Work and Leisure

Chapter 1A brief history of work and itsrelationship to leisureA. J. VealHistorical perspectivesIn the 1975 volume Work and Leisure (Haworth and Smith 1975), history wasvirtually ignored; the early 1970s was a period of economic and demographicgrowth and leisure researchers in Britain were more concerned with planningfor the future rather than mulling over the past. History was neglected despitethe existence of a considerable body of literature on the historical aspects ofthe work–leisure relationship, including Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of theLeisure Class (1899) and Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1950) which discussthe emergence of leisure and play in prehistory, Sebastian De Grazia’sOf Time, Work and Leisure (1964) which begins with classical Greek ideasabout leisure, and Stella Margetson’s (1968) Leisure and Pleasure in theNineteenth Century. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, however, a veritablecornucopia of historical research on work and leisure was published, including,for example, that by Helen Meller (1976), Peter Bailey (1978), JamesWalvin (1978), Gary Cross (1990), Hugh Cunningham (1980) and RoyRosenzweig (1983). Essentially these histories concentrated on the nineteenthcentury and the overall theme was the struggle between the masses andburgeoning capital over the control of work and leisure time during theprocess of industrialisation and urbanisation. Thus students of leisure cameto see contemporary forms of leisure and work as a product of industrialisation,with only a hazy impression being gained of work and leisure innon-industrial societies.More recently, research on women and leisure has drawn attention to thefact that not everyone in contemporary Western society has experienced theformal compartmentalisation of work and leisure, the emergence of whichhad been chronicled by the historians. Even in industrial society much workcontinues to be unpaid and is not regulated, recognised or rewarded as partof the industrial economy (see Judy White’s Chapter 4 in this volume). Thecurrent phase of globalisation draws attention to the fact that nonindustrialwork and leisure is still the norm for most of the planet’s populationand for millions the experience of industrialisation is the present or the