Getting onboard: women, access and serious leisure

This paper explores women’s experiences of accessing serious leisure. It responds to a perceived tendency in contemporary feminist theories of leisure to celebrate women’s ability to weave potentially empowering identities from discursive resources in leisure spaces and experiences. While this work creates much needed theoretical space for the exploration of women’s agency and self determination within leisure, there is little critical attention given to how women may first negotiate the complexity of their gendered lives to gain access to these sites and experiences. By drawing on the accounts of forty women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps, a form of serious leisure, this paper argues that accessing leisure is still an important aspect of women’s leisure experiences. Women cited here engage in active and conscious practices and performances to both justify their access to leisure and to enable their disengagement from demands associated with normative femininity. This paper concludes that to sideline questions of access serves to conceptually dislocate leisure from the wider patterns of women’s everyday lives and limits our understanding of how women perceive, use and give meaning to their serious leisure participation.     

The Semiotic Self and Serious Leisure

Examinations of the self and leisure are uncommon, not to mention those bearing on leisure and the semiotic self. The goal of this article is to help correct this deficiency. To this end, the serious leisure perspective is presented, followed by a discussion of how it is related to the semiotic self as formulated by Norbert Wiley. The principal vehicle by which this is accomplished is by way of the meaning of leisure. Moreover participants in serious leisure find there a powerfully attractive leisure career, an experience that is unavailable in the other two forms: casual and project-based leisure. This career frames the development of the semiotic self through leisure.     

Serious Leisure and Work

This article looks at the complex relationship between serious leisure and work, with an eye to examining its implications for social life and practice. First, the serious leisure perspective (a theoretic framework that synthesizes three main forms: serious, casual, and project-based leisure) is described. Then, occupational devotion is examined. It consists of a strong, positive attachment to a form of self-enhancing work, where the sense of achievement is high and the core activity (set of basic tasks) is endowed with such intense appeal that the line between this work and leisure is virtually erased. Devotee work roots most immediately in amateur, hobbyist, and volunteer pursuits. Next some of the ways that people bridge devotee work and their leisure are considered. Careers are then discussed. These careers originate in serious leisure and, for some people, extend into work. After considering some others ways of bridging devotee work and serious leisure, two main implications of the link between these two are taken up.     

“We are not strippers”: How Belly Dancers Manage a (Soft) Stigmatized Serious Leisure Activity

Most stigma research examines people who engage in deviant activities or possess visible and permanent discredited attributes, which lead to “hard” or severe consequences. Existing leisure studies focus on the benefits of leisure pursuits. Less attention is paid to the potential costs associated with serious leisure, such as “soft” stigma. The snubs and slight embarrassments resulting from soft stigma may jeopardize the rewards people receive from participating in leisure, such as a sense of identity, self‐worth, and pride. Using interviews with seventy‐four female belly dancers, most of whom belly dance as a form of “serious leisure,” this article examines how dancers manage perceptions that they are erotic dancers. Results show that dancers use an interesting set of stigma management techniques and new forms of some existing management strategies to simultaneously protect themselves and enhance the reputation of the group. Implications for how people negotiate soft stigma associated with serious leisure are discussed.     

Time Is of the Essence: An Analytic Autoethnography of Family,Work, and Serious Leisure

While leisure is often represented in public discourse as a realm of freedom and self‐actualization, for most adults the pursuit of serious leisure activities involves negotiating familial and professional constraints. Based on the author's autoethnographic experiences with sport skydiving, this article examines the familial and professional constraints that he has experienced, as well as the challenges to recreational skydivers posed by current trends in the sport. The author describes various only partly successful strategies he has used to manage the tensions between his skydiving pursuits, work, and family. Proposing his analysis as an example of “analytic autoethnography” the author concludes by considering the implications of his research for better understanding serious leisure pursuits more generally, as well as for answering the personal question, should I continue to jump out of planes?     

