Work and Leisure

48 Chas Critcher and Peter Bramhamtask of social integration to the market and the media. People are engaged insociety as consumers not producers: spending therefore becomes a duty andpolitical partisanship an irrelevance. The current hegemonic project is to producewilling consumers rather than obedient citizens immersed in nationalculture. Market inequalities may produce flawed consumers – poor, homelessand unemployed people – but they can be controlled and supervised. Thewhole culture is now impossible to escape and we may not even want to.ConclusionWe have tried, here, to confine our argument within clear boundaries, thoseof understanding the key changes in work, family and leisure in Britain sincethe mid-1970s. We considered the McDonaldisation thesis, less because weare necessarily persuaded by it but because it offered one coherent (not to sayaccessible and amusing) rendering of the connections across work, familyand leisure. Accounts of this kind seem to us to be one way forward forconsidering the future of work and leisure. However, it is not easy to restrictthe scope of the discussion. For one of the problems we posed at the beginning– how we conceptualise these changes – ultimately demands someengagement with new kinds of theories which purport to encapsulate thenature of recent societal change.This is not the place to evaluate these perspectives but we must note thatsome of them would not only dispute the particulars of our analysis but itsinitial assumption: that work, family and leisure provide the basic frameworkfor understanding everyday life. In this view, our social activity in all thesespheres cannot be divorced from ‘how contemporary consciousness is structuredby the global economy of signs’ (Rojek 1995:147). It is no longer thecase, as sociology traditionally assumed, that society produces culture; rather,culture parades a ‘hyperreality’ of signs from which we construct our apprehensionof daily experience. The symbolic activities of the mass media andcommunication technologies suffuse all areas of life – work, family, leisure,politics, consumption – which are now essentially postmodern in nature.The implication is that what we call ‘leisure’ is where the new social consciousnessfinds its most powerful expression. Its modes of consumption andsymbolic plenitude become the defining characteristics of the culture as awhole. While it is quite true, and something our own account may haveunder-stressed, that the leisure and media industries do occupy an ever morecentral role in the economic structures and cultural sign systems of contemporarysociety, they have yet to dislodge the fundamental sociologicalproposition that all societies must have – and it is an imperative – systems orstructures of production, reproduction and consumption. If some traditionalaccounts have over-privileged production, it would seem equally erroneous toplace excessive emphasis on consumption. Neither may take reproduction,biological and cultural, seriously enough. We hold to the project that