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Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time (paperback edition)

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Edition: paperback, with new Introduction by the author
Publisher: Transaction

Authors:

Robert Stebbins

The University of Calgary

Structural Complexity: From Tribes to Social Worlds

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Serious

Leisure

2 The Historiography of Psychoanalysis

Introduction 3

Transaction Publishers

New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)

Serious

Leisure

A Perspective for Our Time

Robert A. Stebbins

4 The Historiography of Psychoanalysis

Brunswick, New Jersey.

tions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by

any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any

information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing

from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers,

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This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Stan-

dard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2006050176

ISBN: 978-0-7658-0363-4 (cloth); 978-1-4128-5594-5 (paper)

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stebbins, Robert A., 1938-

Serious leisure : a perspective for our time / Robert A. Stebbins.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7658-0363-1 (alk. paper)

1. Leisure—Sociological aspects. I. Title.

GV14.45.S843 2006

306.4'—dc22 20006050176

Introduction 5

To Abran, Amélie, Braeden, and Landon

6 The Historiography of Psychoanalysis

Introduction 7

BLEST, who can unconcernedly ﬁnd hours, days and years, slide soft

away, in health of body, peace of mind, quiet of day, should sleep by

night, study and ease, together mixed—sweet recreation.

“Ode on Solitude”

by Alexander Pope (1717)

8 The Historiography of Psychoanalysis

Introduction 9

Contents

Note to the Reader xi

Preface to the Paperback Edition xiii

Preface xix

Acknowledgements xxiii

1. The Serious Leisure Perspective 1

2. Recent Research on Serious Leisure 25

3. Casual and Project-Based Leisure: The Basics 37

4. Synthesizing the Forms 53

5. Extending the Perspective 77

6. History of the Perspective 101

7. Importance of the Perspective 119

References 137

Index 149

10 The Historiography of Psychoanalysis

List of Tables and Figures

Table 5.1 Relationship of Leisure and Popular Culture 93

Figure 4.1 Structural Complexity: 64

From Tribes to Social Worlds

Figure 5.1 Serious and Casual Leisure 97

and Arts Administration

Note to the Reader

The SLP as a Formal Grounded Theory

I made the claim early in this book (p. 3) that the serious leisure per-

spective (SLP) had reached the point where it can be identiﬁed as a formal

grounded theory. That claim has since been validated over and over by

a burgeoning theoretical and empirical literature centered either wholly

or substantially on the Perspective or one or two of its three forms (seri-

ous, casual, project-based leisure). This includes ethnographic research

on particular heretofore unexamined serious leisure activities. There are

now over 1,100 references of this nature in the Bibliography found on the

SLP website. As an update of Chapter 6, a chronicle of the journey from

substantive to formal grounded theoretic status is available in Stebbins

(2013) and, in somewhat greater detail, on the site itself (click on History).

The SLP Website

I mention this site on page xv, noting its origin in an adventitious initial

encounter with Jenna Hartel. She was at that time a doctoral student in

library and information science (LIS) at UCLA. She is now an associate

professor in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto and, as the

site’s webmaster from the beginning, has been a main player in its growth

as well as in the extension of the SLP into LIS. She proposed that the

site contain a digital library, which today, houses several digitized, open-

source books, theses, articles, and the entire Leisure Reﬂections series.

She also designed the SLP typological diagram and the SLP Involvement

Scale, both found on that site. Also available there is an extensive history

of the Perspective (it dates to 1973), a summary of its central concepts

and propositions, and a page containing our curricula vitae.

In short, this Internet domain has become a vital center for collecting

and disseminating scientiﬁc information and its application (click on

“More” and then on “News”) related to the SLP. Being without an orga-

nizational base this website is the Perspective’s only hub. Dr. Hartel has

designed and maintained it, always with this crucial function in mind.

xiii

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Some important things have happened to the serious leisure perspec-

tive (SLP), after being introduced in this book in 2007. One, the SLP

has continued to expand as a formal grounded theory. Two, the website

that saw the light of day in 2006 has now, under the new URL of www.

seriousleisure.net, developed considerably. Three, the basic deﬁnition of

leisure—the foundational concept of the SLP—has been reformulated.

Four, I have proposed a positive sociology based on the SLP, even though

sociology as a discipline continues (especially in North America) to keep

its distance from the study of leisure. Five, the set of extensions discussed

in Chapter 5 has grown since 2007.

The Deﬁnition of Leisure

Among the general theories commonly discussed in leisure studies,

the SLP is the only one whose origins lie directly and substantially in

research on free-time activity. That is, the SLP emerged inductively

from a foundational set of exploratory studies that were focused ﬁrst and

foremost on various leisure activities (summarized in chapters 2 and 3).

For this reason the Perspective can be qualiﬁed as an internal theory,

and contrasted with the various external theories that have also been

used to explain this sphere of life. Theories like functionalism, symbolic

interactionism, critical analysis, and postmodernism contain some ideas

on leisure, but they emerged in answer to intellectual questions quite

distant from that subject.

