Leisure Activities in Context by Robert A. Stebbins

Author:Robert A. Stebbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2016-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

6

Temporal Context

The ways we use time in our lives wind up becoming a distinctive part of our personal existence. That is, each activity in the domains of leisure, work, and non-work obligation has its own temporal space within which that activity is undertaken. Some of these activities are institutionalized and, consequently, so is the physical and temporal space used to engage in them. For example, parents routinely take their child to play in a park for approximately a half-hour each session; community actors gather three days a week in their theater to prepare the next play to be performed; some teenagers go every weekend to the beach to tan and meet friends. Nevertheless, other activities, as noted in Chapter 2 with napping and eating lunch, have failed for whatever reason to become institutionalized, at least to this point in their history.

Research in leisure studies reflects in a crude way this pattern of institutionalized/noninstitutionalized use of time according to the activity being pursued. Accordingly, the main subjects of this chapter are general participatory time use (as studied in time-use research) and discretionary participatory time use (as studied in the SLP). General participatory time use refers to patterns of activity participation, a main component of any social institution. By contrast, discretionary time is subjective; it revolves around how individuals intend to allocate and manage their time for participation in the leisure activities of interest to them. Some discretionary-time allocations enable institutionalized activities (e.g., committing time to spending weekends at the beach), whereas other such allocations enable noninstitutionalized activities (e.g., committing time to napping). Each type fits in its own way in the micro-meso-macro context that frames leisure.

Leisure as Free Time

So far, we have been looking at leisure as free time, but framed in a special definition of this concept. In the SLP free time consists of the minutes, hours, days, and so on not spent meeting disagreeable obligations, or at least not meeting the most constraining of them. More particularly, we saw in Chapter 1 that serious and project-based leisure sometimes have some disagreeable obligations, but they are neither odious nor frequent enough to force the participant to abandon the activity in question. We might refer to this aspect of leisure as “time virtually free of disagreeable obligation.” However, the locution is clumsy. Thus, I prefer to write about “free time,” as just more clearly defined, with the hope that conventional definitions of it will not overwhelm this special meaning.

Nevertheless, most scholars interested in the temporal approach see leisure time much more simplistically: it is time not spent making a living, or work versus leisure. This conceptualization, however, fails to recognize the time given to nonwork obligations as well as that given to devotee work (see Chapter 1). Time-use studies, which examine the proportions of time spent at leisure vis-à-vis work, exemplify well this simplistic temporal definition of leisure (e.g., Cushman, Veal, & Zuzanek, 2005; Robinson & Godbey, 1997). Variations in the proportion of time spent at work (all types) and away

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