Encyclopedia of SociologyVol._3

amendment to the American Constitution outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The law was passed after decades of lobbying by members of the numerous ‘‘temperance movements,’’ who originated predominantly from fundamentalist Protestant stock, largely from rural areas, and initially from middle-class backgrounds. They were the upholders of the Protestant ethic and valued hard work, self-reliance, and sobriety.

Gusfield argues that as America industrialized during the nineteenth century, the traditional rural settlers experienced a loss of social status compared to the new urban classes and experienced a challenge to their traditional values as urban development introduced increasingly nontraditional immigrants. The temperance movements were a form of status politics designed to reaffirm the prestige of a lifestyle. In the early period (1825–1875) the temperance movements pursued their objective through education, persuasion, and the reform of social conditions that caused excessive drinking. With increasing urbanization and greater European immigration, however, the tactics changed from a policy of socialization to one of coercive reform. The temperance movement became a prohibition movement. And when conservative forces came to dominate the political scene in America following World War I, the value of sobriety was to be achieved coercively—by outlawing booze. In Canada prohibition was approved in a national plebiscite in 1898 and enabled by federal law in 1916. The federal law allowed provinces to implement their own legislation, and all but Quebec outlawed booze, although booze continued to be manufactured for export—usually illicitly to the United States—and was available in Canada by prescription in pharmacies. The Canadian experiment in forced temperance ended in the mid-1920s, and the United States repealed Prohibition in 1933.

Gusfield’s work is important for several reasons. It stressed the idea that legislation was ‘‘sym- bolic’’—that it reflected the values of distinctive social groups and that such groups struggled to have their views insinuated into state legislation. Unlike Marx, who viewed political struggle as class politics, Gusfield stressed ‘‘status’’ politics—the advancement of group respectability or status by seeking to have the group values enshrined in law. Gusfield further implied that laws, particularly in the field of ‘‘victimless crimes,’’ were symbolic in another sense. Instrumentally, prohibition was a

terrible failure. It created huge markets for organized crime, and liquor consumption appears to have proceeded in spite of the law. Hence, the condemnation of insobriety was merely ritualistic (i.e., symbolic) because it did not extirpate drunkenness nor seriously inhibit liquor consumption. Similar arguments have been raised regarding the criminalization of narcotics, prostitution, and por- nography—classical ‘‘victimless crimes,’’ the markets for which thrive on a demand that seems little impeded by legal proscription.

The labeling theories of the 1960s developed the Durkheimian emphasis on the importance of societal reaction to crime (Kitsuse 1962; Lemert 1967) and identified some of the processes by which conduct was successfully labeled as criminal or how it successfully evaded such a label (Becker 1963). Theorists explored the self-fulfilling prophecies of deviant labels and the role of stigma in stabilizing rejected identities (Goffman 1961, 1963). The role of moral entrepreneurs was identified; these Weberian charismatics personified the struggle against evil and expedited legal change by campaigning in the media on the dire consequences of everything from dance halls to crime comics to television violence and marijuana use. Research on societal reaction proliferated. Studies focused on the manufacture of mental illness (Scheff 1999; Szasz 1961, 1970), the creation of witchcraft as a form of labeling (Erikson 1966; Currie 1968), the selective policing and the resulting social construction of delinquents (Cicourel 1968), the political hysteria that underlay political show trials (O’Connor 1972), the role of hysterical stereotypes in the criminalization of narcotics (Cook 1969; Lindesmith 1965), and the mythification of the Hell’s Angels in the popular press (Thompson 1966).

The studies of this period had an insurgent flavor and a barely concealed contempt for legal structures and institutions that drew the line between conformity and deviance in an arbitrary fashion. This was particularly true in the context of legislation outlawing ‘‘victimless crimes.’’ John Stuart Mill had established the ideological pedigree of this critique when he suggested that the democratic state’s sole justification for limiting the freedom of an individual was that the person’s behavior was harmful to others. Legal critics in the 1960s and 1970s objected to the extension of the law to cover vices and immoral activities since the participants in these acts, it was argued, were autonomous

beings who had chosen them voluntarily and so were mischaracterized as either criminals or victims. The argument was that participants were not criminals since their behavior was not harmful to others, and they were not victims since their fates were chosen voluntarily (Schur 1965). Since these activities flowed from free choice in democratic states, how could they have been made unlawful? The answer lay in the fact that conservative forces led by moral entrepreneurs had stampeded democratic governments through wild allegations that the activities in question were so harmful that they struck at the very fabric of society and that however voluntary or self-inflicted the corruption, its control and eradication was justified for the sake of society itself. More recent studies have taken a different turn. Studies of the law-and-order campaigns associated with the resurgency of political conservatism have led sociologists to ask different sorts of questions.

