Transformation or reproduction? Trends with age in gender and class divisions in young single adults’ uses of free time in south and east Mediterranean countries since “the events of 2011”^*

* This paper has been prepared within the research project FP7-SSH-2013-2 SAHWA: Researching Arab Mediterranean Youth: Towards a New Social Contract. We acknowledge the contributions of research teams from The Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), Barcelona who coordinated the project; the Centre of Arab Women for Training and Research, Tunis; the Centre de Recherche en Economie Appliquee pour le Developpement, Algiers; the Insitut des Hautes Etudes de Management, Rabat; the Lebanese American University, Beirut; and the American University in Cairo who supervised the survey work in their respective countries.

ABSTRACT

This paper urges resetting research into youth and leisure to match recent extensions of the life stage. It also proposes that the special mission of sociology within studies of youth and leisure should be to focus on “Big Leisure”, all of it, rather than a series of “little leisures”. These proposals are applied in analysing the findings from surveys of nationally representative samples totalling approximately 2000, 15–29-year-olds in each of five South and East Mediterranean countries (Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia). The results show gender differences in uses of free time widening, and differences by social class origins weakening but remaining influential throughout the extended youth life stage, while the influence on leisure of levels of educational attainment and labour force experience assist the reproduction of existing social class formations. It is argued that the failure of the “Arab Spring” to trigger wider social and economic transformations in the region is mirrored in young people’s uses of leisure which are helping to perpetuate existing divisions, thereby tending to stabilize rather than undermine the region’s Arab-Islamic version of modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab
• free time
• gender
• leisure
• leisure careers
• social class
• youth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

* This paper has been prepared within the research project FP7-SSH-2013-2 SAHWA: Researching Arab Mediterranean Youth: Towards a New Social Contract. We acknowledge the contributions of research teams from The Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB), Barcelona who coordinated the project; the Centre of Arab Women for Training and Research, Tunis; the Centre de Recherche en Economie Appliquee pour le Developpement, Algiers; the Insitut des Hautes Etudes de Management, Rabat; the Lebanese American University, Beirut; and the American University in Cairo who supervised the survey work in their respective countries.