A response to ‘Leisure, lifestyle and status: a pluralist framework for analysis’ (original) (raw)

Tony Veal (Leisure Studies (1989) p. 141) rightly identifies the need to relate leisure to its wider social context, and goes on to evaluate the failings of what he calls 'the Marxist' and 'the pluralist' perspectives in attempting to do this. Sadly, he ignores totally the progress which has been made by feminist researchers and writers in successfully locating women's leisure, gender relations and patriarchal society in the social contexts in which they have developed. Liz Stanley (1989) has criticized much of leisure studies for imposing, on people's behaviour, researcher-defined categories of what constitutes 'leisure', and for stripping even individually defined experiences of their particular personal context, adding them to responses by other people and producing generalizations about them. While Stanley argues for the need to 'put context back in', and look at people's lives 'in the round', Veal appears to be suggesting that it is the categories, or aggregations, which leisure researchers have got wrong. Veal is unhappy with the problematic aspects of 'the Marxist' explanations of the work-leisure relationship, especially where he sees class and class conflict failing to explain social change. And yet he seems to be arguing for a new set of stereotypical categories, based on unquestioned assumptions regarding a market economy, which fail themselves to translate to individual experiences. A more fundamental criticism of his work is that, in spite of his claims for a 'pluralist' approach, it is largely gender-blind, and clearly ignores the progress made by feminist researchers in addressing the problem of situating leisure in its lived context. Doubts about the efficacy of Veal's own pluralism are highlighted by his apparently naive and underdeveloped view of what he calls 'the Marxist view of society and leisure'. It seems hardly accurate to describe the numerous, complexly developed neo-Marxist analyses as having a singular view on any phenomenon. "The" Marxist view of society is described as being situated within 'its basis of class division and conflict'. But this limited perspective ignores the ways in which the relations of production, with all their attendant complexities, divisions and contradictory locations under advanced capitalism, have been addressed by, for example, Braverman (1974), dealing with the complex changes in class relations; or the Poulantzas (1978)/Olin Wright (1978) debate concerning the need to understand class analysis through the criteria of economic, political and ideological categorization. Veal seems to be confining his critique of 'the Marxist' perspective to