Where Gusfield stressed that legislation might take on a symbolic aspect that reflects the interests of discrete social groups, recent work suggests that laws may mystify the social conditions that give rise to them and consequently may result in social control that is sought for altogether different reasons than the ones identified in the legislation. Taylor (1982) argues that many crime waves, moral panics, and anticrime campaigns are orchestrated in response to basic social conflicts and shifting economic realities and that they function to misdirect our attention away from social contradictions. Three noted British investigations lend support to this view. Hall and colleagues (1978) argue that the moral panic in British papers over street mugging in the early 1970s that resulted in calls for tougher jail sentences and more law and order in England mystified a basic structural shift in employment patterns that occurred during attempts to dismantle the British welfare state. In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a conservative political movement in both America and Great Britain to curb state investments in public welfare—to ‘‘downsize’’ governments and to privatize public institutions. There was a certain amount of conscious political resistance in the labor movement and in socialist political quarters. However, the control culture succeeded in redefining the political resistance into an issue of individual lawlessness that required tougher policing, particularly of those persons who experienced the greatest amount of

social dislocation as a result of fiscal restraint— poor youth, minority groups, and immigrants. The reports of street ‘‘muggings’’ imparted to England the imagery of lawlessness from the American ghetto, creating the impression that there were dramatic increases in street crime, that the crimes were disturbingly ‘‘un-British,’’ and that they were symptomatic of a wider threat to Great Britain’s collective security as witnessed by violence in industrial disputes (fights at picket lines) and misconduct among soccer fans.

Having defined the problem as individual lawlessness, the conservative solution of more law and order, greater investment in policing, longer jail sentences, and so forth, occluded the problem of youthful unemployment that resulted from conservative fiscal policies and that contributed to theft and other petty rackets in the first place. In this interpretation, moral panics have a material foundation in everyday experience, but where the earlier labeling theorists viewed the panics as causes of legal change, the British theorists suggest that panic was the result of social change. Sensationalism over crime in the popular media legitimates the introduction of coercive legislation that frequently suspends normal democratic liberties and replaces parsimonious forms of control with more punitive measures. In the case reported by Hall and colleagues (1978), penalties for petty street crimes increased dramatically as the public, the judiciary, and the politicians were treated to hysterical excesses in the popular press of violent youth running amok.

A similar structural argument is advanced by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics

(1972). This study examines the role of the media in the re-creation of the ‘‘mods’’ and ‘‘rockers.’’ There have been a series of distinct trends in youth culture in both America and Great Britain over the last four or five decades—the zoot suiters, the Teddy Boys, the beats, the skin heads and punks, the soccer hooligans, and the motorcycle rebels— all of whom expressed antiauthoritarianism and youthful rebellion. What seems to have set off the postwar youth cultures was society’s relative affluence, which created conditions for distinctive consumption patterns supporting unique fashion styles, musical tastes, and recreational opportunities. The mods and rockers were motorcycle-riding youth groups who appeared in the British seaside resorts

in the middle 1960s. As Hunter Thompson discovered in his study (1966) of the California Hell’s Angels, the British newspapers made a feast of the mods’ antics, typically exaggerating and reporting spuriously on their activities. Cohen (1972) stresses that the function of the news hysteria was to create a kind of rogue’s gallery of folk devils— vivid, even fearsome images that registered collective fears about the youth, their mobility, and their independence, which served as collective reminders of what youth should not be.

In this approach, moral panics are an ongoing, recurrent, and predictable aspect of the popular culture. From this perspective, they are not considered the handiwork of individual moralists who may or may not decide for personal reasons to pursue a moral campaign. Moral panics are orchestrated when individuals feel compelled by their sense of the collective consciousness to repair a breach in the ideological fabric of society. Typically, either such persons are affiliated with institutions that have a longstanding investment in moral control—church organizations, community groups, political parties, and so forth—or they occupy roles as self-appointed arbiters in democratic societies—academic experts, professional journalists, and publishers.

