class patients who trooped into his
consulting rooms in Vienna revealed psychological burdens which
damaged all aspects of their lives, including their 'free' time relations.
Moreover, systematic study of the Case Histories alone would yield
rich material for considering another neglected question in leisure
studies: the question of what constitutes 'deviant' and 'normal' leisure
practice. Harvie Ferguson, in his mobile and unconventional essay on
Freud, argues that Freud's own leisure habits (orderly/self-improving)
must be used as the basis for understanding the relevance of Freud's
writings for the study of leisure. Freud lived in a society dominated by
the philosophy of possessive individualism - bourgeois society. The
market of goods and services found its direct parallel in 'the market of
sentiments'. The pursuit of pleasure in bourgeois society, like the
pursuit of goods and services, was founded on rational, calculable
action. Freud, argues Ferguson, revealed that the bourgeois world of
pleasure was based on the systematic repression of 'fun'. The crucial
breakthrough here was Freud's 'discovery' of infantile sexuality. In the
Chris Rojek 3
'polymorphous perversity' of the infant, Freud discovered 'the
primary processes' which precede the orderly, artificial, adult world of
bourgeois pleasure. In a subtle and suggestive commentary on the
concepts of 'fun', 'pleasure' and 'excitement', Ferguson exposes the
unconscious motivations at work in the modern 'leisure industry'.
Freud is presented finally as a major, if.also reluctant representative of
modernist sensibility.
The theme of modernism is continued in the next two essays.
Chapter 4 is written by David Frisby and consists of an examination of
Simmel and leisure. Georg Simmel's writings are notoriously difficult
to categorise. The breadth of his intellectual concerns and his
resistance to systematising his thought, contributed to the marginal
status meeted out to him as a 'founding father' of sociology. David
Frisby has done much to rehabilitate Simmel as a key sociologist of
modern times. 3 In this elegant and powerful essay, Frisby explores the
place of leisure in Simmel's writings. Simmel's sensitivity to the flow,
diversity and interdependency of modern urban-industrial relations
would alone guarantee the enduring relevance of his work for the study
of leisure. However, added to this is the extraordinary vitality of his
substantive works. Simmel's essays on aesthetics, fashion, travel,
adventure, the metropolis and exhibitions crackle with unfamiliar
ideas and connections regarding leisure practice. Frisby's discussion of
Simmel's thought on 'momentary satisfactions' and the individual's
quest for 'ever-new stimulations and sensations' is particularly
evocative. Simmel died in 1918. Yet here and elsewhere in his writings,
he reads like a contemporary observer struggling to explain the friction
and restlessness of leisure practice today.
Traditional bourgeois life was founded upon principles of sobriety
and delayed gratification. Work was seen as a part of the realm of
necessity and was associated, more or less exclusively, with public life.
Leisure and family life were seen as parts of the realm of freedom, and
were identified with private life. Doubtless the distinctions between
necessity and freedom, public and private life, work and leisure, were
always challenged. However, in the twentieth century, under the full
impact of modernism, they ceased to be tenable. In Chapter 5, Chris
Rojek considers the work-leisure relationship in traditional bourgeois
society. Using biographical and documentary sources he shows how
leisure time and space were regulated. Moreover, he indicates some of
the ways in which the traditional bourgeois perspective in leisure
practice have been undermined by modernism.
Part II of the book explores substantive issues of power and planning
in modern leisure. Chapter 6 focuses on tensions in post-war leisure