Work and Leisure

2 John T. Haworth and A. J Vealseen as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Leisure time and activity can be used for good or illand that itself will often be a contested, subjective judgement. Of coursepublic policy related to leisure is inevitably normative – leisure policies seekto promote those activities which are deemed, through a political processwhich may or may not be contentious, to be socially beneficial and torestrict, or even prohibit, those activities deemed to be socially harmful.Acceptance of the ‘residual’, time-based definition of leisure does notimply a view of leisure as necessarily culturally residual and does not denythat leisure has many complex meanings and functions for the individualand society, which are open to research and investigation (Roberts1999: 153).Yet many researchers view leisure in terms of what it is, focusing on dimensionsof positive experience, such as intrinsic motivation and autonomy, andenjoyment (Iso-Ahola 1980; Neulinger 1981; Mannell and Kleiber 1997;Stebbins 1998; Thompson et al. 2002). Interestingly, some of the dimensionsof positive experience studied by leisure researchers have been found to bevery relevant to the study of well-being, which is now an important area ofresearch, and will be returned to later in this introduction. It is thereforeimportant to recognise that both residual and experiential definitions ofleisure are important. Both types of definition are used by the contributorsto this book, with residual definitions usually being used when large-scalesurvey research and trends are discussed, and experiential definitions beingused more often when leisure and well-being are discussed, though they arenot mutually exclusive.The definition of work has been less problematical than that of leisure.Usually, work is considered to be paid employment. But a significant changesince the mid-1970s has been to emphasise that ‘work’ not only includespaid work, but also includes unpaid domestic and childcare work and somecommunity voluntary activity. Work has often been equated with labour, inline with the Hebrew view that it was imposed on humankind to expiate theoriginal sin committed by its forefathers, or the Protestant view that work wasof service to God. Yet, as noted in Haworth and Smith (1975), ifa restricted definition of work is used, such as ‘to earn a living’, this canequally restrict the constructs which are used to study work and thushave important theoretical significance. Practically, it may encourage theattitude in management, trade unions and employees, that work need notbe a meaningful experience.(Haworth and Smith 1975: 1)But work is important to human functioning. Kohn and Schooler (1983)indicate that where work has substantive complexity there is an improvementin mental flexibility and self-esteem. Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre (1989),studying ‘optimal experience’ or ‘flow’ in a range of occupations, found that