Also, moral panics and the legislative changes they engender track important shifts in social structure fairly closely. This is the conclusion of Pearson’s

Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1983). Pearson reports that the current ‘‘public’’ appetite for law and order, for stiffer justice, and for a return to the past are recurrent themes in Western history. The historical perspective suggests that the feelings that, from the perspective of crime and delinquency, things are at an unprecedented nadir, that the present conduct of society compares poorly with the way things were in a previous golden age, that the family is falling apart, and that the popular entertainments of the lower classes are criminogenic, are recurrent in every major period of British history from the 1750s to the present. Over time, the rhetoric of decline has an uncanny similarity. Pearson’s point is that crime fears or moral panics occur when the legitimacy of state control over the working class is somehow challenged or brought into question. In the nineteenth century the British working class was only partially integrated into the political process. Consequently, their consent to government—which

was dominated by the propertied classes—was usually testy. In the 1840s in particular, there is an apprehension in philanthropical writings about the working-class ‘‘dodgers,’’ bold, independent delinquents viewed as potential revolutionaries who might fuel the Chartist movement and overthrow the private ownership of property. In this context, philanthropists prescribed education and policing to create internal restraints in the interest of protecting property.

From this perspective, class tensions were misinterpreted in the public press and by middle-class politicians as ‘‘rising crime and delinquency,’’ and the middle-class solutions were recurrently more ‘‘law and order’’ on the one hand and education on the other—that is, more police repression and control, a return to birching, a removal of the unBritish elements of the population, a repudiation of meretricious American culture, and a return to the tranquility of the golden age when people knew their place.

It is difficult to give an overall assessment of how the processes of legislating morality discovered in the labeling period in America can be integrated with the class conflict approaches stressed in the recent British studies. Certainly, there is no reason to believe that the class antagonisms that characterize British society are as developed in North America, nor that these would be a monolithic source of legal change. On the other hand, there is also no reason that the search for systematic sources of moral panics as effects of social change could not be undertaken in North American studies. Since the early 1980s it has become clear that the preoccupation with abortion, pornography, the funding of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) research, gay bashing, and the Equal Rights Amendment in U.S. public discourses is related to important trends in family composition and female labor force participation. For the tradition minded, the suppression of access to abortion, pornography, and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as well as lethargy in dealing with AIDS, all seem to be an attempt to turn the clock back toward patriarchal families. For more progressive feminists, access to abortion on demand, suppression of degrading pornography, and the confrontation of the epidemics of sexual and physical violence against women and children are essential ideological matters for the insurance

of greater female social and economic advancement. In both cases, the public imagery of epidemics of fetal massacres on the one hand, and epidemics of incest and female abuse on the other, are not the products of idiosyncratic moral campaigns but arise in the context of profound social structural transformations—suggesting the need to develop a convergence of theories of symbolic interests and structural shifts that have developed independently to date.

As we enter the new millennium in American politics, it is clear that the contemporary issues in moral discourse are distinct from the earlier focus on the criminalization of things such as drugs and alcohol. Political observers have coined the term ‘‘culture war’’ to characterize the attempt of the ‘‘Moral Majority’’ of Christian right-wing politicians to topple ‘‘the moral decline of the nation’’ and to substitute ‘‘moral sanity’’ in the form of widespread laws consistent with their religious beliefs (Scatamburlo 1998). Despite the dominance in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate by leading proponents of ‘‘born-again’’ politics over the past decade (Shupe and Stacey 1982), the New Right has effectively capitulated and virtually despaired of incorporating its views into American public and personal life (CBS 1999). Its proponents have failed repeatedly to achieve significant change. Specifically, they have failed to reintroduce prayer into the public school system— at the very time when American schools were racked by senseless shootings by disgruntled students. They have failed to curb the use of abortion as a method of birth control, failed to oust a philandering president despite a relentless investigation by a special prosecutor, and failed to curb the spread of sexual explicitness and capricious violence in everything from video games to Hollywood movies in spite of the fear that a great deal of youthful violence appears to be copied from mass media images. Further, they have failed to protect the hegemonic status of the traditional, heterosexual family and its access to spousal benefits from incursions by lesbian and gay lobbyists. They have made headway in downsizing the welfare state, but this has been achieved to varying degrees throughout the Western democracies without the same moral agenda.

