Work/Leisure
Don Slater
Commonsensically, work and leisure are opposites: leisure is time off work, off school, either at play or at rest. It is in many respects a 'residual' category in modern thought and experience, labelling what is left when work time is subtracted from the day (evening), week (weekend), year (holiday) or even lifetime (youth or retirement). At the same time, leisure labels kinds of social time, space and activity which are different from or opposed to work. Primarily, work belongs to a public domain of social institutions and obligations whereas leisure belongs to a private sphere of the individual or family. This accounts for much of the different character ascribed to each. Leisure is thought to comprise intrinsic pleasures, activities done for their own sake rather than to achieve some extrinsic end (to produce things, earn money, gain status); leisure is therefore enjoyable rather than irksome; it is also free and uncompelled, a matter of individual or at least private choice, whereas we have no choice but to work if we can get it, while life at work is governed by rules, obligations and pressures. This view of leisure has been important to our view of modern life: the private freedoms and pleasures of leisure (like consumption) are regarded as the payoff for the intensive structuring of public economic and political life. By the same token, however, because leisure is seen as a private affair it is reckoned to take place off the social stage and to have far less social importance than work. It has consequently received far less serious attention from sociology. Historically it has only entered the sociological field of vision when it has entered the public stage as a social problem, as when the non-work time of youth takes unruly forms in public places (for example, football violence, subcultural affronts to 'normal', 'workaday' society).
CORE SOCIOLOGICAL DICHOTOMIES
At the same time, the work/leisure distinction is not as straightforward as common sense would have it. The way in which the two are distinguished depends on the way in which they have been socially separated in modern times and this separation has been a complex and variable achievement. It has also been experienced quite differently by different sectors of the population. Most crucially, a rigorous separation between work and leisure is bound up with employment in paid work outside the home. It has therefore been more characteristic of men's experience than women's, and can become problematic if 'paid work outside the home' becomes less central to the structure of everyday life (as with mass unemployment or increasing self-employment).
Finally, even for those whose time and activities neatly divide into work and leisure, the values ascribed to each can be confused and overlapping. For example, leisure is often associated with play: as in the case of sports and games, we are talking of bounded activities undertaken for their own intrinsic pleasures. But if leisure is active, it can take on many of the properties of work: for example, hobbies and sports can be exceedingly goal-orientated, competitive, methodical, labour-intensive. They can also be encouraged not for their own pleasures, but because they are therapeutic or 'recreate' the person and their energies so that they can continue carrying out their public functions: they therefore become forms of work, or extensions of work. Moreover, when leisure is not overtly active (watching TV, lying on a beach) it may still not be the opposite of work but may rather replicate the boredom and passivity of much modern labour (it can be programmed into schedules or package holidays).
WORK, LEISURE AND MODERNITY
Strictly speaking, the distinction between work and leisure is not new or modern; it is the social separation of the two that has taken new forms. Distinctions between being at work and at rest, and related ones such as being engaged in productive or unproductive activities, are fairly widespread. They were fundamental to ancient thought and experience: 'work' meant 'non-leisure' in Greek (Arendt 1958). Just as in contemporary life, however, leisure in ancient Greece did not mean idleness but the pursuit of qualitatively different sorts of activity. In the Greek case, work was identified with those activities that involve securing the necessities of life: people engaged in such activities were considered unfree in spirit (and were in fact generally slaves or women) whereas being a citizen required that one was freed from such necessities and therefore able to pursue the good, to achieve perfected form in body, in speech and (ironically) in the promotion of justice in the poliš. Non-workers, men of leisure, were therefore identified with culture and spirit rather than necessity and material gain.
