Work and Leisure

112 A. J. Vealrecommendations are largely concerned with humanisation of the workplace.Both Wilensky’s and Parker’s work can be seen as very much ‘unfinishedbusiness’, even in its own terms. Empirically the studies were quite limited, interms of the numbers and range of people and occupations studied. Whiletheir theories implicitly promised a full outline of the relationships betweentypes of work and types of leisure, in both cases the conclusions remained ata high level of generality. Nevertheless the ideas were influential and wereseen as a key element of ‘leisure theory’ at the time. A considerable body ofresearch on the theme of work/leisure relationships developed in the 1970s(see Zuzanek and Mannell 1983 for appraisal), but lost favour in the 1980s asa result of direct criticism and perceived loss of relevance.The lack of theoretical rigour of leisure studies and its failure to connectwith the concerns of mainstream social research of the time was subject toconsiderable comment, and Parker’s work–leisure was a particular focus ofthe critique. Thus Moorhouse (1989) states:Parker . . . is unable or unwilling to suggest some actual causal line ormajor relation [between work and leisure], so we can be told: ‘Highinvolvement in work may be positively, negatively or neutrally related tohigh involvement in leisure’, which is another way of saying there is norelation . . . What Parker claims to have revealed are some associationsbetween ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ but even this is not really the case, for theevidence offered is very thin and contradictory, and even if it consisted ofthe reliable statistical associations Parker claims, correlation is far fromcausation, and all the academic labour required to turn what is in fact atypology of possibilities into hypotheses capable of being tested in realityremains all to be done.(Moorhouse 1989: 23)Leisure studies researchers interested in theoretical issues tended to rejectParker’s functionalist approach and his failure to connect satisfactorily withwider social theory (e.g. Rojek 1985: 87–97; Jarvie and Maguire 1994: 22).Neo-Marxist researchers, while welcoming Parker’s focus on the centrality ofwork, rejected his functionalism and his failure to consider class relations andissues of freedom (Clarke and Critcher 1985: 16–22). Feminist researchersrejected Parker’s approach because it failed to take account of the experiencesof women not in the paid workforce and ignored the role of the familyand children and the differences in the situation of men and women (Wearing1999: 4–8). Some researchers shifted the focus from broad, structuralfunctionalconsiderations and preferred a more individually orientated,social-psychological approach, in which work was just one influence onlifestyle (Rapoport and Rapoport 1975; Kelly 1983).In addition to its neglect of women, both in and not in the paid workforce,the Wilensky/Parker approach to leisure analysis tended to ignore, by