Overturning the Modernist Predictions: Recent Trends in Work and Leisure in the OECD

Abstract

The optimistic predictions of social scientists about the coming of a leisured future are increasingly being discredited (Gershuny, 2000; Robinson, 1986; Robinson and Godbey, 1999; Juster and Stafford, 1985, 1991). As early as the 1960s, the optimists expected that by the twenty-first century, citizens of the advanced industrialized nations would be living lives of leisure, perhaps suffering from a ‘crisis of leisure time’, brought on by boredom and a failure to know how to spend time. But instead of boredom, time poverty and high levels of daily life stress appear to be widespread. (On the ‘crisis of leisure time’, see Schor, 1992; on time pressure, see Robinson and Godbey, 1999, and Galinsky et al. 2001.) The trends in the subjective measures are readily explainable by developments in actual hours of work, and in particular a break from earlier patterns of rapid decline in work time. For example, in the OECD, over the last 20 years average hours per working age person fell a meagre 2 per cent, not per year, but for the entire two decades. Hours per employee have fallen by 7 per cent. This is a far cry from the 18 per cent decline over the period 1950–80, the experience that presumably led to such optimistic longterm predictions about declining hours of work and rising leisure time. The experience of the United States, where both predictions and explanations of the ‘growth of leisure time’ were pervasive, is an even more cautionary tale for the teleological, modernist perspective. According to internationally comparative sources, working hours per employee rose 3 per cent in the period 1980–2000, and a whopping 16 per cent per working-age person.