Leisure as a Primary Institution (original) (raw)
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5-CONCEPTIONS of Leisure : A Historical Approach on Societies
2013
Introduction Leisure has been the focus of countless studies on contemporary society. This is due mostly to the strong correlation among leisure activities and quality of life and the social development of individuals. Although it is impossible to precisely foresee the starting point of concerning about leisure activities, it is known that those have accompanied man ever since the beginning of humankind. Although leisure has been the focus of studies in different areas, it should be studied from the precept that man is a biophysicosocial being, and his biological, psychological and sociological characteristics cannot be dissociated. An investigation concerning leisure can reveal several characteristics that show the social and cultural context of a society. Eventually leisure is conceived as a synonym of free time, nevertheless, such proposition is not true. Leisure activities are practiced during free time, but free time is not completely fulfilled with activities characterized as ...
Recreation and leisure in modern society
Recreation and leisure in modern society., 1971
In part 1, The recreation movement today, a detailed survey is given of the recreational facilities in the USA, whether organized by governmental, voluntary, private or commercial institutions. In part 2, The history of recreation and leisure, recreation is outlined in ...
The Concept of Leisure as Culture-dependent–Between Tradition and Modernity
Journal of Cultural and Religious Studies, 2014
The article deals with the concept of leisure in Israel in terms of time, activity, state of mind, and Jewish values. The purpose of the study is to examine changes in how leisure is conceived in Judaism and the differences in the secular and religious conception of leisure, and the special relationship between leisure, work, and religious obligations and tradition. The study reviews the factors that have shaped the conception of leisure and its developments over time in Jewish religious society in general and in Israel in particular, which is a country with cultural foundations in both tradition and modernity, and one that strives to strike a balance between its multiple commitments to its religious roots and its modern democratic nature. The study proceeds to discuss the implications of such conceptions and developments for the Israeli education system. The article may have practical implications for imparting leisure behaviors, an educational challenge involving people's attitude to leisure.
Reinforcement of the Leisure Culture
This paper examines major trends in leisure in an attempt to trace some possible future developments in the consumption and production of leisure in general, and tourism in particular. The first part of the analysis concentrates on the time dimension, examining the changing relationship between work and leisure time in the developed world. This is followed by an analysis of the social consequences of the ‘growth’ of leisure, particularly in terms of the growing imbalance in the distribution of work and leisure time. The future implications of this imbalance are then considered, particularly in terms of its potential influence on tourism consumption.
Leisure and culture – the (in)visible link in modern societies
World Leisure Journal, 2011
Leisure and culture Á the (in)visible link in modern societies Overview: culture and creative leisure Leisure often evokes ideas synonymous with different modes of easy living: entertainment, distraction, sports and relaxation, including tourism. As the antithesis of labour, leisure is thus often perceived as a time of luxury, idleness and inefficiency. But, although powerful, this view that free time is time lost may not be accurate. Many thinkers have insisted on the idea that leisure, authentic leisure, is time dedicated to developing one's capacities, a time of learning and cultivation. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, ''Leisure is time for doing something useful'' (Franklin, 1758). A life dedicated solely to work would not be a decent human life Á this is implicit in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, in its Article 28, that ''Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits'' (United Nations, 1948). In terms of human development, we could say that our bodies need rest, but that our minds need creative leisure. In terms of economic development also, equating leisure with inefficiency is questionable. Economic success is often associated with striking the right balance in the division of labour, that is production; but consumption mostly happens when people are not working, that is when they participate in the life of their cultures. In that, leisure can be credited with giving a boost to creativity, innovation and related synergies. Thus, contrary to commonly held views, leisure is a special feature of culture, be it individualised or organised. As culture determines our lifestyles, our consumption and our production patterns, we need to realise that the culture of creative leisure includes tourism, travel and vacation, fashion and dressing, eating, epicurean pleasures and hospitality, sports, reading, museums and exhibitions, media and the visual arts, concerts, opera and music. Building on this, we can give a quick account of how the leisure-culture link positively relates to different approaches to development.
