The Labour of Leisure

The Labour of Leisure PDF Author: Chris Rojek
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1412945534
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
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.

The Labour of Leisure

The Labour of Leisure PDF Author: Chris Rojek
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1412945534
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 PDF Author: Stephen D. Rosenberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979516
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
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.

Work and Leisure

Work and Leisure PDF Author: John Trevor Haworth
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415250573
Category : Labor
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Examines the profound transformations in the nature and organization of work that are occurring worldwide, with potentially far reaching social and economic consequences.

Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society?

Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society? PDF Author: A. J. Veal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351972022
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The idea of a ‘leisure society’ was in its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was predicted that the pattern of falling working hours which had been experienced in Western societies in the first half of the twentieth century would continue indefinitely. The leisure society has clearly not been realised. On the contrary: contemporary industrial societies seem to be characterised by a shortage of time, experienced as ‘time squeeze’ and stress. The leisure society idea can be seen as the modern version of the age-old dream of a ‘life of ease and plenty’. This analytically and empirically rich book traces the idea in history, through biblical, classical Greek, medieval and nineteenth century utopian writings and into twentieth century concerns with dystopia and the impact of rapid technological change. The ‘leisure society’ concept turns out to have been an elusive and short-lived phenomenon. For a variety of reasons, the trend towards shorter working hours ran out of steam in the last quarter of the twentieth century. However, while leisure scholars have deserted the topic, a diverse range of activists, including environmentalists, economists and feminists, continue to make the case for reducing working hours. Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society? concludes that the on-going ‘struggle for time’ should be supported, for the sake of human health and well-being and for the sake of the planet. This is a valuable resource for students and academics in the fields of leisure studies, cultural studies, history, economics, sociology and political science.

Leisure for Living

Leisure for Living PDF Author: The Labour Party
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Why Work?

Why Work? PDF Author: Freedom Press
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629635928
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
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.

Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1

Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 PDF Author: Henri Lefebvre
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844671917
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society. Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, the Critique was a philosophical inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France and is considered to be the founding text of all that we know as cultural studies, as well as a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. A work of enormous range and subtlety, Lefebvre takes as his starting-point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet one which remains the only source of resistance and change. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

The Anatomy of Work

The Anatomy of Work PDF Author: Georges Friedmann
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412835886
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The consequences of narrow work specialization are critical not only for workers and employers but for civilization as a whole. In The Anatomy of Work, George Friedmann elucidates the large and small questions raised by this evolutionary moment in human labor and development. Donald C. King's introduction to this new edition discusses the impact of Friedmann's work on later researchers and assesses its relative strengths and weaknesses in forecasting future trends, particularly in regard to automation. This is pioneering study on how work is organic to human identity.

Tourism and Leisure Mobilities

Tourism and Leisure Mobilities PDF Author: Jillian Rickly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317415817
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
This book reframes tourism, as well as leisure, within mobilities studies to challenge the limitations that dichotomous understandings of home/away, work/leisure, and host/guest bring. A mobilities approach to tourism and leisure encourages us to think beyond the mobilities of tourists to ways in which tourism and leisure experiences bring other mobilities into sync, or disorder, and as a result re-conceptualizes social theory. The proposed anthology stretches across academic disciplines and fields of study to illustrate the advantages of multi-disciplinary conversation and, in so doing, it challenges how we approach studies of movement-based phenomena and the concept of scale. Part One examines the ways in which mobility informs and is informed by leisure, from everyday practices to leisure-inspired mobile lifestyles. Part Two investigates individuals and communities that become entrepreneurial in the face of changing tourism contexts and reflects on the performance of work through multiple mobilities. Part Three turns to issues of development, with attention to the cultural politics that frame development encounters in the context of tourism. The varied ways that people move into and out of development projects is mediated by geopolitical discourses hat can both challenge and perpetuate geographic imaginations of tourism destinations.

Eight Hours for What We Will

Eight Hours for What We Will PDF Author: Roy Rosenzweig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521313971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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.