The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain

Transcription

1 The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain

2 Titles in the Crisis Points series Published The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain John Clarke and Chas Critcher Schooling the Smash Street Kids Paul Corrigan Forthcoming The Battle for Television Graham Murdock

3 The Devil Makes Work Leisure in Capitalist Britain John Clarke and Chas Critcher pal grave

4 * John Clarke and Chas Critther 1985 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or In accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying Issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Totten ham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act In relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be Identified as the authors of this work In accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act Published by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Baslngstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. N.Y Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE ls the new global academic Imprint of St Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book Is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book Is available from the British Library OS Transferred to digital printing 2005

5 Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the area of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism. a socialist culture- already fully formed- might be simply "expressed". But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why popular culture matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it.' (Stuart Hall, 'Notes on de constructing the popular', in Ralph Samuel (ed. ), People's History and Socialist Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 239.) 'And what I'd say is simply this. I don't believe that theories about socio-cultural reproduction and social class can in fact be reconciled with the evidence about the diversity of leisure behaviour. Now if you think it can achieve the reconciliation, then do it. And I don't believe you can.' (Kenneth Roberts, in Alan Tomlinson (ed.), Leisure and Social Control, Brighton Polytechnic p. 66.)

6 Contents l 2 Preface Idle hands Trouble in paradise? Preparing for leisure Leisure as work The price of pleasure Breaking the mould: a brief encounter with the sociology of leisure Stanley Parker Occupational hazards A worked-out theme Michael Young and Peter Willmott Keeping it in the family Homing in on leisure The onward march of history Robert and Rhona Rapoport Peddling the life cycle The generation game Kenneth Roberts A singular case of pluralism Missing links Where do we go from here? vii Xl l

7 viii Contents 3 Passing the time away: the historical development of leisure A brief case for history The 1800s: 'Merrie England' The 1840s: 'hard times' The 1880s: 'Coronation Streets' The shape of things to come Separate spheres The 1920s: 'love on the dole' Something old, something new Keeping spirits high It's still the same old story The 1960s: 'You've never had it so good' Fings ain't wot they used to be Private lives Talking 'bout my generation Young, gifted and black Profit and loss The good old days? End of Part 1: a pause for reflection We sell everything- the mixed economy of leisure Market well 'Last orders please' 'A fine and private place?' Subsidising pleasure Making a mass of things 'Going too far' The state of play Licensed leisure Disorderly conduct Home and away Learning to enjoy ourselves 'Healthy minds' 'Healthy bodies'

8 Contents ix 5 6 The new 'people's palace'? The nation at play Rolling back the state Divided we play: leisure and social divisions In a class of its own 'Will the real working class please stand up for itself?' Knowing your place Leisure through the ages Growing pains Boys will be boys Engendered leisure May the best man win Coming home to roost Getting away from it all High days and holidays 'You don't know what you're missing' The social division of leisure Future imperfect: leisure and the post-industrial society Are we being served? An endangered species? A terminal case? A sense of direction? End of Part II Conclusion The sociological imagination The long revolution Women's oppression today Leisure, culture and hegemony

9 x Contents Epilogue It's a free country 'Entertaining programmes' 'Let's have a party' 'Time gentlemen, please' Author Index Subject Index

10 Preface It has taken us a long time to write this book about leisure, not least because it has had to be written in our spare time - of which we have too little. We begin with this point not to gain sympathy, for there are too many people experiencing a lack of work to justify complaints from those who feel they do too much. We begin here because, at a personal level, this point illustrates some of the paradoxes of leisure. Writing this book was voluntarily undertaken. and to make room for it, other pleasures were foregone. If the writing of it appeared to be leisurely, not least to our long-suffering publishers. it certainly felt like hard work to us. The psychological meaning of the work-leisure couplet for the individual has become one focus of the academic study of leisure, although it has often been formulated in ways which make our experiences of leisure unrecognisable. The fact that leisure is a common. everyday experience for most people makes it more, rather than less difficult to analyse. This has not, however, prevented its rapid growth as an area of academic study. It is not possible to write about leisure without being aware of the ways in which 'leisure' already means something. Everyone has some experience of using free time. Leisure is the subject of political discussion, and has a place in the political culture of Britain. Leisure is a source of work for a growing number of leisure administrators and managers who have developed 'professional' analyses of what leisure means and how it can best be organised. Leisure is also the focus of academic analysis- it forms one of the subject areas of the different social sciences. Sociologxi