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The Greek example demonstrates a view of work and leisure as not only dichotomous but also inversely related: in conditions of social inequality, my (free) leisure depends on others' (unfree) work. Pleasure and pain, as well as freedom and unfreedom, are socially distributed. In the famous concept of Thornstein Veblen (1953), ruling classes generally take the form of a leisure class' which indicates its superiority by 'conspicuous leisure' and consumption, a wastage of time and goods which demonstrates its freedom from having to engage in productive labour, and its ability to live off the labour of others. In fact, Veblen argues that gender division is at the basis of social inequality: men engage in sport, exploit and warfare to accentuate their distance from (and command over) the work of domestic reproduction as done by women. The ideal demonstration of superiority would be pure leisure in the sense of doing absolutely nothing at all. However, as total inactivity is irksome even to the most effete aristocrat, they learn to fill their time with a multitude of leisure (non-productive, non-necessary, literally useless) activities which come to be understood as 'cultured': for example, bourgeois and upper-crust men and women are rushed off their feet learning dead languages, doing charity work, acquiring 'accomplishments', or maintaining refined behaviour in 'society'. However much those who engage in leisure believe that they enjoy it and pursue it (especially in the form of culture) for its intrinsic pleasures, they are nevertheless, Veblen believes, really just engaged in status competition through the use of status symbols. Veblen's argument involves a critical reversal of the Greek valuation of leisure and work: for Veblen it is not leisure and culture but work - the productive and useful application of skills to materials (he calls it 'workmanship') - that gives human beings their true ethical dignity and personal integrity.
Though the distinction is ancient, modernity - specifically industrialization and capitalism - introduced a more fundamental and pervasive separation of the two spheres. The basic story is fairly clear: labour becomes separated from rest and pleasure in order to intensify it (make it more productive, efficient, cheap). The rise of industrial capitalism is associated with wage labour: in exchange for a wage, the worker is meant to work (the wage does not pay for idleness during working hours), while private ownership of capital increasingly excludes workers from control over the work process. Intensification of work is associated with separating it both temporally and spatially. Temporally, work hours, work days, work weeks and work years ruled by clock and calendar are delineated (and fought over). Getting to work on time, keeping a steady rate of work within that time, reducing to a minimum those activities which do not contribute to productivity (socializing, eating, resting, going to the toilet): these are central to what is known as 'labour discipline', which in turn is deemed essential to modern forms and relations of production. Negotiations over the limits of this discipline have been historically important struggles, involving unions, management and the state, over labour contracts that
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define, for example, the length of the working day or conditions at work. However, the primary issue was settled early in the nineteenth century: industry required that the time and pace of labour should be fixed and predictable; and that the payment of a wage for labour entitled the employer to minimize moments of leisure at work (Braverman, 1974).
The same issues arise in relation to the spatial segregation of work from leisure. Work came increasingly to be seen as a rational and technical process which requires complete control over all its elements, including labour. For example the division of labour within the factory or office implies a central plan which allocates tasks to all those involved. This requires that work time is dictated by the flow of work tasks. It has also tended to imply that work flow has to be spatially controlled: people have to be where the machines and materials are. Factory and office buildings therefore physically separate acts of work from the enjoyment of leisure, social labour from domestic activity. Conversely, the work/leisure distinction is possibly beginning to blur again because, it is argued, the electronic nature of new work processes and products (for example, information) allow it to be spatially distributed while still maintaining the temporal intensity and discipline of work.
By the same token these developments physically remove work from the social and communal contexts where it was formerly carried out. Though it would be very wrong to romanticize the arduousness or length of pre-modern labour, much of it was carried out within cultural contexts which asserted values and obligations other than productivity - indeed, values which we now associate with leisure. For example, premodern agricultural labour was interspersed on a daily basis with eating and rest periods; on a seasonal basis, the work was punctuated by a large number of feasts and saints' days, fairs, market days, and so on. Similarly, guilds combined the regulation of crafts with various forms of social life and consumption. The strength of this integrity of work/leisure can be measured by the extent of the battle of early capitalists to remove these non-work traditions from the work calendar by reducing 'leisure' at work: the classic clash was over 'Saint Monday', whereby workers maintained traditional schedules of work (taking Monday off) despite all employers' efforts (Thompson 1967; 1971).