The other side of the culture war has been associated with the rise of ‘‘identity politics’’—a

growth in social movements among racial minorities, women, and sexual minorities during the past two decades. In an attempt to recenter knowledge and power on the basis of experiences overlooked by male, Eurocentric, and heterosexual perspectives, claims have sometimes been made that gynocentric, Afrocentric, and gay voices have epistemological and moral standpoints that are superior to those which have traditionally overshadowed them (Seidman 1994, p. 234). Though such claims are extravagant, they signal cultural conflicts over basic moral and social questions and foster power politics resulting from the emancipation of racial minorities, women, and gays and lesbians This explains in part the Moral Majority’s sense of crisis, its backlash against political correctness, and its desire to return to the previous equilibrium. Schlesinger argues that the crisis is further fueled by the feeling that the common presuppositions that are required for democracy are imperiled by the spread of ‘‘strident multiculturalism,’’ radical ethnocentrism, and the undermining of the very possibility of a common American identity (Schlesinger 1998). The matter is only intensified by the shifting racial composition of America. Maharidge’s The Coming White Minority (1996) documents the apprehension among white Californians about becoming a minority group in their ‘‘own’’ state, a trend true of America as a whole in the larger global perspective. The social processes are not unlike those identified by Gusfield in the analysis of the temperance movement, suggesting that the social forces explaining the cultural conflicts are not unfamiliar to students of moral panic. What is less well acknowledged, and what might be important to keep in mind for resolution of what is regrettably labeled the ‘‘culture war’’ is the following. From the start, the Moral Majority campaign tended to be exclusionary and fundamentalist (Snowball 1991). Democracy requires coalitions and a broad basis of mutual support. When politicians in a democracy take their policies from religion, moral condemnation overshadows political dialogue. Political decisions are not arrived at through compromise and mutual dependence but through faith. Given these tendencies, ‘‘average citizens’’ have failed to assent to the moral absolutes required by politics based on religious righteousness, and the movement appears to have run its course (Weyrich 1999). Whether the culture war is amenable to an alternative, more inclusive, multicultural resolution remains to be seen.

(SEE ALSO: Deviance; Social Control)

REFERENCES

Becker, Howard S. 1963 Outsiders. New York: Free Press.

Cain, M., and A. Hunt 1979 Marx and Engels on Law. New York: Academic.

Cicourel, Aaron 1968 The Social Organization of Juvenile

Justice. London: Heinemann.

Cohen, Stanley 1972 Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Cook, S. 1969 ‘‘Canadian Narcotics Legislation 1908– 1923: A Conflict Approach.’’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 6:36–46.

Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) 1999 ‘‘The Moral Minority.’’ 60 Minutes, report by Leslie Stahl, May 16.

Currie, Elliott P. 1968 ‘‘Crimes without Criminals: Witchcraft and Its Control in Renaissance Europe.’’ Law and Society Review 3(1):7–132.

Durkheim, Emile (1897) 1951 Suicide. New York: Free Press.

——— (1893) 1984 The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press.

Erikson, Kai T. 1966 Wayward Puritans. New York:

John Wiley.

Goffman, Erving 1961 Asylums. New York:

Doubleday/Anchor.

——— 1963 Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Gusfield, Joseph R. 1963 Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, and B. Roberts 1978 Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.

Kitsuse, John I. 1962 ‘‘Societal Response to Deviance: Social Problems of Theory and Method.’’ Social Problems 9:247–256.

Lemert, Edwin 1967 ‘‘The Concept of Secondary Deviation.’’ In E. Lemert, ed., Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Pearson, Geoffrey 1983 Hooligan: A History of Respectable

Fears. London: Macmillan.

Scatamburlo, Valerie 1998 Soldiers of Misfortune: The New Right’s Culture War and the Politics of Political Correctness. New York: Peter Lang.

Scheff, Thomas 1999 Being Mentally Ill. New York: Aldine.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. 1998 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, rev. ed. New York: Norton.

Schur, Edwin 1965 Crimes without Victims. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Seidman, Steven 1994 Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era, Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

Shupe, Anson, and William S. Stacey 1982 Born Again Politics and the Moral Majority: What Social Surveys Really Show. New York: Edwin Mellen.

Snowball, David 1991 Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the Moral Majority. New York: Praeger.

Sutherland, Edwin 1950 ‘‘The Diffusion of Sexual Psychopath Laws.’’ American Journal of Sociology 56:142–148.

Szasz, Thomas 1961 The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Heuber-Harper.

——— 1970 The Manufacture of Madness. New York: Harper and Row.

Taylor, Ian 1982 ‘‘Moral Enterprise, Moral Panic, and Law-and-Order Campaigns.’’ In M. M. Rosenberg, R. A. Stebbins, and A. Turowitz, eds., The Sociology of Deviance. New York: St. Martin’s.

Thompson, E. P. 1975 Whigs and Hunters. Harmondsworth,

England: Penguin.

Thompson, Hunter S. 1966 Hell’s Angels. New York:

Random House.

Weyrich, Paul 1999 ‘‘A Conservative Throws in the Towel.’’ FrontPage Magazine, February 16. http:// www.frontpagemag.com/archives/politics/ weyrich2-17-99.htm.

