Robert A. Stebbins

Serious Leisure A Conceptual Statement

Many social scientists believe the future will offer significantly fewer opportunities for most adults to gain and maintain a job in the way they are used to doing today. A smaller number of jobs and a substantially reduced number of work hours are in store for many employees in the postindustrial society. Whether or not their jobs ever provided such things, they will increasingly be searching the world of leisure for ways to express their abilities, fulfill their potential, and identify themselves as unique human beings. Serious leisure is a main route open to people with these goals. Its three types—amateurism, hobbyist pursuits, and career volunteering—are defined, described, and interrelated. They are contrasted throughout with unserious or casual leisure, on the one hand, and work, on the other. The intermediate position of serious leisure between these two extremes relegates its current participants to the status of marginal men and women of leisure.

Casual leisure: a conceptual statement

Since 1982, the year the serious leisure perspective was first set out, the concept of casual leisure has served mostly as a foil for sharpening understanding of that framework. Yet casual leisure is a distinctive activity in itself and an important part of the contemporary leisure scene, suggesting that it, too, should be conceptually elaborated just as serious leisure was earlier. Thus the principal goal of this article is to present a theoretical statement defining casual leisure as a separate field demarcated by its own special properties. To this end, a definition of casual leisure is presented after which its six types are described. This is followed by a section on hedonism and other rewards and one on deviant leisure, both casual and serious.

Volunteering: A Serious Leisure Perspective:

A handful of observers have suggested that volunteering can be defined and described as a leisure activity. Extending this reasoning, it is argued that many kinds of volunteering, because they foster the acquisition and expression of a combination of special skills, knowledge, and experience, can be looked on as serious leisure. The serious leisure perspective not only defines and explains volunteers and volunteering as self-interested leisure but also opens the way to a more comprehensive theoretical statement of leisure volunteering than was heretofore available. In this artick, the author explores the leisure components of all volunteering to learn where the serious leisure model applies. Distinctions are drawn between types of volunteering: career and casual, formal and informal, and occupational and nonoccupational. The perspective fails to fit each type equally well. It fits best the types of volunteering classifiable as formal and nonoccupational, types in which wlunteers normally find substantial leisure careers.

Cultural tourism as serious leisure

Mather, E. C. 1972 The American Great Plains. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62~237-257. Meinig, D.W. 1979 Reading the Landscape in the Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. New York: Oxford University Press. Pinder, D. 1991 The Netherlands: Tourist Development in a Crowded Society. In Tourism and Economic Development, Western European Experiences, A. Williams and G. Shaw. eds. London: Belhaven Press. Wallach, B. ’ 1992 Oklahoma When the Jokes Wear Thin. Focus 42(4):32-37.

Development of the serious leisure inventory and measure.

In this investigation, the serious leisure inventory and measure (SLIM) was developed from convenience and target samples. The multidimensional framework of serious leisure contains six qualities from which 18 operations were employed. With the use of a q-sort, an expert panel, and confirmatory factor analysis, the 72 item SLIM demonstrated acceptable fit, reliability and equivalence across samples. Mean differences and correlation patterns found between samples demonstrated preliminary evidence for the predictive ability of the new measure. The SLIM short form (54 items) demonstrated good model fit and construct validity. Future replications are needed to adequately address the psychometric complexities of the SLIM within the network of interrelated leisure constructs.

Volunteering as leisure/leisure as volunteering: an international assessment.

Volunteering as Heritage, Volunteering in Heritage Adopting Sustainable Ethics: Voluntary Practice amongst Event Organizers Paths to Volunteer Commitment: Lessons from the Sydney Olympic Games Understanding parks and recreation volunteers Defining field characteristics of museums and art museums: An Australian Perspective Volunteering in the Canadian context: Identity, civic participation, and the politics of participation in serious leisure Managing Volunteers in Different Settings: Membership and Program Management Pressures on Volunteers in the U.K. Examining best practice in volunteer tourism Fostering Human Resources in the Leisure Field: Serious Leisure and the Potential Role of Volunteers, a Proposal for Developing Countries Leisure Volunteering: Future Research and Policy

The costs and benefits of hedonism: some consequences of taking casual leisure seriously

