Stan Parker
Born 29 November 1929, died 4 June 2012
Stan Parker was not just one of the founders of the UK’s Leisure Studies Association (LSA) but a founding father of leisure studies itself. He was involved in all the meetings that led to the LSA’s formation in 1975/1976. The conference whose papers are the first publication in the LSA series was held at Regent Street Polytechnic, because this was Stan’s academic base at the time, and also, as part of a flowering of British sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, his alma mater. He was a very active LSA committee member, and was centrally involved in all the association’s publication ventures until the mid-1980s, a period which saw the launch of the LSA’s official journal, Leisure Studies. Stan became the LSA’s first ever honorary life member in 1997.
By then Stan’s enduring reputation as a founding father was securely based on his seminal publications on the work–leisure relationship. Work was the issue that, at that time, drew Stan and several other sociologists into the study of leisure. Trends in the economy and labour markets were creating increased leisure time and spending. The claim of Stan Parker and others was that time and money did not exhaust the interconnections between work and leisure. Stan systematised ideas that had been debated since the 1920s about how people’s experiences in their workplaces affected how they experienced their ‘free’ time. Drawing on his own research among child care officers and bank clerks, Stan proposed a threefold typology. When people found their work interesting and took pride in their occupational skills, their leisure would tend to become an extension of their working lives. People who disliked their jobs, for whom work aroused negative feelings, would use leisure to do things and derive experiences which were ‘oppositional’ to their paid work. The third type was midway neutrality: work and leisure were simply different. These ideas were developed in conference papers, journal articles and books that Stan wrote between the late 1960s and mid-1980s, and cemented a reputation as a pioneer of leisure studies which will keep him on reading lists all over the world for long after his death. By the mid-1980s, Stan’s publications extended into other areas, including leisure in later life, but he will be forever recalled for his ideas about the work–leisure relationship.
An unusual feature of Stan’s career as a leisure researcher and writer is that he never held a mainstream academic job. His main career job was with the Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys (subsequently known as the Government Social Survey). Leisure scholars will mostly be unaware that in the 1960s and 1970s Stan was responsible for a series of major surveys and the author of politically significant reports on Britain’s industrial relations. He held some academic positions, such as visiting fellow in the Leisure Research Unit at the Chelsea School (at the then Brighton Polytechnic, now the University of Brighton). His colleagues there remember him as an unflappable analyst and tracker of social trends and patterns of social life, with outstanding survey design skills. Generally, leisure studies were a hobby for Stan. He not only advocated but practised serious leisure before Bob Stebbins coined the term. However, Stan insisted that people could engage seriously in leisure only if they had work that they took, and for which they were taken, seriously. Stan was a lifelong socialist, for whom social scientific research and scholarship were essential to an informed, progressive and caring world view. He did not believe that capitalism was capable of offering either fulfilling work or fulfilling leisure. During his semi retirement from leisure studies in the 1990s and 2000s, he stood (unsuccessfully) as a Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate in elections for his local London council and the European Parliament. Until the year of his death, he continued to publish in the Socialist Party’s journal.
The work–leisure relationship has long lost its central position in leisure studies. By the mid-1980s, the implications of unemployment were submerging interest in the implications of having jobs of different types. Also, extension and oppositional work–leisure relationships proved difficult to identify in large quantitative data-sets. This was because we know that leisure is also responsive to gender, life stage and other social differences, as well as possessing limited independence. Also, Stan and other early writers on work and leisure encountered feminist criticism that they had been researching and writing about men’s work and men’s leisure. However, a revival of interest in work and leisure looks long overdue. Work has changed since the 1970s. There are now many more precarious and part-time jobs. The gender and ethnic composition of the workforce have changed. Any revival of interest in work and leisure should bear in mind that Stan Parker was not trying to explain ‘what’ people did in their leisure time so much as however the ‘what’ was experienced. In times of economic recession, seismic shifts in the nature of the labour market, and debates about the ‘experience’ economy, his ideas deserve a serious renaissance.
Stan died peacefully after a brief illness at St Peter’s Residence in London where he had lived since 2008. His sole surviving kin is a 97-year-old aunt. The leisure studies and socialist communities were Stan’s families. He will be remembered for a highly idiosyncratic style on the dance floor at LSA conferences, for his mischievous smile, for his aversion to extended footnotes and superfluous references, and for his utter hopelessness in the kitchen. His discreet but influential presence is widely remembered. We shall miss him, but he will never be forgotten.