After Work: The Search for an Optimal Leisure Lifestyle
by Robert A. Stebbins, University of Calgary
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Leisure in the Information Age
Chapter 2 Amateurism and the Love of Leisure
Chapter 3 The Hobbies: Serious Leisure for All
Chapter 4 The World of the Career Volunteer
Chapter 5 Satisfaction in Serious Leisure
Chapter 6 Starting a Leisure Career
Chapter 7 Lifestyle, Identity, and Leisure Marginality
Chapter 8 Serious Leisure in a World without Work
A Practical Bibliography of Serious Leisure
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Cynthia Janzen for her careful work on several aspects of the Practical Bibliography and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the small research grant that made it possible to pay her for her efforts. I am also grateful to my wife, Karin Stebbins, for typing that
bibliography.
Introduction
After Work was written with two audiences in mind. One consists of those self-directed learners who are searching for an optimal leisure lifestyle, conceived of here as the pursuit during free time of a substantial, absorbing form of leisure. The other consists of leisure practitioners and students in leisure studies and continuing education who would like to help the first to realize their free-time goals. The scientific basis for this book lies in the field of serious leisure research, a relatively new branch of the leisure sciences. Some of the people seeking an optimal leisure lifestyle today have been made redundant, some have retired from active employment (whether at, before, or after age sixty-five) and some, though still fully employed, have simply become bored with their present leisure lifestyle. Those who succeed in their search will discover and eventually embrace one of the three types of serious leisure: the steady pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or career volunteer activity that capitivates its participants with its many challenges and inherent complexity.
Several writers, among them Jeremy Rifkin, Ann Howard, and Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, have observed that the number of people with substantial amounts of free time on their hands is growing dramatically, paralleling the rapid spread of electronic technology across all sectors of the economy and the sharp reduction in employment opportunities that nearly always follows in its wake. One far-reaching consequence of this radical transformation of modern life, albeit a consequence these authors only allude to, is that, to find the equivalent respectable identity and central life interest they once knew in their work, more and more people will be forced to search for free-time activity of considerable substance. After Work takes the reader down the road to the Leisure Age, exploring along the way the complex world of serious leisure as well as the practical questions of how to get started in the amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activities piquing his or her interest.
Although I certainly did not invent these three types of serious leisure, I did coin the term and pioneer this domain of research. My interest in serious leisure dates to 1974 when I began my theoretical work on this concept. Since then I have studied empirically eleven serious leisure activities: amateurs in baseball, Canadian football, archaeology, astronomy, theater, classical music, entertainment magic, and stand-up comedy; hobbyists in barbershop singing and cultural tourism; and volunteers in the French communities of Calgary and Edmonton . Moreover, I continue to work theoretically, expanding the perspective as well as linking it with adjacent specialities, principally the fields of tourism, well-being, philosophy, volunteering, and continuing education. Since I refer to these studies at numerous points in this book without citation, readers who would like to know more about them should search the entries under my name in the "Works Cited" section. Because they were field studies and because they were written as much for the people who were observed and interviewed as for my professional colleagues, the books and articles listed are not technically difficult. Note, too, that I am by no means the only person studying serious leisure. Many others have contributed to our present level of knowledge about these activities; they are properly cited in the text and duly referenced in the aforementioned section.
Although this book is about serious leisure and the multitude of benefits it offers men and women of all ages, it opens on a contextual note with an examination of the larger social and economic backdrop for contemporary leisure as this backdrop has been designed and painted with the brush of revolutionary electronic technology, a force now engulfing us all. Thus placed in perspective serious leisure then takes the stage. Here, after discussing its essential characteristics, I describe its three principal types and then explore the considerable satisfaction they can bring, a satisfaction that is, however, never free of costs. With this background, I then turn to the practical matter of getting started in one or two of the more than 300 serious leisure activities
and categories of activities previously discussed. The Practical Bibliography of Serious Leisure, which contains short lists of introductory books on most of
these activities, will further help many beginners in this regard.