11 xii Preface ists, psychologists, economists, geographers and historians have addressed the problems of what people do in leisure and what those activities mean. Because leisure is already colonised by these different approaches, because it is already made to 'mean something', we have had to address our book to a consideration of those meanings. Our relationship to these existing definitions is a critical one. Consequently, part of the task of this book is to examine the political, professional and academic definitions of leisure - to interrogate their assumptions about leisure, to question the conclusions which they offer in order to present our own. We make no apologies for this approach, which organises the first two chapters of this book. We do not believe that meanings are all equal, that all views are equally valid, and we have spent some time trying to argue that the consequences of errors, distortions and misunderstandings need to be highlighted. In trying to shift the analysis of leisure we have insisted that leisure is not, and cannot be analysed as, a self-contained sphere of life, cut off from other aspects of British social organisation. We have drawn on historical studies which illuminate how the current status and organisation of leisure has come about. and have stressed the conflicts and competing interests that are at stake in the creation of leisure. In part, this is because we fear that social sciences, and leisure studies in particular, have played little attention to the historical development of the object with which they deal. The professional segregation of history and social sciences (you study the past, we'll study the present) involves an attempt to divide the subject-matter - society and its processes - which is profoundly unsatisfactory. These, then, are the concerns of the first part (Chapters 1, 2 and 3) of this book. By engaging with already existing definitions of leisure, and by considering how leisure as an aspect of social organisation has developed in Britain, we hope to establish the foundations for a different way of examining leisure in contemporary Britain. In the second part (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) we have tried to put this different approach to work. One central point of this difference is our commitment to moving the main focus of attention from the study of what people do in leisure to the conditions under which leisure is experienced. There is an expanding 'leisure industry',

12 Preface xiii alongside the provisions of the state, which provide an institutional framework within which leisure choices take place. We have tried to offer an account of leisure which considers the way in which social groups - differently positioned in the social structure of British capitalism - encounter these institutions of leisure, and create leisure activities. To garble a famous quotation from Marxpeople make leisure, but not under circumstances of their own choosing. This book is an attempt to understand that process- the interaction of constraint and creation - and to examine its social and political consequences for British society. It is worth adding a few words about what this book is not. It is not a synthesis of all that is known about leisure in modern Britain. We are not specialists in the leisure studies field, nor even accredited' historians or sociologists. Our intellectual biographies were shaped in the development of cultural studies, which is more concerned with making connections across academic specialisms than with the pursuit of particular disciplinary interests. Leisure is an important topic in its own right, but we have less interest in what is 'known' about leisure than in what the study of leisure can tell us about the nature of contemporary society. However, this book is not a new 'theory of leisure'. It does not attempt to finally lay to rest all those complex definitional questions about what is or is not leisure. We do not believe that these questions can be solved by ever more elaborate analytical juggling. Rather they have to be seen as part of the complex patterns within which leisure is organised and lived in British society. Nor, finally, is this book an original study of leisure, it does not contain new factual evidence about how particular individuals or groups spend their leisure time. We have attempted to draw leisure out of its artificial social and academic segregation - to argue against its status as a separate sphere, and to connect it to the social and political processes and structures of British capitalism. Our interest, then, is not really in 'leisure' itself, it is in what leisure can tell us about the development, structure and organisation of the whole society. It is our view that the study of leisure for its own sake (like any other aspect of the society) is an irrelevancy. The purpose of studying any particular element of the social order is to connect- to understand the ways in which one particular element is shaped by other structures and ways in which that one area affects and contributes to the development of the rest.

13 xiv Preface We hope that the intellectual debt which we owe to our friends and colleagues from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies is obvious in what follows. Beyond that, we are also grateful to Susan Boyd-Bowman, Alan Clarke, Elaine Wade and Garry Whannel for their critical reading of drafts of this book, without which it would have been much worse than it is. Like most men, our work depends heavily upon the labour of women. Our thanks are due to Margaret Parker and Susan Boyd-Bowman for both tolerating our obsession and encouraging us to see it through to a conclusion, and to the many secretaries at the Open University and Sheffield City Polytechnic whose efforts are condensed in the final product. A note on further reading We have resisted the conventional practice of including lengthy footnotes and constant indications of our sources in writing this book. We hope, by this means, to have made the structure of our argument clearer and more immediately readable. Instead, each chapter is followed by suggestions for further reading in which we have identified studies on which we have drawn, and books in which particular points of our argument can be usefully followed up or taken further. Acknowledgement We are grateful to the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office for permission to reproduce the material on pages