A Social Thesis of Leisure

Abstract

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.