Work and Leisure

114 A. J. VealSocio-economic groupEmpirical research relating leisure participation to occupation has a longerhistory than the work–leisure typologies discussed earlier. Thus, for example,as early as the 1930s, Lundberg et al. (1934: 100–1) examined the variationin time spent on various leisure activities by men and women in differentoccupational groups in the United States. Activities examined included eating;visiting; reading; entertainment; sports; listening to the radio; motoring;and visiting clubs. Occupations were divided into white collar; professionaland executive; housewives; labour (blue-collar); unemployed; high schoolstudents; and college students. Variations between the groups were readilydiscernible, but not in the direction revealed by later studies; in Lundberg’sstudy, blue-collar workers spent more time on a wider range of leisureactivities than those in white-collar and professional jobs. The differencebetween this and the Wilensky/Parker work/leisure approach can readily beseen: both occupation and leisure activity are classified or measured ‘objectively’,or at least in a replicable manner, and the relationship is examinedstatistically.An approach to the study of work–leisure relationships therefore emergedwhich involved relating patterns of leisure participation to socio-economicgroup, the hierarchical system of occupational classification devised by governmentalstatistical agencies and market research organisations. The socioeconomicvariable group can have as few as two categories – for example,‘white collar’ and ‘blue collar’ – and as many as seventeen, as in the systemoriginally devised by the UK Office of Population Censuses and Surveys.Typically, classification systems used in social research comprise four or fivecategories. Individuals in professional and managerial jobs are generallydescribed as being in the ‘higher’ socio-economic groups and those in manualoccupations are described as being in the ‘lower’ socio-economic groups –with a number of supervisory, clerical and skilled manual occupations beingin the middle. These systems relate not only to the concept of occupation butalso to social class, indeed, some forms of socio-economic classification arereferred to as ‘Social Class’.One of the technical difficulties associated with the use of the socioeconomicvariable in the study of leisure behaviour can, paradoxically, beseen as an advantage over the work–leisure typology approach. In bothapproaches, individuals who are not in paid jobs are seemingly excluded fromthe analysis. However, with its social class dimension, socio-economic grouphas the advantage that unwaged individuals in a household with a waged‘main breadwinner’ can be classified according to the socio-economic groupof the breadwinner. This approach is clearly appropriate in representing thelikely socio-economic situation of the individual household member and isadvantageous in facilitating the classification of all members of a household,but clearly cannot be used if the focus of interest is the work experience of the