Temporal and spatial separation of work from leisure was probably most clearly registered in the separation of work from the family. Families have never been self-sufficient, but until fairly late into modern times 'domestic labour' included not just cooking and cleaning but a far more extensive range of domestic production which could involve men, women and children: growing food, rearing animals, brewing, making cloth and clothes. In the premodern household, work and leisure, production and reproduction, were consequently integrated to a now surprising extent. Work could be arduous in the extreme for all members of the household (again there is nothing to romanticize here), but it was carried out in the context of a family's customs and values rather than treated as an abstract productive
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capacity. Again, this meant that non-work activities which we now hive off to leisure time were then part of the same time and space as work: socializing, celebrating, learning and so on.
Conversely, once work had been sequestered to certain public times and places, the private household came to be associated with leisure (as well as consumption): a space of non-utilitarian values, of emotional rather than rational relationships, of rest and enjoyment rather than effort and discipline. However, this characterization depends on quite particular definitions of work: work came to be identified entirely with paid employment outside the household. It was therefore an activity with a primarily public status (even when it was domestic labour in someone else's home) in that it involved a contractual wage relationship. Moreover, work was increasingly defined as productive labour, which came to mean labour which produced goods for the market, or accomplished public goods such as the management of institutions. Reproductive labour was unpaid and domestic (and was also unpaid because it was reproductive rather than productive) and therefore was not defined as work.
This gives rise to the clearest problem with the entire work/leisure distinction: it does not recognize unpaid labour in the home (Crowley 1992; Deem 1986; Green et al. 1990). This obviously casts most women's experience into a sociological void: given that most women bear the responsibility for domestic reproduction, the home is for them a place of work, not leisure, despite the absence of payment (indeed there have been campaigns for 'wages for housework' that aim at validating as well as simply recompensing women's labour). Women who do have paid jobs carry out a 'double shift' (public production and domestic reproduction) and therefore have, if anything, less leisure. The question is really whether women can be said to have any leisure at all, or whether the entire term rests precisely on a distinction (paid work versus non-work) that merely reflects men's experience of and position within modernity. For example, many men feel they can come home from work and indulge in a form of leisure in which they 'do nothing' but watch TV and be a couch potato. Most women, on the other hand, experience the home as a place of work (even if they have just come home from a job) and feel guilty and unsettled as well as straightforwardly hassled by the outstanding duties and demands that confront them in the home: few women feel they can 'just watch television' (Morley 1986; 1992).
On the other hand, it could be argued that women can get much enjoyment as well as ethical dignity from domestic labour, caring, shopping, crafts like sewing or knitting. Indeed, they can experience in them the kinds of pleasures associated with 'leisure'. The issue is whether women's work and leisure can be separated out in the home the way men's can be separated out between work and home. If a 'housewife' finds knitting or shopping pleasurable, is she then doing work or enjoying leisure? Does she herself know or see things in terms of this distinction?
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Finally, because the work/leisure relationship has been bound up with struggles over contractual arrangements such as the length of the working day, it has also been closely bound up with labour organization and representation (trade unions, but also political parties). Women and children have been in a weak position in such spheres (as have immigrant and ethnic communities), and where their terms and conditions of work have eased (for example, reduction of hours) this has had less to do with successful demands for more leisure and more to do with being seen as competing for men's work. Similarly, men's domination over paid labour increasingly meant that wages meant 'family wages'. Women as non-earners did not have their own money to spend on leisure (and spending on oneself is widely experienced as a guilty pleasure by women with families); while women earners received wages that were regarded as supplementary to men's. Family levels of domestic reproduction, consumption and leisure were set through men's participation in paid work.
THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF WORK AND LEISURE
It is obvious to most people that work is socially organized: it takes place in institutions (firms, factories, offices) which are organized in relation to final products and organizational aims (profit, efficiency, etc.). Leisure, on the other hand, like consumption, is less evidently social in character: the very fact that we often call it 'free time' indicates that it is meant to be individual, subjective and undetermined - not structured by social forces. Leisure is ostensibly private, individual and free as opposed to work which is public, social and regulated.
