Leisure

Leisure, defined in sociology as activities other than work (specifically, performance of tasks carried out in return for wages); leisure includes free time, allowing a release from occupational or domestic responsibilities; forms of relaxation, such as recreation and hobbies; and various creative pursuits that express the imagination. Today, hobbies are increasingly pursued as modern technology, lack of employment, and greater numbers of people living beyond retirement age make more free time available to more people. Leisure is also commonly regarded as a quality of life in itself, or, formerly, a “gentlemanly” mode of existence entailing no practical work.

Analyses of leisure are limited when they simply refer to activities per se. In complex societies, leisure for some means work for others. For example, spectators attend football matches in order to participate in socially approved forms of “excitement behaviour”. For professional footballers, the play is actually work that entertains spectators; furthers competitive aspirations of club managers; and maintains the support of those whose financial backing is vital. Similarly, listening to music for pleasure is qualitatively different from listening to the same performance to prepare for a lecture.

The word “leisure”, from the Latin licere, means “to be allowed”, or “licenced”. Aristocratic ideas that intellectual activity was superior to daily work tasks emanated from Greek thought. Duties were carried out by slaves while, as we learn from Aristotle, their masters sought higher things through leisure. In medieval commentary, “toil” was regarded as paid time inasmuch as hired labour performed tasks and built things for the satisfaction of others; again, leisure activities provided permitted relief from work. In non-industrial, agrarian societies, work-leisure cycles operate differently. Seasonal rhythms of cropping and stockbreeding demand intensive periods of activity; peasant farmers work under customary pressure, and disciplines of weekly duties may be unknown.

The demarcation between work and leisure was a result of mass industrialization and the separation of ways of earning a living from other activities. Social reformers pondered whether restricted working hours and specified non-work time led to dissipation or self-improvement among the workforce, and whether leisure activities should be subject to authoritative social control. As spare time in pre-industrial, less technological societies was rare, because work for most people was long and hard, amusements were self-made and more simplistic. However, leisure in late 20th-century, post-industrial societies in developed countries relies more on structured, commercially available activities such as computer games; sports, sometimes requiring the purchase of expensive equipment, or club membership; or passive enjoyment of activities and events supporting vast industries, such as cinema and television. In Britain, for example, the average individual spends some 25 hours a week watching television.

In recent decades, automation, with subsequent increased reduction of human labour, along with rising unemployment, has raised the question of whether industrial countries may witness the birth of a leisure society, where a large segment of the population is excluded from work and where free time is targeted by a proliferating leisure industry. Some sociologists regard leisure as an individual’s freedom to resort to non-productive activities; others regard it as an illusion of “independence” from work, beset with exploitative commercial manipulation by highly profitable pleasure industries.

There has also been an increase in numbers of people who have entered retirement (either at the official retirement age or before); people are living longer and tend to be fitter and healthier than in previous decades.

The problem of enforced leisure time, according to many commentators, poses dangers of growing crime and social disorder, especially where people affected are without the necessary work skills required in a post-industrial society. This also highlights the links between leisure and work patterns, one such being the possible absorption of people without new technology skills into jobs in the leisure industries themselves, or into the voluntary and care sectors. See Leisure Industry.