AUGUSTINE BRANNIGAN

LEGITIMACY

Lindesmith, A. 1965 The Addict and the Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Maharidge, Dale 1996 The Coming White Minority: California’s Eruptions and the Nation’s Future. New York: Times Books/Random House.

O’Connor, Walter D. 1972 ‘‘The Manufacture of Deviance: The Case of the Soviet Purge, 1936–1938.’’

American Sociological Review 37:403–413.

See Interpersonal Power; Organizational

Structure.

LEISURE

Since 1930 the sociology of leisure in North America and Europe has not developed in a linear or cumulative fashion. Rather, research agendas, the

accepted premises for research and theory, and the ‘‘common wisdom’’ of the field have been revised and challenged. Change did not come in one great overturning, but in a sequence of revisions. A dialectical model seems to be most appropriate to follow the sequence. Through the 1950s, there was an accepted consensus as to both issues and premises. This common wisdom was eroded as well as challenged by new research. The ‘‘revised consensus’’ expanded agendas for both research and theory without completely overturning earlier developments.

Since 1985, a more critical antithesis with multiple sources has emerged to subject the second consensus to a more thoroughgoing revision. The sources of this antithesis have included conflict or neo-Marxist theory, gender-focused critiques, non-Western perspectives, and various poststructural analytical approaches. Critiques are associated with concepts such as hegemony and power, commodification, cultural and social fragmentation, gender and patriarchical structures, imperialism, world views, symbol systems, ideologies, and existential action. Now a central question concerns the kind of synthesis that will be developed in the ongoing process.

The dialectical sequence provides a dynamic framework for a review of central areas in the study of leisure. Although many issues and lines of research can be identified, four have consistently been most salient. In a highly abbreviated form, we will summarize the dialectics of theory and research in relation to (1) work and time, (2) family and community, (3) aging and the life course, and

(4) the nature of leisure.

WORK AND TIME

Leisure and Work Domains. When sociologists turned their attention to leisure in the 1960s, three perspectives were adopted. The first, based on earlier community studies, approached leisure as a dimension of the social organization of the community (Lundberg, Komarovsky, and McInerney 1934; Dumazedier 1967). The second, exemplified by David Riesman and initiated at the University of Chicago, viewed leisure as social action that created its own worlds of meaning. The third, the one that came to shape domain assumption and research agendas, emerged from the sociology of work. Its fundamental premise was that economic

institutions are central to the society and economic roles the primary determinants of other roles. Especially leisure was assumed to be secondary and derivative. As a consequence, various models of determination by work were proposed that modeled leisure as similar to work (‘‘spillover’’ or identity), contrasting (compensation), or separate (Wilensky 1960; Parker 1971). The bias, however, was clearly toward some kind of determination rather than segmentation.

As research proceeded, the ‘‘long arm of the job’’ was found to be both shorter and less powerful than expected as only limited, modest, and sometimes inconsistent relationships were found between leisure styles and occupational level and type (Wilson 1980). In a fuller perspective, on the other hand, it was evident that economic roles are determinative of the social context of adult lives— schedules, control of resources, autonomy, and other basic conditions (Blauner 1964). Leisure is part of the reward structure of a social system with differential access to resources based largely on socioeconomic position.

A second revision of the common wisdom concerned time available for leisure. The longterm reduction in the average workweek from as high as eighty hours in the early days of the industrial revolution to about forty hours in the post– World War II period along with the five-day workweek and paid vacations for many workers had led to an unquestioned assurance that more and more leisure time would be the product of increased economic productivity. In the 1970s, however, the declining rate of the decrease moving toward stability produced a revised consensus suggesting segmented time scarcity and a variety of social timetables. Most recently, analysis of labor statistics indicates that workers in high-pressure occupations and some services may have average workweeks much longer than forty hours (Schor 1991) even though time-diary research identifies a small overall increase in time for leisure (Robinson and Godbey 1997). Considerable attention has also been given to those impacted by the time scarcities of those, mostly women, with multiple work, household, and caregiving roles.

A next challenge to the early common wisdom was a recognition of leisure as a dimension of life with its own meaning and integrity. Leisure is more than leftover and derivative. It has its own

place in the rhythm and flow of life. First, leisure came to be defined more as activity than as empty time. Among the themes emerging were relative freedom of choice, distinction from the obligations of other roles, and the variety of meanings and aims that might be sought in such activity. Just as important as the revised definition, however, was the identification of leisure as something more than a derivation of work. Social life could not be divided into a work versus leisure dichotomy, but consisted of multiple sets of intersecting roles. Leisure, although it has a particular relationship with the bonding of family and other immediate communities (Cheek and Burch 1976), had multiple contexts, connections, and meanings (Kelly 1981).

