The Labour of Leisure

The Labour of Leisure

Author: Chris Rojek

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1412945534

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Leisure has always been associated with freedom, choice and flexibility. The week-end and vacations were celebrated as 'time off'. In his compelling new book, Chris Rojek turns this shibboleth on its head to demonstrate how leisure has become a form of labour. Modern men and women are required to be competent, relevant and credible, not only in the work place but with their mates, children, parents and communities. The requisite empathy for others, socially acceptable values and correct forms of self-presentation demand work. Much of this work is concentrated in non-work activity, compromising traditional connections between leisure and freedom. Ranging widely from an analysis of the inflated aspirations of the leisure society thesis to the culture of deception that permeates leisure choice, Rojek shows how leisure is inextricably linked to emotional labour and intelligence. It is now a school for life. In challenging the orthodox understandings of freedom and free time, The Labour of Leisure sets out an indispensable new approach to the meaning of leisure. Chris Rojek is Professor of Sociology and Culture at Brunel University. In 2003 he was awarded the Allen V. Sapora Award for outstanding achievement in the field of leisure studies.


Time for Things

Time for Things

Author: Stephen D. Rosenberg

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0674979516

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Modern life is full of stuff yet bereft of time. An economic sociologist offers an ingenious explanation for why, over the past seventy-five years, Americans have come to prefer consumption to leisure. Productivity has increased steadily since the mid-twentieth century, yet Americans today work roughly as much as they did then: forty hours per week. We have witnessed, during this same period, relentless growth in consumption. This pattern represents a striking departure from the preceding century, when working hours fell precipitously. It also contradicts standard economic theory, which tells us that increasing consumption yields diminishing marginal utility, and empirical research, which shows that work is a significant source of discontent. So why do we continue to trade our time for more stuff? Time for Things offers a novel explanation for this puzzle. Stephen Rosenberg argues that, during the twentieth century, workers began to construe consumer goods as stores of potential free time to rationalize the exchange of their labor for a wage. For example, when a worker exchanges his labor for an automobile, he acquires a duration of free activity that can be held in reserve, counterbalancing the unfree activity represented by work. This understanding of commodities as repositories of hypothetical utility was made possible, Rosenberg suggests, by the advent of durable consumer goods—cars, washing machines, refrigerators—as well as warranties, brands, chain stores, and product-testing magazines, which assured workers that the goods they purchased would not be subject to rapid obsolescence. This theory clarifies perplexing aspects of behavior under industrial capitalism—the urgency to spend earnings on things, the preference to own rather than rent consumer goods—as well as a variety of historical developments, including the coincident rise of mass consumption and the legitimation of wage labor.


Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World

Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World

Author: Michael J. Naughton

Publisher: Emmaus Road Publishing

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 194901357X

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If we don’t get Sunday right, we won’t get Monday—or any day of the workweek—right. The divided life is a temptation so built into our society, we may not even recognize it. Yet most of us fall prey to it. We either undervalue work, resenting it as simply a job, or we overvalue it as an identity-defining career. Michael Naughton, drawing on his background in both business and theology, proposes that the key to finding balance is another important human activity: leisure. In light of leisure—not mere amusement, but time for family, silence, prayer, and above all, worship—work becomes a space where men and women can find deep fulfilment. Naughton provides real-world examples of how businesses can promote authentic human flourishment and innovation through practices and policies that support leisure. In Getting Work Right Michael Naughton will change how you work—and rest.


Labour and Leisure in the Soviet Union

Labour and Leisure in the Soviet Union

Author: William Moskoff

Publisher:

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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Social research study on relationships between labour shortage, individual value systems and employees attitudes towards leisure in the USSR - examines household time budget structure, the labour force participation of woman workers, retired workers, pupils and students, the use of temporary employment and overtime work, etc.; comments on paid leave policy and on failures of the service sector to provide consumer goods and appliances; considers leisure activities of the rural population. References.


Leisure and Feminist Theory

Leisure and Feminist Theory

Author: Betsy Wearing

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1998-12-04

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0857026003

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Wide-ranging and challenging, this book offers a host of new insights into how leisure theory has handled the question of gender difference and inequality. Providing a critical introduction to the leading positions in leisure theory, Betsy Wearing guides the reader through their strengths and weaknesses from a feminist perspective. This book draws attention to the various leisure experiences that women encounter and construct in their everyday lives and the meanings that these experiences have for them. Her perspective takes into account such poststructuralist ideas as multiple subjectivities of women and multiple femininities; the possibilities of resistance to male dominance in leisure; the potential through leisure of rewriting masculine and feminine scripts; and leisure as a site of struggle to challenge hegemonic masculinity.


Why Work?

Why Work?

Author: Freedom Press

Publisher: PM Press

Published: 2018-11-01

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1629635928

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Why Work? is a provocative collection of essays and illustrations by writers and artists from the nineteenth century through to today, dissecting “work,” its form under capitalism, and the possibilities for an alternative society. It asks: Why do some of us still work until we drop in an age of vast automated production, while others starve for lack of work? Where is the leisure society that was promised? Edited by Freedom Press, this collection includes contributions from luminaries of the past such as William Morris and Bertrand Russell, contemporary theorists such as David Graeber and Juliet Schor, and illustrated examinations of workplace potentials and pitfalls from Clifford Harper and Prole.info.


Decentring Leisure

Decentring Leisure

Author: Chris Rojek

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1995-03-08

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780803988132

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This book explores the meaning of leisure in the context of key social formations of our time. Chris Rojek brings together the insights of feminsim, Marxism, Weber, Elias, Simmel, Nietzsche and Baudrillard to produce a survey - and rethinking - of leisure theory. At the same time he presents a radical critique of the traditional 'centring' of leisure, on 'escape', 'freedom' and 'choice'. Revealing how leisure practices have responded to living in a risk society, he shows that 'free' time becomes something very different when simulation and nostalgia lie at the heart of everyday life.


Leisure

Leisure

Author: Josef Pieper

Publisher: Ignatius Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1586172565

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One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century, Joseph Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial than it was when it first appeared fifty years ago. Pieper shows that Greeks understood and valued leisure, as did the medieval Europeans. He points out that religion can be born only in leisure. Leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. He maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our cultureCand ourselves. These astonishing essays contradict all our pragmatic and puritanical conceptions about labor and leisure; Joseph Pieper demolishes the twentieth-century cult of Awork as he predicts its destructive consequences.


Eight Hours for What We Will

Eight Hours for What We Will

Author: Roy Rosenzweig

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521313971

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Focusing on the city of Worcester, Massachusetts the author takes the reader to the saloons, the amusement parks, and the movie houses where American industrial workers spent their leisure hours, to explore the nature of working-class culture and class relations during this era.


Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society?

Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society?

Author: A. J. Veal

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780367519933

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This critical and empirically-rich book documents and analyses the rise and fall of the leisure society idea, examines its role in the study of leisure, and assesses its relevance to the challenges facing global society in the 21st Century.