Role Balance Among White Married Couples

We generate models predicting wives' and husbands' feelings of overall balance across roles. Drawing on fine‐grained data about marital lifestyles and time use, we find few predictors that are the same for both partners. Both report greater role balance when their level of parental attachment to children is higher and when their marital satisfaction is greater, but gendered time use gives rise to important differences. Wives report greater balance when they have more paid work hours but have fewer of these hours on weekends. Wives' balance is also greater when they feel less financial strain, have less leisure time alone with their children, more couple leisure alone with their husbands, and more social network involvement. Husbands' contribute to wives' balance when they report more relationship maintenance in the marriage and more leisure with their children at those times when wives are not present. Husbands' own role balance increases as their income rises, but it decreases as their work hours rise. Husbands' balance also rises with more nuclear family leisure, and it lessens as their leisure alone increases. Our discussion highlights the ways that gendered marital roles lead to these different correlates of balance.     

More wages,more income,more leisure? Evidence from Thailand’s time use survey

ABSTRACT

Does more income mean more leisure? This paper investigates the impact of wages and income on leisure time using merged data from two nationally representative samples in Thailand: (1) the Time Use Survey, and (2) the Labor Force Survey. Results will depend on our definition of income or wages. The data indicate that Thai people tend to reduce their leisure time in response to monthly income changes. The reason for such a negative relationship is that monthly income is composed of extra income other than wages, for example, overtime and bonus pay, which are found to be inversely related to leisure time. However, when the relationship between leisure time and hourly wage is estimated, we find that an increase in hourly wage substantially and significantly induces people to engage in more leisure and that a percentage change in hourly wage also provides a positive percentage change in leisure time.     

Rethinking Kink: Sadomasochism as Serious Leisure

Based on extensive ethnographic research in a public SM (sadomasochism) community, this paper frames SM as recreation. Drawing on Robert Stebbins’ work on “serious leisure” (1982), I posit that in order to more adequately understand SM as it occurs in this community, we need to shift from mainstream assumptions of SM as (simply) “kinky sex” to a more nuanced perspective. I explore the unique skills required in order to engage in SM, as well as the benefits and rewards that participants derive from it, in order to illustrate that SM can be more usefully understood as serious leisure.     

Joint and Separated Lifestyles in Couple Relationships

A survey among 1,523 married and cohabiting couples in the Netherlands is used to describe the extent to which couples have lifestyles characterized by separate leisure pursuits. Four types of leisure are examined: visiting friends and family, entertainment, outdoor recreation, and indoor leisure. For these activities, we find that contemporary couples cannot be characterized as highly individualized. Next, we analyze why some couples have a more separated lifestyle than others. Hypotheses are developed about the life cycle of the couple, the couple's work life, social and cultural homogamy, and value orientations. Multivariate analyses show that life cycle factors are an important determinant of separate lifestyles, whereas evidence for the role of values and homogamy is modest. We also present evidence revealing the time constraints that children and work schedules pose for realizing a joint lifestyle, but we do not find that spouses in dual‐earner couples generally operate more separately than do other couples.     

Children’s Time Use: Labor Divisions and Schooling in Indonesia

Data from the Worker and Iron Status Evaluation are used to examine gendered patterns in children’s time in market and nonmarket work, schooling, and leisure in Indonesia (N= 2,929). Boys spend more time in market work; girls spend more time in nonmarket work. Work responsibilities increase with age as well as gender differentials in children’s time use. By age 18, girls spend nearly 1 more hour per day working and enjoy significantly less leisure time, but the gender gap in schooling is not significant, suggesting that parents and children are committed to both work and schooling. Additionally, Tobit regression results suggest that parents’ education, household income, and rural residency are important predictors of children’s labor and schooling time.     

Who Experiences Leisure Deficits? Mothers' Marital Status and Leisure Time

The authors used the 2003 to 2012 American Time Use Survey to examine marital status variation in mothers' leisure time. They found that never‐married mothers have more total leisure but less high‐quality leisure when compared with married mothers. Never‐married mothers' leisure is concentrated in passive and socially isolated activities that offer fewer social and health benefits. Black single mothers have the highest amount of socially isolated leisure, particularly watching television alone. Results suggest that differences in the context and type of leisure are salient dimensions of the divergent and stratified life conditions of married, divorced, and single mothers.     