The Challenge of Critical Theory. The domain assumptions of functional sociology have been challenged by critical analyses with roots in neo-Marxist cultural studies (Clarke and Critcher 1986; Rojek 1985), historical study that focuses on power and the struggles of the working class, and social construction approaches that take into account the interpretive symbolic activity of social actors (Rojek 1995).

The central theme of the critical challenge is social control by ruling elites. Leisure is seen as a critical element in the hegemony of ruling elites in a capitalist society. In order to assure compliance in the routinized ‘‘Fordist’’ workplace, the political arena, and the marketplace, leisure has emerged as central to the capitalist reward and control system. Leisure is, from this critical perspective, a market-mediated instrument that binds workers to the production process and to roles that support the reproduction of the capital-dominated social system. Leisure is defined as a commodity that must be earned and is indissolubly connected to what can be purchased and possessed.

A number of themes are gathered in this critique. The power to enforce compliance is masked behind an ideology in which ‘‘freedom’’ comes to be defined as purchasing power in the marketplace of leisure. Such ‘‘commodity fetishism’’ (Marx 1970) of attachment to things defines life and leisure in terms of possessions. Leisure, then, becomes ‘‘commodified’’ as the consumption of marketed goods and services, entertainment in contrast with commitment to involving,

challenging, and developmental activity (Kelly and Freysinger 1999). Social status is symbolized by leisure display (Veblen 1899). Absorption in mass media, especially low-cost and easy-access television (Robinson and Godbey 1997), legitimates consumption-oriented values and worldviews (Habermas 1975). What appear to be varying styles of leisure reflect the profoundly different conditions of work, family, and leisure assigned by class, gender, and race (Clarke and Critcher 1986).

A Prospective Synthesis. The fundamental presupposition of any sociology of leisure is that leisure is a thoroughly social phenomenon. It is a part of the culture and a product of the social system. Leisure is not separate and secondary, but embedded in the institutional structures, social times, and power allocations of the society. In a complex social system, both individual self-deter- mination and institutional control differ by economic and social position. Leisure is not segmented, but woven into the system. Out of the current dialectic between the consensus and the critique, a number of issues call for attention.

The first agenda is to move beyond ideologies to examine the lived conditions of poor, excluded, and disinherited children, women, and men. Their struggles for life in the present, and their struggles for a future, are reflected in what they do to express themselves, create community, fill ordinary hours and days, and seek new possibilities.

The second issue is to identify the ways in which economic roles provide contexts, resources, limitations, and orientations for the rest of life— family and community as well as leisure. In a ‘‘postFordist’’ global economy with a loss of linear work careers and fragmented cultural schemes, the question is not the simple determination of life and leisure by work, but how determinative definitions of both the self and society are learned in a powerdifferentiated social context.

The third issue is meanings. Purchasing is not necessarily commodification and owning is not fetishism. What are the commitments, symbols, meanings, self-definitions, and worldviews that are the cognitive context of decisions and actions? What are the meanings and outcomes of leisurerelated spending, media use, packaged entertainment and travel, and images of pleasure? Possession may be a way of life or an instrument of

activity. Does leisure reflect a culture of possession? Or is there a deep paradox between alienation and creation that permeates the entire society?

The fourth issue revolves around time. It is necessary to discard misleading models about average workweeks and the ‘‘more or less leisure’’ argument. Rather, what are the actual patterns and varieties of time structure and allocation? How do these patterns and possibilities vary by economic role, gender, life course, family conditions, ethnicity and race, location, and other placement factors? Time remains a basic resource for leisure action, one that not only varies widely but is one index of the possibility of self-determination.

FAMILY AND COMMUNITY

Leisure as a Context for Family Bonding. If leisure is not just activity determined by and complementary to work, then is there some other critical relationship to the social system? The evident connection is to family and other immediate communities (Roberts 1970). Most leisure is in or around the home. The most common leisure companions are family and other close friends and intimates.

The basis of the first common wisdom was the series of community studies beginning in the 1930s (Lundberg, Komarovsky, and McInerny 1934; Lynd and Lynd 1956). Leisure was found to be a web of ordinary activity, mostly social interaction and tied to the institutions of the community from the family outward to status-based organizations. From this perspective, the later work of Cheek and Burch (1976) argued that the primary function of leisure is to provide a context for social bonding, especially that of family and ethnic community.

