Introduction: Unforbidden Fruit: From Leisure to Pleasure

Abstract

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.

Leisure’s role in people’s lives is not purely economic. Leisure has important social, psychological and cultural dimensions. As leisure’s share of the economy grows, so does its role in people’s everyday lives. So the balance tilts from life being work-and production-centred to becoming leisure- or consumption-centred Roberts (2004: 2).