Work and Leisure

The devil still makes work 43differentiate between the ideology, structure and experience of families inadvanced industrial capitalism.In post-war Britain, family structures and household relationships areapparent sites for fragmentation, destabilisation and individualisation,though overall ‘the structures of both the household and the family arebecoming diverse, but remain important to society and retain an integral rolein people’s lives’ (Office for National Statistics 2001: 55). In the 1970s and1980s, Young and Willmott (1973) and Kelly (1983) might have detected theconsolidation and centrality of the ‘symmetrical family’ in leisure but thisportrait seems increasingly anachronistic. However, in so far as leisure studieshas traditionally identified the family as a site, participating group and centralmotivation for leisure, none of these trends seem likely to have dislodgedthe family or, more accurately, household unit from its strategic position. Itsinternal dynamics and precise composition may have changed but its role insociety and its leisure patterns can be expected to have remained relativelyconstant.Leisure and lifestylesWe must again insist on the primacy of economic factors. Households nowhave, on average, greater disposable income than ever before. This is so,despite the proportion of income spent on mortgages having increased fromone-tenth in 1971 to one-quarter in 2004. Otherwise, the proportion spenton essential items has decreased while that on non-essential items, includingleisure, has increased. The purchase of financial services, tourism and telecommunicationshas shown some of the sharpest increases. New kinds ofconsumers emerge, most indicatively children. But again there are disparities.Unemployed people do not share in this expansion of disposableincome, which is also regionally variable. The ‘average’ household spendsone-sixth of its income on leisure goods and services but the figure is higherin London and the South East, lower in the North East, Northern Irelandand Scotland.Of all leisure activities, the group which still consumes most time, thoughoften in conjunction with other activities, comprises the mass media andrelated communication technologies. An average of 26 hours a week is spentwatching television, with those of pensionable age spending twice as long aschildren. Some19 hours is spent listening to the radio. Four in ten householdshave a home computer, even more where there are children. Listening tomusic is also a common home-based leisure pursuit. Indeed contact withrelatives and friends is the only leisure activity which occurs with anythinglike the frequency of use of communications media. Overall, the trendtowards home-based leisure has increased and become more and moredependent on the purchase of leisure technology. But DIY and gardeningcontinue to be popular, heavily correlated with social class.