Work and Leisure

6 John T. Haworth and A. J Vealsubject to the effects of the changing national and international economy andtheir resultant effects on work. In the words of Bill Clinton’s US presidentialcampaign: ‘It’s the economy, stupid’.The development of the field of leisure studies since the mid-1970s hasbeen characterised by what Chris Rojek (1985: 5) termed ‘paradigmaticrivalry’. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in John Clarkeand Chas Critcher’s seminal work of the mid-1980s, The Devil Makes Work:Leisure in Capitalist Britain, in which they outlined the shortcomings, as theysaw them, of earlier perspectives on leisure, such as those expounded byStanley Parker, Ken Roberts, Rhona and Robert Rapoport and MichaelYoung and Peter Willmott, and presented their own critical analysis of thephenomenon of leisure. They sought to discover ‘what leisure can tell usabout the development, structure and organisation of the whole society’(Clarke and Critcher 1985: xiii). In Chapter 2 of this volume Chas Critcherand Peter Bramham review the changes which have taken place in work andthe economy, in the family and social structure and in leisure and culture inBritain, and in social theory, since the late 1970s. They conclude that theanalysis in The Devil Makes Work stands the test of time. Changes in thelabour market have been such that increasing productivity and wealth havefailed to produce the anticipated across-the-board increase in prosperity andleisure time, but have resulted in a growing division between those with highlyskilled and paid and pressurised jobs and the casualised and marginalised.Changes in family and household structures and patterns of child-bearingand rearing have not, Critcher and Bramham argue, dislodged the family orhousehold unit as the major site for leisure. As for leisure itself, despiteincreasing commodification and globalisation of providers and products, andthe associated increased focus on consumption, the traditional critical concernswith production and biological and cultural reproduction still providethe essential basis for understanding leisure. It is nevertheless suggested thatthere is a need for ‘some engagement with new kinds of theories whichpurport to encapsulate the nature of recent societal change’.In Chapter 3 Chris Rojek picks up from this point. He considers many ofthe same issues concerning recent economic and social change, in particularthe polarisation between the overworked section of the community identifiedin Juliet Schor’s (1991) The Overworked American and the increasinglymarginalised and insecure mass identified by Ulrich Beck (2000) in the‘Brazilianization thesis’. Rojek addresses the question of solutions to the‘post-work’ world, including the idea of a guaranteed income and the possibilityof harnessing unpaid civil labour to undertake work of communitybenefit. But he notes the likely problems of adopting such measures giventhe currently entrenched values of Western society.One of the major criticisms of the study of work–leisure relationships priorto the 1980s was that it was ‘gender-blind’. This was certainly reflected in the1975 Work and Leisure book. While data were available at the time on the