Work and Leisure

Perspectives on leisure–work relationship 109creative autonomy, a general sense of oppression, and an increase in theanxious effort to conform’ (Wilensky 1960: 546). Wilensky concluded that the‘issues remain obscure’, but went on to say:It is apparent that these themes of social criticism centre on the majortheoretical concerns of sociology – the attributes of social structureand their connexions, how one or another structural form emerges,persists, changes, how structure facilitates or hampers the efforts ofmen, variously located, to realise their strivings. More specifically, howdoes role differentiation arising in the economic order affect roledifferentiation in the community and society – ie. how do diverse institutionalorders (economic, political-military, kinship, religious, education-aesthetic)maintain their autonomy and yet link up? What specificchanges in work and leisure can be linked to changes in the classstructure of the urban community? How do these changes affect thesocial integration of industrial society – the extent to which personsshare common permanent definitions (values, norms, beliefs) of theroles they play?(Wilensky 1960: 546–7)These comments, and later discussion on the need to combine research at themicrolevel with ‘big picture’ research, were generally ignored by leisureresearchers who subsequently drew on Wilensky’s work. He addresses issueswhich, decades later, the field of leisure studies was accused of ignoring.Also generally ignored by leisure scholars is the fact that Wilenksy’s theoreticaldiscussion of compensation/spillover and segmentation/fusion was notbased on his own empirical research but was a preliminary and speculativesummary of the views of other commentators, as he saw them. His ownresearch, reported later in the same paper, in fact focused on the differencebetween employees with careers, who gained status from, and identified with,their work, and those without careers, whom he saw as largely alienated fromtheir work. The career-orientated group would, he asserted,develop a ‘pseudo-community’ lifestyle characterised by many lightlyheld attachments . . . The stronger their career commitments the morethey will integrate leisure and work, but the majority of workers, thosewithout careers, would withdraw further into family or neighbourhoodlocalism.(Wilensky 1960: 558–9)Again, the wider, negative, social implications of this social divide between anupwardly mobile, career-orientated elite and a non-mobile, alienated masswere discussed. The precise nature of a ‘pseudo-community lifestyle’ or‘neighbourhood localism’ are not expanded on; thus even this empirically