However, leisure is very definitely socially organized, and its structure is clearly bound up with the organization of work. Firstly, as we have seen, modern leisure arises when it becomes socially segregated from work (at least from paid public employment). Secondly, leisure has been structured around the same two features that have structured work itself: commodification and rationalization.
Commodification
We are accustomed to think that capitalism arose on the basis of the increasingly mechanized production of material goods. In fact the commodification of leisure played an important role in the rise of capitalism: early entrepreneurs rapidly realized that forms of play, entertainment, sport and spectacle could be organized as commercial enterprises and transformed into commodities.
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On the one hand, material commodities could replace or supplement domestic forms of leisure. For example, toy-making became a major industry from the seventeenth century, linked to a new location of children (at least those of the middling and upper crust) in the world of play rather than labour. So too did popular literature including novels and periodicals from the eighteenth century, which linked a reading public of 'leisured' ladies to the private, non-work world of the home. These were significantly large industries in their own right, they linked to the general development of consumer goods markets in early modernity, and alongside them were pioneers of the art of dealing with large, geographically spread markets of anonymous consumers. The workers in many of these industries were a new type: wage workers who could constitute a consumer market for commodities made by other waged workers (Thirsk 1978).
On the other hand - and to some extent more widespread - was the transformation of many leisure activities into commodities by organizing them commercially and then charging admission by ticket. Much of this was pioneered in the eighteenth century with the entrepreneurial development of events such as masquerades, concerts, theatre, pleasure gardens like Vauxhall and Ranelagh, construction of local halls for subscription dance and ball seasons, and the transformation of sporting events like races and boxing into advertised and ticketed events held at regular times. This is intensified in the early nineteenth century with the rise of theatre (especially melodrama, magic shows), circuses, menageries and other travelling spectacles (Cunningham 1977; Plumb 1973; 1983).
Leisure activities still provide major opportunities for commodification and the creation of new markets. For example, from the 1880s onwards photography was transformed through technological and marketing changes from an expensive craft pursued by professionals or wealthy amateurs into a mass market. That market comprised both snapshooting (in which photography was defined as an essential accompaniment to all leisure activities - the family at play on holiday, at Christmas and other reunions as recorded generally by the woman of the family) and amateur photography (a form of active leisure which generally involved men lusting after ever more technical goods - new types of film and processing, lenses, motor drives, flash, new electronic components). Similar developments can be traced for film and video. It is possible that with the digitization of photography, snaps, amateur photography, video, sound, computer games and interactive multimedia programs can all be integrated as leisure activities through the home computer, which itself can be plugged into the Internet (Slater 1991; 1995).
Many argue that the commodification of leisure (as of consumption) is a counterpart to the commodification of labour. Under modern arrangements, all needs are to be met through the market. Workers go to the labour market to get wages and to consumer markets for consumer and leisure goods. The fact that production is carried out for the market gives both the
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opportunity and the necessity for the commodification of leisure: workers have neither the time nor the skills for domestic production, while capitalist firms need ever more opportunities to sell things to people - or, in the case of leisure, to sell activities to people in the form of things.
Regulation
While work involves discipline, it is often assumed that leisure is all one's own: a sphere of freedom. In reality, the very fact that people could be free or unregulated in non-work time meant that it was a source of considerable worry to political, social and religious authorities, as well as to many employers who feared that licentious behaviour outside work hours would erode labour discipline within. Hence, the non-work time of workers (as well as the behaviour of non-workers such as the unemployed) became as obsessive a focus for regulation as was their work time.
Workers out of work had always been associated with disorder. Traditional society could contain this precisely through the way it mixed work and celebration: it could license and manage all sorts of periodic disruptions in the form of fairs, festival, carnivalesque events. The separation of work from its various cultural contexts (home and community) -especially when it took the form of mobile workers flooding into the anonymous cities, freed from communal surveillance - served to deregulate time out of work. Early modernity was disrupted by riots and mob actions which combined political protest, economic desperation, and simple criminality and drunken mayhem (the classic examples are the Gin Riots and the Gordon Riots of the eighteenth century; see Rude 1970). Ironically, both the working class and the aristocracy were considered prone to disorderly leisure (both alone and together), especially to drunkenness in the context of games and leisure pursuits such as boxing, horse racing, gambling. Hence many attacks on leisure, as on consumer and popular culture, began as bourgeois attacks on the traditional, premodern activities of both the upper and lower orders, whose lifestyle seemed more appropriate to life on the land than in the factory or office. The aim was to extend a methodical and sober lifestyle across the work/ leisure divide.