Let’s go out for a drink after work! The relation between leisure time spent with colleagues and employees’ life satisfaction

Despite the tremendous research studying the factors that influence employees’ well-being, the effect of what happens when leisure time is spent with colleagues remains yet unexamined. Building on the Conversation of Resource Theory, we propose that leisure time spent with colleagues could be understood as a resource, especially for those individuals who have few friends at their workplace. In a cross-sectional design, 136 university employees provided information about the number of friends they have at work, the amount of leisure time spent with befriended colleagues, and their life satisfaction. Results suggest that a larger network of friends at work is positively associated with life satisfaction. Furthermore, the effect of the number of friends at work on life satisfaction is moderated by the amount of leisure time spent with befriended colleagues. Employees who have few friends at work report more life satisfaction, if they spend more leisure time with befriended colleagues, whereas such an effect was not found for employees with a large friend network at work. These results are placed into the context of current discussions about work-life-blending.     

Time,Work, and Family Life: Reconceptualizing Gendered Time Patterns Through the Case of Children’s Organized Activities1

This article considers the understudied phenomenon of children’s organized leisure as it relates to the division of labor in the family. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we first ask whether the labor entailed by children’s organized leisure is divided evenly between mothers and fathers. Both data sets indicate that this is not the case, with the majority of the work falling to mothers; they also indicate that at least some employed mothers face a tradeoff between time devoted to paid work and time devoted to facilitating their children’s leisure. Subsequently, we consider key qualitative aspects of these leisure activities, including deadline sensitivity, authority over scheduling, and degree of predictability. These factors, we find, serve to exacerbate the inequity of the allocation of responsibility between mothers and fathers. We conclude by suggesting that organized leisure has become an important part of the familial landscape and thus warrants further attention. We also suggest that research on the gender division of labor would be enhanced in important ways by greater attention to qualitative dimensions of time use. Researchers should not simply assume that “an hour is an hour.”     

Family Leisure and Changing Ideologies of Parenthood

This paper examines the significant role that family leisure plays in family life, and the ways in which family time, family activities, and family vacations reflect and contribute to changing ideologies of parenthood (including ideologies of motherhood and fatherhood). Research on this topic has shown family leisure to be a parental commitment, organized and constructed for the benefit of children and for the family as a whole. At the same time, family leisure has contradictory meanings and outcomes, because of the work involved and the difficulties associated with organizing and facilitating positive family experiences. Moreover, the work of family leisure falls disproportionately to mothers, reducing their personal time and personal leisure. It is argued that family leisure is a new obligation of parenthood, and one that has important implications for understanding ideas, beliefs and practices associated with intensive motherhood and involved fatherhood.     

The social stratification of time use patterns

Time use is both a cause of social inequality and a consequence of social inequality. However, how social class stratifies time use patterns is seldom studied. In this paper, I describe the time use patterns in the years 1983 and 2015 by social class, and gender in the British context. Using sequence analysis methods, I show how the diversity of time use patterns in British society is socially stratified. I find that 13 clusters capture the heterogeneity of time use patterns and that these clusters are associated with social class, gender, and day of the week. These clusters capture patterns of paid and unpaid work schedules, as well as leisure patterns. The results show that men have experienced a reduction of the standard Monday to Friday 8-hr working day, while women have experienced a general increase in this type of schedule. On the other hand, patterns of domestic working days have reduced for women and increased for men. Important differences exist in paid and unpaid work patterns between social classes. Working-class women have experienced an important increase in shift work on weekends. They are also much more likely to be doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to upper-class and middle-class women. Working-class men are more likely to experience non-working days and leisure days on both weekdays and weekends and are more likely to be doing shift work. They are also more often doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to men in upper-class households. Patterns of childcare indicate that all families have increased their childcare time. Men in upper-class households in particular have experienced an important growth in childcare time between 1983 and 2015. I conclude by discussing how time use can further our understanding of social stratification.     

