Work and Leisure

Chapter 6Looking backPerspectives on the leisure–workrelationshipA. J. VealIntroductionTo what extent are patterns of leisure behaviour influenced by, or even determinedby, a person’s work situation? In this chapter three research traditionswhich have addressed this issue are reviewed and their current relevanceassessed. They are: first, the early work of Wilensky (1960) and Parker(1972, 1983) in devising typologies of work–leisure relationships; second,research on the relationships between leisure participation and occupationbasedsocio-economic groups; and third, the phenomenon of occupationalcommunities. All three traditions largely faded from leisure studies duringthe 1980s and 1990s, squeezed out by more fashionable approaches andconcerns, and often dismissed on the basis of incomplete or oversimplifiedrepresentations of their essential nature. It is argued here that all threetraditions provide a legitimate basis for current concerns in the study ofleisure.Work–leisure relationshipsEarly empirical research on work–leisure relationships arose from investigationsin industrial sociology and explored the extent to which workers werecommitted to work and the organisations that employed them, as opposed toconcerns outside the work environment, including leisure. Thus researchconducted by Dubin in the 1950s focused on the question of workers’ ‘centrallife interests’ and, as indicated in Chapter 1, established that only a minorityof industrial workers saw their work as the most important facet of their lives(Dubin 1956).In the 1960s, American sociologist Harold Wilensky sought to theorisechanging work–leisure relationships and observed that ‘two major hypotheses’had been put forward by the critics of industrialism concerning therelationship between work and leisure in industrial society. These hedescribed in the following classic passage.