Work and Leisure

110 A. J. Vealbased contribution can be seen to be quite speculative and concerned primarilywith broad social structural issues rather than with the minutiae of patternsof leisure participation.Both Dubin’s (1956) findings on the uninterested worker and Wilensky’s(1960) observations on the non-career-orientated masses were confirmed inthe 1960s ‘Affluent Worker’ study of British car-industry workers, conductedby Goldthorpe et al. (1968: 144), which found that the lack of job-orientationof affluent workers did not imply a corresponding ‘leisure-orientation’ intheir lives. These male manual workers, who were often mobile, having movedcity to secure a highly paid job, 1 did not necessarily enjoy an active social orleisure life: ‘in the absence of many of their kin and of solidary local communities,the majority of our respondents were led to adopt a style of lifewhich was decisively centred on the home and the conjugal family’(Goldthorpe et al. 1968: 154). The study did not, however, extend to anexploration of the detailed patterns of home-based leisure. Affluence meantrising housing standards and the study period also coincided with the adventof television, so, for men at least, being ‘home and family centred’ was notnecessarily incompatible with being ‘leisure-centred’. Thus we see that, evenas the work–leisure dichotomy was being addressed by leisure researchers forthe first time, the empirical evidence was suggesting that dividing life into twodomains of work and leisure was an oversimplification – for most male workersthere were at least three important domains, namely work, leisure andhome/family.British sociologist Stanley Parker, in his seminal study The Future of Workand Leisure (Parker 1972: 71, 99), and his later version, Leisure and Work(Parker 1983), elaborated Wilensky’s typologies, as shown in Table 6.1, introducinga range of new terms and adding a third type of ‘in-between’ relationship,which he variously referred to as separateness, neutrality, containment,compartmentalisation and segmentation. But, while Wilensky at least speculateson the types of leisure which might flow from certain work–leisurerelationships, Parker focuses almost entirely on the nature of the relationshipitself, giving no clear indication of what specific leisure activities might flowfrom different types of relationship and different types of work. Further,Parker’s exposition gives no explanations as to why particular work/leisurerelationships arise – they just are. Wilensky’s exposition arose from a concernabout changes in the broader social structure brought about by industrialisation;his overall purpose was structural and analytical rather than prescriptive.Parker, while not ignoring such broader issues, puts more emphasis onthe personal, philosophical dimension of work–leisure relationships: thechoice between segmentalism and the holistic approach to life becomes largelya matter of personal philosophy. His discussion of broader issues is in theform of suggested policies to encourage a more holistic approach to workand leisure. Since he basically rejects the idea that leisure should be used ascompensation for unpleasant, alienating or damaging work, his policy