Leisure was to be 'cleaned up' in a wide variety of ways. Above all it was to be brought into line with evolving bourgeois codes of order and respectability. This could involve purging leisure time of immoral activities which were considered both evil in themselves and unconducive to economic and civil order: above all drink, gambling, gaming, prostitution. The list could be extended - depending on prevailing levels of strictness and passing moral panics - to such things as theatre, films, amusement parks, bathing in public, comic books, and now videos, computer games and the Internet. But leisure could also be disciplined in various ways
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which closely paralleled the rationalization of work (Haywood et al. 1995). Firstly, it was first banned from public spaces and then spatially restricted to designated locations. Primarily, leisure was to be focused as far as possible in the home and within the bosom of the family; in so far as it took place in public it should occupy ordered spaces such as the park, the playing field, the swimming bath. Secondly, leisure activities were temporally organized (events held at fixed times, from the ninety-minute form of the football game as it developed in the 1880s to the programmed flow of television). Thirdly, various forms of rationalization developed: leisure activities came increasingly to be rule-governed and organized through formal institutions which could enforce them. This regulation also involved what Elias terms a 'civilizing process' that includes the progressive elimination of (unauthorized) violence from games and other leisure.
Finally, leisure was regarded not only as a problem but also as holding a potential for 'educating' people outside work, for making their non-work time productive of social order and moral behaviour as well as of productive skills. Leisure could be made respectable and orderly by giving it worthy aims and even making it conform to a work ethic that condoned only purposeful behaviour. Hence, there is a history of first emptying leisure time of its traditional, non-domestic and volatile activities through temperance, anti-gambling, Sunday school and Sabattarian movements and then filling it again with 'rational recreations' and improving activities such as crafts, adult education, paramilitary groups (like the Boy Scouts) and organized sports which produced team spirit, patriotism and discipline. The contemporary descendant of this rational recreation is probably the 'hobby'.
WORK, LEISURE AND ALIENATION
As we have seen, the different values placed on work and leisure can change, veering for example between a work ethic and a leisure or hedonistic ethic. It is also possible to regard the very distinction itself as a social problem. The clearest example of this is the Hegelian tradition, most radically expressed through Marxism. In this tradition, praxis or practical activity is fundamental to human identity and progress. Through our activity we transform the world and create human-made environments which, in turn, radically transform our own subjectivity and consciousness. Praxis, in this sense, is very far from modern work in which people sell labour time in exchange for wages. Indeed, it looks rather like play, creativity, artistic transformation: the kinds of activities that - for Marx no less than the Greeks - represent a freedom from the realm of necessity that allows the development of a human realm of freedom (culture). In the Marxian tradition, human transformative capacity - the human essence or
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species being itself - is considered to have been 'alienated' in the form of labour power: we sell it as a commodity, and place it at the disposal of employers. We do not identify ourselves with this labour or with its products. What free time and energy is left to us - leisure - is a poor and insignificant imitation of praxis. Moreover, it is itself highly commodified and regulated.
In fact the picture is even more complicated because the alienated forms of work and leisure, it is argued, partly arise on the basis of a third feature: consumption. Modern productivity means that every hour worked produces far more goods than before and this presents individuals and communities with an obvious choice: they can either keep working, or even work harder, in order to produce yet more material wealth and consumer goods; or they can choose to work less, being now able, through productivity gains, to fulfil the same wants and needs with less time and effort. They could thus reap the modern harvest in time (leisure) rather than goods (consumption) so long as they decide to limit their needs and wants. In fact this choice is not theoretical, nor was its outcome inevitable: it has been historically decided at various times (Campbell 1989; Cross 1993; Sahlins 1974).