Casual leisure has been defined as immediately, intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it (Stebbins, 1997). Among its types are play (including dabbling), relaxation (e.g., sitting, napping, strolling), passive entertainment (e.g., TV, books, recorded music), active entertainment (e.g., games of chance, party games), sociable conversation, and sensory stimulation (e.g., sex, eating, drinking, sight seeing) and casual, or non-career, volunteering. It is considerably less substantial and offers no career of the sort described elsewhere for its counterpart, serious leisure (Stebbins, 1992). Casual leisure can also be defined residually as all leisure not classifiable as amateur, hobbyist, or career volunteering. This brief review of the types of casual leisure reveals that they share at least one central property: all are hedonic. More precisely, all produce a significant level of pure pleasure, or enjoyment, for those participating in them. In broad, colloquial language, casual leisure could serve as the scientific term for the practice of doing what comes naturally. Yet, paradoxically, this leisure is by no means wholly frivolous, for there are some clear costs and benefits in pursuing it. Moreover, unlike the evanescent hedonic property of casual leisure itself, its costs and benefits are enduring, a property that makes them worthy of extended analysis in their own right. This is the subject of this note

Project‐based leisure: theoretical neglect of a common use of free time

Project‐based leisure is a short‐term, moderately complicated, one‐shot1 or occasional though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time. It requires considerable planning, effort and sometimes skill or knowledge, but is for all that neither serious leisure nor intended to develop into such. Nothing has been written about project‐based leisure per se, even though it appears to be widely pursued wherever people have sufficient free time and resources for it. The object here is to present a conceptual framework detailed enough to focus inquiry, but at the same time open‐ended enough to permit and encourage effective and extensive exploration of this (theoretically) new form. Among those likely to engage in project‐based leisure are people with heavy workloads; homemakers, mothers and fathers with extensive domestic responsibilities; and unemployed individuals who, though looking for work, still have time at the moment for (mostly one‐shot) projects. In the Conclusion, project‐based leisure is discussed as a form of leisure experience.

Choice and Experiential Definitions of Leisure

“Choice” and “freely chosen,” those once sacrosanct de rigueur elements in standard definitions of leisure as experience (Kelly, 1990, p. 21), have lately been the targets of some bad press. Juniu and Henderson (2001, p. 8), for instance, say that such terms cannot be empirically supported since people lack significant choice because “leisure activities are socially structured and shaped by the inequalities of society.” True, experiential definitions of leisure published in recent decades, when they do contain reference to choice, tend to refer to perceived, rather than objective, freedom to choose. The definers recognize that various conditions, many of them unperceived by leisure participants and unspecified by definers, nevertheless constrain choice of leisure activities. Juniu and Henderson argue that these conditions are highly influential and that defining leisure even as perceived choice tends to underplay, if not overlook, their true effect. One logical outcome of their position would be to toss the idea of perceived choice onto the scrap heap of outmoded scientific ideas, thereby sparing ourselves its indirect dismissal of inequality (Juniu and Henderson do not carry their argument this far). However, as Rojek (2000, p. 169) observed, to throw out all considerations of choice is tantamount to throwing out human agency. Without the capacity and the right to choose leisure activities, people acting in this realm of life would be reduced to mere structural and cultural automatons. It is clear, however, that beyond its definitions of experiential leisure, the field of leisure studies recognizes in several ways that individual choice is anything but unfettered. For example, an ever-growing literature describes a great range of leisure constraints, one effect of which is to dampen all enthusiasm for the assumption that leisure entails unqualified free choice. Further, culturally rooted preferences for certain leisure activities acquired through primary and secondary socialization steer so-called choice in subtle directions often unbeknownst to the individual. Then there is boredom in leisure. It springs from having nothing interesting to do, from having woefully little choice among leisure activities. So the time has come, I believe, to declare that words like “choice” and “freely chosen” have indeed outlived their utility as quintessential definers of leisure. They are hedged about with too many qualifications to serve in that capacity. Here is a sample of the qualifications: When, as scientists, we speak of leisure choice, we must

The Amateur: Two Sociological Definitions

As professionalization spreads from one occupation to another, what was once considered play activity in some of these spheres is evolving quietly, inevitably, and unnoticeably into a new form, which is best named modern amateurism. The evolution of modern amateurism has been occurring alongside those occupations where some of the participants in the central activity are able to make a substantial living off it and consequently devote themselves to it as a vocation rather than as an avocation. Though there are possibly others, sport, entertainment, science, and the arts are the major types of occupations where work was once purely play and where modern amateurism is now a parallel development. What has been happening is that those who play at the activity are being overrun in significance, if not in numbers, by professionals and amateurs, a process that seems to unfold as follows: as the opportunity gradually appears in history for full-time pursuit of a skill or activity, we find that those with even an average aptitude for it are able to develop it to a level observably higher than that of the typical