Work and Leisure

108 A. J. VealThe compensatory leisure hypothesis: In an up-to-date version the Detroitauto-worker, for eight hours gripped bodily to the main line, doingrepetitive, low-skilled, machine-paced work which is wholly ungratifying,comes rushing out of the plant gate, helling down the super-highway at80 miles an hour in a second-hand Cadillac Eldorado, stops off for a beerand starts a bar-room brawl, goes home and beats his wife, and inhis spare time throws a rock at a Negro moving into the neighbourhood.In short, his routine of leisure is an explosive compensation for thedeadening rhythms of factory life.Engels also implies an alternative. The ‘spillover’ leisure hypothesis:Another auto-worker goes quietly home, collapses on the couch, eats anddrinks alone, belongs to nothing, reads nothing, knows nothing, votes forno one, hangs around the home and the street, watches the ‘late-late’show, lets the TV programs shade into one another, too tired to lifthimself off the couch for the act of selection, too bored to switch thedials. In short, he develops a spillover leisure routine in which alienationfrom work becomes alienation from life; the mental stultificationproduced by his labour permeates his leisure.(Wilensky 1960: 544)Although Wilensky did not directly attribute the first hypothesis to specificauthors, it is notable that he attributed the second, ‘spillover’, hypothesis toEngels, and went on to relate it to the idea of the alienated worker andthe class struggle. This, he argued, contrasted with the perspective of deTocqueville, who saw alienation as a feature of ‘mass society’, in which individualspursued material pleasures focused exclusively on the nuclear family,losing connections with the wider community – a ‘false consciousness’ perspective.Thus Wilensky sought to link the work–leisure relationship to questionsof wider social and economic structure – an aspect which was largelylost in subsequent developments of his ideas in the leisure studies literature.Wilensky went on to discuss two ‘elaborations’ of the above views of thework–leisure relationship, seemingly drawn from the literature of the time butnot specifically attributed, namely the ideas of segmentation and fusion. Thesegmentation view saw an ‘ever-sharper split’ developing between work andleisure, resulting in ‘interpersonal and intrapsychic strain and social instability’and weaker attachments to various spheres of private life, leading to‘stronger attachments to remote symbols of nation, race and class, which areexpressed in hyper-patriotism, racism, extremist politics and fear of conspiracy’(Wilensky 1960: 545). Again a strong link can be seen with wider socialand political issues. The fusion perspective saw work becoming more play-likeand leisure becoming more work-like, although the examples given byWilensky, of long coffee breaks and lunch hours, and card-games amongshift-workers, are less than convincing. The negative consequences ofthis trend were portrayed, again somewhat unconvincingly, as a ‘decline in