A central argument here, well represented by Marcuse's (1964) work, is that although capitalism has attained the technological capacity to satisfy most needs, it requires that needs never be satisfied or that new ones be constantly created. If needs were satisfied, people would neither work longer to produce more wealth, nor consume more and therefore buy up the goods that are produced. There would be a crisis of production and profit. Marcuse therefore argues that capitalism promotes consumerism and the inculcation of false needs and wants, of ever new desires, so that we will keep working for the money to buy more, rather than stop working in order that we may do more. The result, for Marcuse, is that work and leisure remain alienated because they are restricted, through consumer culture, to a false necessity. Hence, for authors like Lefebvre, the very triviality yet pathos of 'leisure', as well as the indignity and exploitation of work, reside in the fact that the essence of humans - their activity - has been reduced to hobbies like gardening and building model railways at best, passively watching TV at worst. Even the most active forms of leisure can be nothing but a slim compensation for the alienation of the best part of ourselves in wage labour.
Moreover, it is argued that even this small compensation has become functional to capitalism. In fact, it has become multi-functionalized. Firstly, leisure time is seen by critical theory as a time of recuperation, of literal recreation of labour power. Modern labour has become so rationalized through the factory system, Fordism and Taylorism that there is no moment of rest: leisure is the unpaid time in which you rest for the next day's labour. Secondly, as recuperation from work, leisure is structured in fairly specific ways: above all, it is characterized by escapism, and that fits well
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with mass culture and consumerism. Leisure is associated by critical theorists with, for example, television and Hollywood films which follow entertainment formulas that can be passively, effortlessly consumed; that allow one to forget the workday world; that do not involve critical thought or challenges to that world. Even active forms of leisure (hobbies) can be seen as escapist (finding great importance in the safe little world of one's garden or darkroom) and passive (gardening and photography can mainly comprise buying consumer goods such as seeds, implements, lenses and using them in conventional, formulaic ways). Thirdly, leisure is intensively commodified and therefore fills the need to sell more goods. Finally, leisure itself is ideologically sold to us as a sphere of freedom from work, from public responsibilities and obligations: the very concept of leisure becomes functional to capitalist economy. Ideologically, it is part of a deal that - in exchange for all this 'freedom' and 'pleasure' - secures docile workers and citizens.
Hence, critical theories of leisure tend to be connected to theories and valuations of 'mass culture', 'popular culture', 'consumer culture'. Moreover, leisure and these related terms can be understood in terms of functions at the highest systemic levels, as in theories of Fordism (Aglietta 1979): leisure and consumerism appear as part of a trade-off which secures both more peaceful, disciplined labour and more commodity consumption for capitalism. Fordism is associated with assembly-line production of standardized mass-produced goods. It therefore involves extreme rationalization of the production process and normally a deskilling of the workforce with a corresponding increase in alienation and the discipline demanded at work. At the same time the output of the system is an overwhelming quantity of goods that need to be sold. Fordism represents an ongoing historic compromise in which organized business, labour and government agree on labour discipline and worker loss of control over workplace organization in exchange for a steadily rising consumption standard and the wages that will fund it. The premise of the whole deal is an absolute separation of work and leisure (discipline) but also an absolute association of leisure with the consumption of the commodities produced by work.
TRANSFORMATIONS
The distinction of work and leisure arises in modern times as a result of new ways of organizing labour. It is therefore possible that it might be eroded if modern forms of labour change in fundamental ways. Unsurprisingly, then, arguments that have gathered steam from around the 1950s onwards about a transition to post-industrial, post-Fordist or - latterly -postmodern society have often focused on the increasing confusion between work and leisure.
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Firstly, it has often been argued that precisely the expansion of consumption (new needs, new goods and therefore lots more work) at the expense of leisure has reached various limits: boredom with consumer society (or its inability to recompense for increasingly alienating labour), the saturation of crucial consumer markets and inability to find new ones, ecological limits to consumption, limits to the productivity of labour. There might be an increasing preference for leisure rather than consumption and work. This is sometimes expressed in rather Utopian terms (small is beautiful, new men who would rather spend more time with their families) which can themselves be intensively commodified.
