Work and Leisure

The devil still makes work 45museums and mega-events in sports and the arts, with ambitious plans especiallyfavoured by de-industrialising cities seeking urban renaissance. Leisureresearchers, too, started to question the role and boundaries of public sectorprovision in sport and leisure. Fred Coalter’s research base into sports participationand deprivation and his polemic against public sector professionalshas grown over the years (Coalter 1997, 1998). There has been a growingoverlap between the public, voluntary and commercial sectors as all haveadopted a business discourse that makes sense to investors, planners, quangos,sponsors, stakeholders and customers alike.Roberts (1995, 1999) has tried to make sense of this kaleidoscope of continuityand change. In the earlier work he identified four trends in contemporaryleisure. The first and most obvious is home-centredness. Many ofthe main items and services of the leisure industry are consumed at home orin household groupings. Alcohol consumption, for example, has increasedbut more of it is being drunk at home. In the second trend, out of homerecreation, people still go out but for discrete activities, with the decline ofcommunal life reinforcing the primacy of the home as a leisure site and thehousehold as a leisure grouping. Only two areas of leisure outside the home,sports participation and tourism, have increased, both concentrated amongmore affluent sections of the population. Third, and again restricted to themore affluent, is the expansion of connoisseur or serious leisure. Committedenthusiasts join networks of the like-minded. The development of suchcommitted leisure interests is one solution to the problems posed by prematureretirement. Fourth is the alienation of youth from the commercialand public leisure provision. Exacerbated by youth unemployment, the leisureof youth is regarded as a growing problem, from teenage pregnancies toexcessive drinking. Overall, the main paradox is the uneven distribution ofthe two preconditions for leisure: free time and spending power. ‘Timereleased from employment has been given to the poorest sections of thepopulation, while spending power has increased mainly for those with theleast leisure time’ (Roberts 1995: 18).The face of leisure certainly seems to have changed. But often what happensis that long-standing pursuits take place in new kinds of environmentalambience: wine bars instead of pubs; shopping malls instead of city centres;multiplexes instead of flea pits; night clubs instead of discos. The Big Five ofleisure – gambling, sex, alcohol, television and annual holidays – have all heldtheir own. Each has experienced changes in dominant forms, such as theNational Lottery, contraceptive techniques, wine consumption, multichannelsubscription television and the weekend break. And again it must beinsisted that much leisure for most people most of the time is informal andmundane. In an ageing society, sedentary leisure is an even more commonpattern. Some accounts of leisure seem to imply that the significant groupsare under 30 and living in city centres; they are, statistically speaking, as likelyto be middle-aged and living in the suburbs.