Becoming Sociological: A Brief Historical Review of Leisure in the Social Survey 1880–1939
International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure
Adopting the social survey as an analytical tool, this paper explores the origins of a sociology of leisure. Modern social understandings of leisure were formed in the expansion of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century in parallel with the growth of systematic and scientifically informed social work. In both Great Britain and the United States of America the survey became a widely adopted method of gathering data to inform social work. Through advances in social work and the settlement movement's association with universities an embryonic sociology of leisure had emerged by 1914. After the First World War leisure became a field of policy discourse in postwar reconstruction and the subject of large scale surveys in both countries. These surveys give insight to new and changing sociological understandings of leisure which provided the foundations for the formal recognition of leisure as a sociological field in the late twentieth century.
2021
A paradigm shift to working to protect the leisure of people in later life from the machinery of growth and consumption is needed. Recognition of the rational instrumental drivers behind active ageing is overdue, research in this area could be about enhancing quality of life, instead it focuses on how to make lives cost less. This book offers a modest development in Leisure Constraints Theory, developing understanding of the interaction of interpersonal and structural constraints in later leisure lives, thus troubling ideas of separate levels of constraints. The Mass Observation Archive offers additional voices for the study of leisure in the context of everyday life. It supported this study of later life leisure to see beyond the noisy concepts of death and disability and ‘age induced constraints’ that direct much leisure in later life research.
Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory
1999
Leisure studies is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be shaken to get it working once again, and if that does not do the trick, opened up and disassembled, its gears, springs, sprockets and levers cleaned, oiled, and its 'movement'the clock's condition embodied in its 'tick-tock' soundmade to run in an even balanced beat. Unlike clockmenders, scholars overhaul subject fields by leaving parts behind that after decades of use have become unnecessary to their workings, replacing these with new ones. They cannot afford to be sentimental when it comes to replacing old parts; if getting the clock back 'in beat' is the objective, then it is best to replace what no longer works. This gives us the impression that things in our subject field change while ostensibly remaining the sameeven if this is not really the case. Just over two decades ago, Chris Rojek published Decentring Leisure, the fruit of his attempt to overhaul leisure studies. This book changed our understanding of leisure forever. Like clockmending, it is a study that draws parallels with deconstructionism. This term is derived from the work of Jacques Derrida, a philosopher with a uniquely sharpened ability for remedying subject fields that have lost their beat. If the job of the clock-mender is to disassemble the 'movement' in a clock, work on it, and then put it all back together again, the job of deconstructionism is to disassemble and reassemble subject fields; that is, take them apart, to not only demonstrate how they are necessarily contingent to time and place, but also to reveal the gaps and absences they render unintelligible. Deconstructionism works with the assumption that all subject fields contain hidden and unexpected meanings, which often signify points of resistance. In this regard its central aim is to show how subject fields do not come up to scratch under their own terms of reference. A successful deconstruction not only changes a subject field, but it also conceives new ways of seeing. Rojek's study is a deconstruction of leisure studies in the sense that not only does it call for a critique of taken for granted assumptions made about leisure, but it also prompts changes in our perceptions about the potential and the limits of leisure studies. Leisure studies after Decentring Leisure was supposed to be business as usual and a return to normality but in reality it was just the opposite. It is the norm in leisure studies to adapt Tolstoy's famous sentence about families and say that good books tend to be good in the same ways. Certainly, if you encounter something that is radically different you are liable to suspect, and perhaps to go on suspecting, that it is different because it is not good. Tolstoy also wrote that the greatest threat to life is habit. Habit, he argued, destroys everything around us. By familiarizing us to the point that we no longer really see anymore, habit destroys our critical faculties. In his important book Thinking Sociologically (1990) the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued that the cure for habit is defamiliarization. In opening up leisure studies to new and previously unanticipated possibilities Decentring Leisure restores leisure studies for us, by remedying the blindness, so that we come to see what it is that is important about leisure in the contemporary world. In so doing it brings the furniture of the critical imagination back into focus. The idea of 'decentring' leisure not only assumes that leisure studies is a discursive formation that exists independently of individual leisure scholars, but also that it should go about its day-today business by undermining the significance of its own unifying centre