Secondly, and more importantly, there have been major changes in the structure of employment. This includes mass unemployment and the expectation that full employment will never return; it also includes 'looser' labour contracts, such as temporary labour, freelancing, self-employment and subcontracting. Work has become much less definite than having or not having a job, and there is an expectation that more or most people will not be working all of their lives but will start later, or end earlier, or work intermittently owing to 'flexible' labour arrangements. The meaning of free time consequently changes too. A lot of one's life might be taken up with time which is free but - because of the continuing valuation of work, because of material poverty, and because of constant uncertainty about one's future - can hardly be called leisure. It is much like an out-of-work actor claiming to be 'resting'.
A significant factor here is that in modern times one's moral worth and dignity derives from one's (paid) labour. This is obviously an aspect of the Protestant ethic: that leisure comes second and is earned through work. Hence unemployment is understood and experienced as threatening not only one's material comfort but also ethical dignity and social identity. One's social standing depends on labour not leisure (again this is a matter not only of money but also of identity). Attempts therefore to pass off leisure pursuits such as hobbies, adult education, and so on as substitutes for work (as well as claims that the unemployed have somehow 'chosen' a life of leisure rather than labour) have been met with derision and anger by the unemployed: 'free time' activities do not mean the same things when uncoupled from work time status and resources. Yet it is precisely this uncoupling that many theorists are claiming to be necessary and desirable (Frankel 1987; Gorz 1982; 1989): work (doing what is necessary for the material reproduction of society) should be minimal; social resources should be dedicated to facilitating meaningful activity in the time formerly known as leisure. This requires that all have good incomes which are not related to the amount of work done; and that leisure time involves activity rather than mere consumption of more commodities.
Finally, there is a range of arguments associated with the concepts of postmodernism and post-Fordism, both of which foresee an increasing merging, or 'dedifferentiation', of work and leisure. This is associated firstly
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with a transition from predominantly manufacturing to service or 'non-material' industries: more of the work that the employed do is bound up with servicing the leisure (or at least non-work) time and activities of people through a huge range of occupations spanning the media and entertainment, through forms of education, community work, and so on. In this sense, leisure becomes more important not only to our non-work identities but also to the identity of work itself. This development has been heralded since at least the 1950s when authors like Riesman argued that work would increasingly concern the management of people, personality and experiences through services rather than the transformation of materials through industry.
At the same time, work might be becoming less fixed and less differentiated in terms of time and space. Increased unemployment (especially at the beginning and end of the 'working life'), erosion of job security through various forms of restructuring, increased home working or work in small business based at home: all these erode the idea of a job that spans a life and happens at a factory or an office. For those in employment, new technologies (mobile phones, e-mail, fax) mean that one can always be at work, wherever one is and whatever time it is. This might mean no leisure (the damned phone is always ringing) or a new integration of work and leisure which for some evokes images of premodern lifestyles.
Finally, many of these changes are claimed to be part of a transition in which people's sense of identity is rooted primarily in their non-work rather than work life. Not only has meaning and identity become rooted, as we have seen, in private, domestic life, and therefore in leisure and consumption, but it may well be that leisure and consumption rather than jobs or careers are the constants in most people's lives. Moreover, absence of job security means that people act more like entrepreneurs than employees, managing their life as a project or enterprise. In this new perspective, leisure, work and consumption activities and choices tend to be inextricably entwined.
KEY CONCEPTS
WORK In the days of a production based economy work was fhe determinant of identity and the regulator of social experience. Work was also the zone where the public most vividly engaged with the private sphere. People became who they were and established their form of life through work. This is not so clearly the case in a late-modern society where production is not the measure of work.
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LEISURE In earlier economies, described under 'work' above, leisure, if at all, was time from work for rest and recuperation. Now leisure has developed into an aesthetic and a form of consumption through which individuals can achieve a different identity. It is also a section of social life that requires more and more management as it is occupying greater sections of peoples lives.
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