Work and Leisure

The devil still makes work 35funding from the National Lottery, itself an innovative kind of state-licensedgambling. The unevenness of these patterns makes it difficult to identify thethrust and nature of change, to differentiate between the form and the substanceof social experience or between permanent structural change andephemeral cultural fashion. Basic questions emerge: has the period since themid-1970s seen the emergence of a new kind of society, radically differentfrom the one preceding it? How do we conceptualise such changes? Whatimplications do they have for our understanding of leisure? In the rest of thechapter we address these questions by looking in turn at paid work, familyand leisure. For each we review the major quantitative changes, comment ontheir qualitative implications and examine one account of their significance.We also note in each case how much or little governments have responded tosocial change.Our argument is that work, family and leisure remain recognisable divisionsof social experience. They demarcate boundaries of time and spacewhich are permeable only to a limited extent. Most people know when andwhere they are at work or working, even though such activities may be punctuatedby others which, in another time and place, might be construed asleisure. Similarly, what is located and timed as leisure might have within itactivity which otherwise might be called work. The family is precisely characterisedby the interplay of activity which is quite clearly work, notablydomestic labour, and that which is as unequivocally leisure, such as holidays.The boundaries between work, leisure and family derive from our ownexperience; they are taken-for-granted and help us make sense of the world. Itis only when there are episodic fractures – unemployment, divorce or depression– that we think about their roles and boundaries. That does not meanthat social science should automatically inherit commonsense notions ofwork, family and leisure. Under intellectual scrutiny, they may not stand up.They may prove misleading, even illusory. Yet nor can they be jettisoned asself-evidently unsatisfactory. Many accounts of the new society do not seemto take sufficient account of the ways in which daily life is structured by theexperience of work, family and leisure. Accounts of consumption subordinateproduction; accounts of identity marginalise primary relationships. Theassumption that leisure has achieved a primacy over other areas of experienceis based on a skewed perception of everyday life. We therefore make noapology for beginning with what most people experience at some time in theirlives as a necessity: paid work.WorkThere is general agreement about the overall trends in employment in theBritish economy since the mid-1970s, though there are differences in thesignificance attributed to fine detail, with even more divergence about whatthe changes in total signify. The main agreed features are the continued