Stephen Wagg

Introduction: Unforbidden Fruit: From Leisure to Pleasure

Ken Roberts has consistently argued1 that the growth of leisure is an important feature of modern industrial societies. Modernity is made up of four distinctive facets-the economic, the social, the political and the cultural. Such formations have their own history, institutional trajectory and momentum. Each has a separate domain: the economic entails material distribution, price mechanisms, supply and demand in markets; the social is organised around face-to-face relations in families, neighbourhoods and local communities; politics is about the nature of authority and the distribution of power and finally; culture concerns communication and material and intellectual signification. Some academic traditions and disciplines have focused on one or other of these spheres. Indeed, one would hardly expect the same theoretical debates and issues to shape the different disciplines of economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Equally, each discipline has developed its paradigms, exemplars of good research methodology and distinctive techniques of framing and collecting data. In turn, each has been drawn into separate debates about policy and decision-making, so as to inform managerial issues of intervention and control. Therefore, the roots of each discipline have been shaped in some way by their own technical legacies-whether it is Keynesian economics, social engineering inside the welfare state or state-socialist collectivism, participation in the planning process or postcolonial anthropological narratives.

An introduction to leisure studies : principles and practice

Defining Leisure and Leisure Studies Studying and Measuring Leisure Time, History and Leisure Caution - Children at Play Growing Up and Getting Out Staying in and Settling Down Divided Leisure: Leisure and Social Class Turning Points Home Alone: Demography and Ageing Leisure and the Future

Afterword: Closing Reflections on the New Politics of Leisure and Pleasure

When this book was first proposed, a number of reviewers commented on its viability. It was interesting, said one, ‘but a lot of what they talk about isn’t political’. This was mistaken, on two counts, both of which we hope are clear from reading the book. First, leisure has always been political. Leisure time had to be fought for, in a time of unremitting toil, and then defended. Successive factory and employment acts across a range of coun tries created space within the working week variously for men, women and children but a succession of legislative interventions governed what people, particularly the working class, could do with their leisure time — what they could see or read, what they might ingest or otherwise do with their bodies, whether or not they could place a bet, where they might walk, what they might hear a comedian say from the stage, and so on. In essence, as this book shows, this remains the case — albeit in ways that are undeniably complex. Secondly, the word ‘politics’ has, since the 1960s, acquired a diverse set of meanings which extends far beyond the doings of professional politicians. Indeed, one can draw a useful distinction between a narrow (P1) and broader definitions of politics (P2). In the UK, Politics 1 refers to what happens in the Westminster village, what is discussed daily in the politics pages of the press, during weekly political programmes on the television and so. Politics 2 refers more broadly to all social relations underpinned by the exercise of power and constraint.