Parents' Family Time and Work Schedules: The Split‐Shift Schedule in Spain

This study used data on couples from the 2003 Spanish Time Use Survey (N = 1,416) to analyze how work schedules are associated with family, couple, parent–child, and non‐family leisure activities. Spain is clearly an interesting case for the institutionalized split‐shift schedule, a long lunch break rooted in the traditional siesta that splits the workday between morning and evening. Results showed strong negative associations between the split shift and both family and parent–child activities. The evening shift was negatively associated with couple and family time, but not with parent–child time. Women spent much more time than men in parent–child activities for all work categories, and they were more responsive to the spouse's work hours. Men were substantially more active than women in non‐family leisure, considering both individuals' and their spouses' work schedules. Altogether, this study has important implications for scientific and public policy debates.     

No Fun Anymore: Leisure and Marital Quality Across the Transition to Parenthood

This study examines changes in leisure patterns across the transition to parenthood for dual‐earner, working‐class couples, as well as the relationship between leisure and marital quality. To this end, 147 heterosexual couples were interviewed across the transition to parenthood. Findings indicate that during the transition to parenthood, husbands and wives experience an initial decline in leisure, followed by a gradual incline after the wife’s return to work. Overall, wives who reported more shared leisure prenatally also reported more marital love and less conflict 1 year later. Husbands with more independent leisure prenatally reported less love and more conflict 1 year later. Conclusions suggest leisure time is integral to well‐functioning marriages, with effects lasting throughout the first year of parenthood.     

Public attitudes to countryside leisure: A case study on ambivalence

This paper describes a research study designed to look critically at the framework underpinning current attitude survey research on countryside leisure. The argument proposes that people do not have set and stable needs and attitudes. Using a framework informed by recent debates on discourse and rhetoric in social psychology, the research examines whether people appear to have, on the surface, variable and flexible views on countryside leisure which reflect deeper societal tensions, ambiguities and uncertainties. This perspective is in stark contrast to current key U.K. leisure policy documents and understandings which implicitly assume people to have unitary and stable needs and views which reflect internally consistent “attitudes” (although the needs which people are assumed to have in relation to countryside leisure are subtly different across the different policy documents). Using seven topical and strongly contested disputes over the appropriateness of particular leisure uses for the English countryside the research “playfully” seeks to determine whether people's expressed views and attitudes to the same issues of countryside leisure can be radically transformed in line with wider cultural controversies. This hypothesis is explored by introducing the same issues, framed in line with three ‘cultural’ voices, in three consecutive weeks. The hypothesis is largely confirmed across many of the countryside leisure controversies and is interpreted as revealing of the considerable ambivalence in people's expressed preferences. The results are argued to be highly relevent to policy makers and some implications of this kind of research are drawn out for U.K. government agencies. Wider theoretical implications are also explored concerning the power of contemporary cultural rhetories, and of how a more reflexive understanding of such rhetorics might inform the practices of a variety of social groupings.     

Leisure activity and adjustment in retirement

A sample of retired persons in a southern metropolitan area responded to a questionnaire designed to investigate the interrelationship between level of leisure activity and adjustment in retirement Adjustment was measured by two indices, life satisfaction and alienation. The survey's results show that persons who have more leisure activities are more satisfied with their lives and are less alienated than those who have few leisure activities.     

Leisure, recreation, and play from a developmental context

Participation in activities and experiences defined as play, recreation,and leisure has important developmental implications for youth. Elements and characteristics of leisure experiences contribute directly to the development of identity, autonomy, competence,initiative, civic duty, and social connections. Whether in informal or formal, appropriately structured and organized programs,leisure experiences can help facilitate adolescent development in these areas. For example, one of the defining elements of leisure is that it is characterized by free choice and self-determination. Programs that promote leadership, choice, autonomy, and initiative can help adolescents deal with developmental challenges associated with this age group. Leisure experiences can also promote civic engagement and provide important peer-to-peer, peer to-adult, and peer-to-community connections. The social context of leisure is important to adolescent development in that it provides opportunities to learn empathy, loyalty, and intimacy in their group activities, as well as to negotiate with peers, resolve conflict,and work together for communal goals. In addition, adolescents often report positive emotional experiences in leisure, which can serve as a relief from the stress they feel in other areas of their lives and contribute to positive psychological adjustment and well-being. A case study is used to show how planned, purposive programs can be used as critical components of efforts to contribute to adolescent development.