Work and Leisure

Work and leisure: themes and issues 217context. While leisure goods benefit from technological advance and becomecheaper, the provision of leisure services, whether by leisure service organisationsor by individuals making use of their purchased leisure goods, takes asmuch time as it ever did. In 1970 Stafan Linder coined the term ‘harriedleisure class’ to describe relatively wealthy individuals seeking to pack moreand more leisure consumption into a fixed – or reducing – amount of time(Linder 1970). Ironically, considerable levels of stress can be generated by theprocess of organising the ‘weekend away’, the ‘night out’, or even the ‘quietnight in’ or finding time to make use of the newly acquired boat, golf clubs orhome entertainment centre. The balance of effort in acquiring and paying forthe second home, boat or golf-club membership, as against the reward, interms of the amount of enjoyment received from their very limited usage, isfrequently questioned.The distribution of work and leisureGenderCritcher and Bramham (Chapter 2 in this volume) discuss recent trends inwork, family and leisure in the United Kingdom. They consider that the‘common experience of those selling labour power has been the actualintensification of work’ and that ours has become a more work-centred society.They note that three-quarters of women aged 25–44 are now in paidemployment, and that 80 per cent of part-time workers are women. Leete(2000) in Working Time states that much work by women, including childrearing,was done in the home, but that consumerism now drives women outto work and still do childrearing. Gershuny (2000), analysing time-use statisticsin the United Kingdom, states that where wives move from being nonemployedto take full-time jobs, they reduce their housework by about tenhours per week, and their husbands increase theirs by about four hours perweek. The total amount of paid labour in Western society has increased. Theincreased hours of paid work done by the average household is one of thecontributors to the perceived increases in levels of stress experienced bycontemporary families, as outlined by Zuzanek and by Schneider et al. inChapters 7 and 8 of this book. In Chapter 4 on gender, Judy White drawsattention to continued inequality between men and women in the distributionof work and leisure, indicating the need for more research to track the effectsof recent change, and political and cultural action to achieve the goals ofequality to which many aspire.Paid work, whether full-time or part-time, can, of course, be beneficialfinancially and psychologically to women and to the family. Roberts (1999)notes thatHaving money and, just as important, earning money, are important for