Work and Leisure

Serious leisure, volunteerism, quality of life 201expressing its special skills, knowledge and experience (Stebbins 1992: 3). Tosharpen understanding of it, serious leisure has often been contrasted withcasual or unserious leisure, the immediately intrinsically rewarding, relativelyshort-lived pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoyit (Stebbins 1997). Its types include play (including dabbling), relaxation (e.g.sitting, napping, strolling), passive entertainment (e.g. TV, books, recordedmusic), active entertainment (e.g. games of chance, party games), sociableconversation, and sensory stimulation (e.g. sex, eating, drinking). It is considerablyless substantial and offers no career of the sort just described forserious leisure. Casual leisure can also be defined residually as all leisure notclassifiable as amateur, hobbyist or career volunteering.Serious leisure is constituted of three types: amateurism, hobbyist activitiesand career volunteering. The amateurs are found in art, science, sport andentertainment, where they are inevitably linked in one way or another withprofessional counterparts who, with some exceptions, coalesce into a threewaysystem of relations and relationships involving the public whom the twogroups share. The professionals are identified and defined according to sociologicaltheory, a more exact procedure than the commonsense approach,which measures professionalism according to the criteria of more or lessfull-time employment for remuneration (Stebbins 1992: ch. 2).Hobbyists lack the professional alter ego of amateurs, although they sometimeshave commercial equivalents and often have small publics who take aninterest in what they do. Hobbyists are classified according to five categories:collectors, makers and tinkerers, activity participants in non-competitive,rule-based, pursuits (e.g. hunting, mountain climbing, barbershop singing),players of sports and games in competitive, rule-based activities with noprofessional counterparts (e.g. field hockey, shuffleboard, badminton) andthe enthusiasts of the liberal arts hobbies. The liberal arts hobbyists areenamoured of the systematic acquisition of knowledge for its own sake.Many of them accomplish this by reading voraciously in a field of art, sport,cuisine, language, culture, history, science, philosophy, politics or literature(Stebbins 1994). But some of them go beyond this to expand their knowledgestill further through cultural travel, public lectures, documentary videos andthe like.Volunteering is voluntary individual or group action oriented toward helpingoneself or others or both (Van Til 1988: 5–9). This definition alludes tothe two principal motives of volunteering. One is helping others – volunteeringas altruism; the other is helping oneself – volunteering as selfinterestedness.Examples of the latter include working for a strongly feltcause or, as will become evident later, working to experience, as serious leisureenthusiasts do everywhere, the variety of social and personal rewardsavailable in volunteering and the leisure career in which they are framed.The taxonomy published in (Stebbins 1998a: 74–80), which consists of 16types of organisational volunteering, shows the scope of career volunteering.