An examination of social and personal identity, leisure lifestyle, and leisure marginality follows. The final chapter explores some of the ways of effecting the transition from the Industrial Age and a life of obligated work to the Leisure Age and a life of serious leisure, a difficult process occupying a great many thinkers these days. There it becomes evident that the day is rapidly approaching when much of the population can enjoy an optimal leisure lifestyle, even if many people must first clear certain critical social, personal, and economic hurdles before they can partake of it.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Leisure in the Information Age
Chapter 2 Amateurism and the Love of Leisure
Chapter 3 The Hobbies: Serious Leisure for All
Chapter 4 The World of the Career Volunteer
Chapter 5 Satisfaction in Serious Leisure
Chapter 6 Starting a Leisure Career
Chapter 7 Lifestyle, Identity, and Leisure Marginality
Chapter 8 Serious Leisure in a World without Work
A Practical Bibliography of Serious Leisure
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Cynthia Janzen for her careful work on several aspects of the Practical Bibliography and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the small research grant that made it possible to pay her for her efforts. I am also grateful to my wife, Karin Stebbins, for typing that
bibliography.
Introduction
After Work was written with two audiences in mind. One consists of those self-directed learners who are searching for an optimal leisure lifestyle, conceived of here as the pursuit during free time of a substantial, absorbing form of leisure. The other consists of leisure practitioners and students in leisure studies and continuing education who would like to help the first to realize their free-time goals. The scientific basis for this book lies in the field of serious leisure research, a relatively new branch of the leisure sciences. Some of the people seeking an optimal leisure lifestyle today have been made redundant, some have retired from active employment (whether at, before, or after age sixty-five) and some, though still fully employed, have simply become bored with their present leisure lifestyle. Those who succeed in their search will discover and eventually embrace one of the three types of serious leisure: the steady pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or career volunteer activity that capitivates its participants with its many challenges and inherent complexity.
Several writers, among them Jeremy Rifkin, Ann Howard, and Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, have observed that the number of people with substantial amounts of free time on their hands is growing dramatically, paralleling the rapid spread of electronic technology across all sectors of the economy and the sharp reduction in employment opportunities that nearly always follows in its wake. One far-reaching consequence of this radical transformation of modern life, albeit a consequence these authors only allude to, is that, to find the equivalent respectable identity and central life interest they once knew in their work, more and more people will be forced to search for free-time activity of considerable substance. After Work takes the reader down the road to the Leisure Age, exploring along the way the complex world of serious leisure as well as the practical questions of how to get started in the amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activities piquing his or her interest.
Although I certainly did not invent these three types of serious leisure, I did coin the term and pioneer this domain of research. My interest in serious leisure dates to 1974 when I began my theoretical work on this concept. Since then I have studied empirically eleven serious leisure activities: amateurs in baseball, Canadian football, archaeology, astronomy, theater, classical music, entertainment magic, and stand-up comedy; hobbyists in barbershop singing and cultural tourism; and volunteers in the French communities of Calgary and Edmonton . Moreover, I continue to work theoretically, expanding the perspective as well as linking it with adjacent specialities, principally the fields of tourism, well-being, philosophy, volunteering, and continuing education. Since I refer to these studies at numerous points in this book without citation, readers who would like to know more about them should search the entries under my name in the "Works Cited" section. Because they were field studies and because they were written as much for the people who were observed and interviewed as for my professional colleagues, the books and articles listed are not technically difficult. Note, too, that I am by no means the only person studying serious leisure. Many others have contributed to our present level of knowledge about these activities; they are properly cited in the text and duly referenced in the aforementioned section.
Although this book is about serious leisure and the multitude of benefits it offers men and women of all ages, it opens on a contextual note with an examination of the larger social and economic backdrop for contemporary leisure as this backdrop has been designed and painted with the brush of revolutionary electronic technology, a force now engulfing us all. Thus placed in perspective serious leisure then takes the stage. Here, after discussing its essential characteristics, I describe its three principal types and then explore the considerable satisfaction they can bring, a satisfaction that is, however, never free of costs. With this background, I then turn to the practical matter of getting started in one or two of the more than 300 serious leisure activities
and categories of activities previously discussed. The Practical Bibliography of Serious Leisure, which contains short lists of introductory books on most of
these activities, will further help many beginners in this regard.
An examination of social and personal identity, leisure lifestyle, and leisure marginality follows. The final chapter explores some of the ways of effecting the transition from the Industrial Age and a life of obligated work to the Leisure Age and a life of serious leisure, a difficult process occupying a great many thinkers these days. There it becomes evident that the day is rapidly approaching when much of the population can enjoy an optimal leisure lifestyle, even if many people must first clear certain critical social, personal, and economic hurdles before they can partake of it.