An anomaly in family leisure began a revision to the first consensus. The family context was reaffirmed and the centrality of the family to leisure supported (Kelly 1983). Despite the traditional focus on freedom as the primary defining theme of leisure, activity with major components of obligation was found to be most important to most adults. The major theme was that leisure was closely tied to central roles, not separate from them.

Leisure, then, is bound to both the roles and the developmental requirements of life (Rapoport and Rapoport 1976). In fact, from this perspective it may be quite central to life, not residual or

secondary at all. It is a primary setting for social bonding and expression as well as for human development. The implied issue, on the other hand, is the consequences for the nature of freedom and choice in leisure. No activity embedded in primary role relationships can ever be free of accompanying obligations and responsibilities (Kelly 1987a, chap. 6). Leisure might be more central but is also less pure and simple.

Power and Self-determination in Leisure Roles. First, there is the challenge posed by changing family patterns now that an unbroken marriage and family through the life course has become a minority probability. The most radical response and antithesis, however, begins with the suggestion that leisure, like other areas of life, has roles. That is, the expectations and power differentials that characterize family, work, and community roles are found in leisure as well. Currently the most salient source of this challenging antithesis is the focus on gender, especially from a feminist perspective (Henderson et al. 1996).

The critique calls for sociologists to go beneath the leisure rhetoric of freedom and selfexpression to the realities of lives with limited power of self-determination. From this perspective, the history of the culture is characterized by male domination of women in profound and multifaceted ways that permeate every aspect of life (Deem 1986). Women have been repressed in where they are permitted to go and what they are allowed to do in leisure. Men have had the power to sexualize social contexts to objectify women and their bodies. Physical power and even violence have rendered many leisure times and places unsafe for women.

Even in the home, women’s leisure is fundamentally different from that of men. It is usually women who are expected to do the work that makes ‘‘family leisure’’ possible. It is the ‘‘hidden work’’ of women that offers relative freedom to much of the leisure of men and children. Women both enable men’s leisure and are leisure for men.

What, then, is the meaning of freedom and self-determination for any subordinate population segment? What about the poor, the racially and ethnically excluded, those cut off from opportunity in abandoned urban areas, and even many of the old? Again, many potential leisure venues in the inner city are unsafe, especially for children and

the old. The resources of time, money, access, and autonomy are evidently unevenly distributed in any society.

In this antithesis, the connections of leisure to nonwork roles and resources, especially family and community, and the positive evaluation of how leisure contributes to development through the life course are brought up against a critical model of society. Leisure may indeed be indissolubly tied to family and community, but in ways that reflect social divisions and dominations as well as expressive action.

Leisure’s Immediate Context: a New Agenda. Leisure takes place in its small worlds, but also in the larger scale of the society. Further, its actualization is in the midst of real life. Research may be based on premises of systemic integration and the benefits of leisure as well as challenged by critiques reflecting ideologies of subjugation and alienation. A new agenda for research, however informed, should be directed toward the actual lived conditions of decisions and actions, relationships and roles. In such an agenda related to community and family, several themes are highlighted by critiques of the common wisdom:

First, the realities of leisure as a struggle for action and self-determination in the midst of acute differences in power and access to resources will receive more attention. Especially gender, race, and poverty will reconstitute research strategies and frames past the easy assumptions that leisure is equally free and beneficial for all. The realities of family instability and crisis as well as of community divisions and conflicts will be taken into account as the immediate communities of leisure are reformulated.

Second, underlying the new agenda is the theme of differential power, not only power to command resources but to determine the course of one’s life and what is required of others. In the action of leisure, there is both a relative openness for action and modes of repression that stimulate submission and resistence.

Third, the pervasiveness of sexuality, gender roles, and sexual orientation throughout life in society will gain greater prominence in leisure sociology. One set of issues revolves around sexuality and related emotions to leisure. Simple models of explanation based solely on rational action

will be recognized as inadequate. Also, gender will be seen as negotiated identity and power of selfdetermination rather than a simple dichotomized category.

Fourth, the danger of leisure’s becoming increasingly privatized, bound only to immediate communities and the small worlds of personal life construction, is a perspective that runs counter to the functional view of leisure as a context for social bonding. There may be a negative side to a focus on the family basis of leisure activity and meanings. As technologies increasingly make the home a center of varied entertainment, leisure could become more and more cut off from larger communities.

In general, leisure is surely not peripheral to the central concerns and relationships of life. That, however, does not lead simply to bonding without domination, to development without alienation, or to intimacy without conflict.

