The leisure society II: the era of critique, 1980–2011

Abstract

The “leisure society thesis” was developed primarily in the 1960s and 1970s and a recent paper in the World Leisure Journal summarised the relevant literature from that period and analysed contemporary recollections of it (Veal, 2011). This paper follows the story of the leisure society thesis since 1980. Set against the background of discussions of work and leisure in periods of high unemployment, the work ethic, working hours, post-work and work–life balance, the paper reviews the post-1980 offerings of proponents, analysts and critics of the leisure society thesis. A four-fold typology of leisure society conceptualisations and reduced-work future scenarios is proposed, comprising: the current leisure society; the evolutionary leisure society; the leisure society as a political project; and other reduced-work scenarios/projects. The second half of the paper reviews literature that is analytical, ambivalent and/or definitional regarding the leisure society thesis and that which is critical. This involves discussion of the failure of paid working hours to fall in the second half of the twentieth century as had been predicted, and appraisal of a range of critical theoretical/conceptual issues. While the significance of the leisure society thesis as an early project of leisure studies is debatable, and it is clearly now an historical reference point rather than a current project, the question is raised as to why the leisure studies community has failed to join with others who are pursuing the cause of reduced paid working hours for all.

Keywords:

• leisure society thesis
• post-work
• work–life balance
• working hours

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous referees of the paper for a number of most helpful suggestions for improving on the original draft of the paper and, indeed, to the referees of Leisure Society I for prompting the preparation of the current paper.

Notes

1. “Paid working hours” or “paid work” is used here to refer to all work undertaken in employment, as distinct from unpaid domestic or voluntary work. This is different from the practice in some labour force literature where the term “paid work” or “paid hours” is used in contrast to “worked hours,” the latter excluding paid holiday time.

2. As with the 1960s and 1970s, the literature of the later period includes numerous passing or secondary references to the leisure society and related ideas. Typically they simply refer to the likely advent of a leisure society or to the fact that other writers, invariably unnamed, have such expectations, or they use the term in the title only. Examples identified are: Vickerman (1980), UK; Jahoda (1981), US; Humphrey (1983),US; Richards (1983),UK; Lichtenberger (1984), Austria; Leighfield (1987), UK; Smith and Theberge (1987),US; Headey (1988), Australia; Rowe (1993), Australia; Zeldin (1995), UK; Leheny (2003), US/Japan; Edginton and Chen (2008), US.

3. NB. In the second half of Table 1, p. 209, in Leisure Society I, a superfluous heading “Leisure society already here” was included in error: all seven authors on this page are in fact leisure society critics.

4. The Society for the Reduction of Human Labor now appears to be inactive but details for a contact person, Benjamin Hunnicutt, are provided on the website of the Shorter Work-Time Group (n.d.).

5. The reference in the text was to an unspecified 1963 edition of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, but the bibliographical reference is to the original, 1956, British edition. The latter does not contain any mention of an “historic inversion” but the Preface to the 1963 Vintage paperback edition refers to the theoretical possibility of the “reversal of the relation between free time and working time” and of “working time becoming marginal and free time becoming full time” (p. vii). The link between Marcuse and “historic inversion” was repeated a few years later, without a bibliographic reference, by a colleague of Dumazedier, Geneviève Poujol (1993, p. 36), and her remarks were, in turn, quoted by Dine (1999, p. 173). In the same volume, Bhodan Jung (1993, p. 201), said of Poland during its 1980s economic crisis: “For the average Pole it was a time of Dumazedier's ‘historic inversion,’ when daily discretionary time (270 minutes per day) became greater than time spent on work (235 minutes per day)…. In this sense the crisis has, in a perverse way, brought Poland one step closer to a poorer brand of a ‘new leisure society’.” The figures given by Jung suggest that the amount of time is averaged over the whole week and the whole adult population.

6. In more recent references to Kerr et al., Rojek (2010, p. 31) does not refer to them as post-industrial theorists and notes that their comments on leisure were “en passant” but still insists on the debatable observation that they were of “foundational significance in the evolution of the leisure society thesis.”