Work and Leisure

Serious leisure, volunteerism, quality of life 203boundaries, membership lists, or spatial territory . . . A social world mustbe seen as an internally recognizable constellation of actors, organizations,events, and practices which have coalesced into a perceived sphereof interest and involvement for participants. Characteristically, a socialworld lacks a powerful centralized authority structure and is delimited by... effective communication and not territory nor formal groupmembership.(Unruh 1980: 277)In another paper Unruh added that the typical social world is characterisedby voluntary identification, by a freedom to enter into and depart from it(Unruh 1979). Moreover, because it is so diffuse, ordinary members are onlypartly involved in the full range of its activities. After all, a social world maybe local, regional, multiregional, national, even international. Third, peoplein complex societies such as Britain and the United States are often membersof several social worlds. Finally, social worlds are held together, to animportant degree, by semiformal, or mediated, communication. They arerarely heavily bureaucratised yet, due to their diffuseness, they are rarelycharacterised by intense face-to-face interaction. Rather, communication istypically mediated by newsletters, posted notices, telephone messages, massmailings, Internet communications, radio and television announcements, andsimilar means, with the strong possibility that the Internet could become themost popular of these in the future.The sixth quality revolves around the preceding five: participants in seriousleisure tend to identify strongly with their chosen pursuits. In contrast, casualleisure, although hardly humiliating or despicable, is nonetheless too fleeting,mundane and commonplace for most people to find a distinctive identitythere.In addition, research on serious leisure has led to the discovery of a distinctiveset of rewards for each activity examined (Stebbins 2001). In thesestudies the participant’s leisure satisfaction has been found to stem from aconstellation of particular rewards gained from the activity, be it boxing,barbershop singing or working with autistic children. Furthermore, therewards are not only satisfying in themselves, but also satisfying as counterweightsto the costs encountered in the activity. That is, every serious leisureactivity contains its own combination of tensions, dislikes and disappointments,which each participant must confront in some way. For instance, anamateur football player may not always feel like attending the daily practices,occasionally be bested by more junior players when there, be required to siton the sidelines from time to time while others get experience at his or herposition, and still regard this activity as highly satisfying – as (serious) leisure– because it also offers certain powerful rewards.Put more precisely, then, the drive to find satisfaction in serious leisure isthe drive to experience the rewards of a given leisure activity, such that its