AGING AND THE LIFE COURSE

Continuity and Change in the Life Course. The earliest common wisdom was simply that age indexed many kinds of leisure engagement. In a simple model, age was even referred to as a cause of decreased rates of participation. It was assumed that something decremental happened to people as they aged. The rates of decline varied according to activity: rapid for sports, especially team sports; more gradual for travel and community involvement. Attention given to those in their later years, generally their sixties and seventies but sometimes their fifties as well, suggested that such ‘‘disengagement’’ might even be functional. Perhaps older people needed to consolidate their activity and recognize their limitations.

The revised common wisdom began by recasting age as an index of multiple related changes rather than an independent variable. Further, the revised framework became the life course rather than linear age (Neugarten 1968). A number of themes emerged:

First, in the Kansas City study of adult life, normative disengagement was replaced with activity (Havighurst 1961). Instead of making a necessary or desirable withdrawal from activity, older people were found to revise their patterns and commitments in ways that fit their later life roles

and opportunities. Leisure was conceptualized as multidimensional in meaning as well as in forms. More recently, this approach has led to a discovery of the ‘‘active old,’’ those before and in retirement who adopt lifestyles of engagement in a variety of leisure activities and relationships. Further, such engagement has been consistently found to be a major factor in life satisfaction (Cutler and Hendricks 1990).

Second, the model of inevitable decrement was challenged by research that failed to measure high correlations between age and functional ability. Rather, a model of aging that stressed continuity rather than loss and change was applied to leisure as well as other aspects of life (Atchley 1989). A return to earlier socialization studies provided a base for a revised model that identified lines of commitment rather than age-graded discontinuity. Especially the ‘‘core’’ of daily accessible activity and interaction remains central to time allocation through the life course (Kelly 1983).

Third, the life course also provided a perspective in which intersecting work, leisure, and family roles and opportunities were related to developmental changes (Rapoport and Rapoport 1976). Leisure is not a list of activities dwindling with age, but a social environment in which many critical issues of life may be worked out. Developing sexual identity for teens, expressing intimacy for those exploring and consolidating family commitments, reconstituting social contexts after midlife disruptions, and ensuring social integration in later years are all central requirements of the life course that are developed in leisure. Not only interests, but also significant identities are often found in leisure as well as in family and work (Gordon, Gaitz, and Scott 1976).

In the revised consensus, then, the life course with its interwoven work, family, and community roles was accepted as a valuable framework for analyzing both the continuities and the changes of leisure. Leisure was seen as tied not only to role sequences but also to developmental preoccupations. The life course was found to incorporate revisions and reorientations rather than being simply an inevitable downhill slide measured by participation rates in selected recreation pursuits.

An Integrated View of Life . . . and Leisure.

The regular and predictable transitions of the lifecourse model, however, seem to gloss over many

of the realities of contemporary life. A majority of adults in their middle or later years have experienced at least one disrupting trauma in health, work, or the family that has required a fundamental reconstituting of roles and orientations (Kelly 1987b). Further, conditions are not the same for all persons in a social system. Race, gender, class, and ethnicity designate different life chances.

In this perspective of continuity and change in a metaphor of life as journey, a number of issues call for attention. First, salient differences in life conditions are more than variations in starting points for the journey. Rather, deprivation and denial are cumulative in ways that affect every dimension of life. Second, individuals come to define themselves in the actual circumstances of life, not in an abstracted concept. Identities, the concepts of the self that are central to what we believe is possible and probable in our lives, are developed in the realities of the life course. Third, the structures of the society, including access to institutional power, provide forceful contexts of opportunity and denial that shape both direction and resources for the journey.

In this revised life-course approach, leisure remains as a significant dimension, tied to family, work, education, community, and other elements of life. Changes in one may affect all the others. Leisure, then, is distinct from the product orientation of work and the intimate bonding of the family, and yet is connected to both.

Leisure and the Life Course: New Agendas.

From the perspective of the life course, research focusing on leisure now requires several revised issues. Among the most significant are:

First, leisure is woven through the life course. It is existential in a developmental sense. That is, leisure is action that involves becoming, action in which the actor becomes something more than before. For example, leisure is central to changing early socialization in the increased activity scheduling, electronic entertainment and interaction, and professional supervision of upperand middleclass children. It is the main context for exploring sexuality and romance for teens and young adults.

Second, the developmental orientation of some leisure is highlighted by this perspective that recognizes lines of action as well as singular events and episodes. What has been termed ‘‘serious