It follows that, when developing internal theory, it is vital that its central

concepts be deﬁned with as much precision as the scientiﬁc knowledge

underpinning them (as opposed to commonsense) will allow. My attempts

over the years to deﬁne the central concept of leisure and its place in

the SLP reﬂect my continual grappling with such knowledge as I have

striven to ﬁnd its essence, its unique features.

In Stebbins (2012) I took the deﬁnitional bull by the horns, devoting

a small book to the matter wherein I presented, ﬁrst, a condensed, dic-

tionary-style deﬁnition of leisure and, then, a book-length elaboration

Serious Leisure

of it. Serious Leisure offers a condensed deﬁnition on pages 4 and 5.

The condensed deﬁnition of leisure presented in Stebbins (2012, pp.

4-6) differs according to the following italicized passages: un-coerced,

contextually framed activity engaged in during free time, which people

want to do and, using their abilities and resources, actually do in either

a satisfying or a fulﬁlling way (or both). In other words, any deﬁnition of

leisure should recognize that it takes place in and is therefore inﬂuenced

by its historical, cultural, and structural contexts. Moreover, wanting to

pursue a serious leisure/devotee work activity can only continue if the

participant has the necessary ability and resources, including money,

opportunity, personal agency, and possibly, social support.

Apropos deﬁnitions, I have also given since 2007 considerable

attention to the pivotal idea of activity (Stebbins, 2009a, pp. 4-7). The

leisure activities that people engage in and their experiences while doing

so constitute an important part of the motivational foundation of the SLP.

The condensed deﬁnition refers to “un-coerced activity.” An activity is

a type of pursuit, wherein participants in it mentally or physically (of-

ten both) think or do something, motivated by the hope of achieving a

desired end. Life is ﬁlled with activities, both pleasant and unpleasant:

sleeping, mowing the lawn, taking the train to work, having a tooth ﬁlled,

eating lunch, playing tennis matches, running a meeting, and on and on.

Activities, as this list illustrates, may be categorized as work, leisure, or

non-work obligation.

Activity is not only a foundational concept within the core con-

cepts of the SLP—serious, casual, and project-based leisure—it also

forms a link with (especially positive) psychology. Viewed from this

discipline an activity may be seen as a set of related behaviors. Meanwhile

in macro-sociology, as just observed, activities are pursued in the soci-

etal domains of work, leisure, and non-work obligation. As one critical

response to the need to further contextually frame the SLP, the domain

of non-work obligation was introduced in Stebbins (2009a, pp. 24-26).

It was fueled by the observation that participation in the domains of

work and leisure can be substantially affected by the nature and amount

of non-work responsibilities. Moreover, some of these responsibilities

might be redeﬁned as agreeable (e.g., gardening activities, handyman

work) turning them into hobbies or leisure projects.

Finally, in Stebbins (2012, pp. 69-85), I fully integrate devotee

work and serious leisure under the overarching concept of the serious

pursuit (see the latest version of the SLP diagram in www.seriousleisure.

xiv

Preface to the Paperback Edition xv

net). That is, serious leisure and devotee work are essentially the same,

even while the latter, in part because it is a livelihood, is obligated activ-

ity, albeit agreeably so. One crucial condition, almost entirely ignored in

the conventional wisdom, is that devotee work is fundamentally depen-

dent on the domain of serious leisure. Bluntly put, without this leisure,

the devotee occupations would never exist. This observation, when it

comes to the trades and the client-centered professions, is apparent to

almost everyone, since they know of the pre-apprentice hobbyist and the

pre-professional amateur. But when it comes to small businesses and

the public-centered professions, it is, alas, all too often overlooked. The

student-amateur precursors of the former constitute a reasonably visible

group, whereas the pure amateur-hobbyist-volunteer precursors of the

latter are much less evident. An in-depth look at the nature of devotee

work and the fulﬁllment careers possible in it is presented in Stebbins

(2014, chapters 6 and 7).

Positive Sociology

This book hints on page xiii at a positive sociology. Here I lament the

exceedingly low level of interest in North American mainstream sociolo-

gy in the subject of leisure, while on pages 98 and 99 I note the need for

the SLP to broaden its scope to include positive emotions in the study

leisure. This new direction also shows the afﬁnity of the Perspective with

the rapidly growing ﬁeld of positive psychology. I have in two books

followed up on these musings.

First, I argue (Stebbins, 2009a) for a positive sociology the foundation

of which is the SLP. “Positive sociology” is my label for the new scholarly

ﬁeld described in that book. It looks into how, why, and when people

pursue those things in life that they desire, the things they do to make

their existence attractive, worth living. Positive sociology is the study of

what people do to organize their lives such that those lives become, in

combination, substantially rewarding, satisfying, and fulﬁlling.

This new ﬁeld differs from the discipline’s mainstream, which is pre-

dominantly problem-centered. That is, a large segment of sociology has

focused and continues to focus on explaining and ameliorating various

problematic aspects of life, aspects many people dislike because they

make their lives disagreeable, if not miserable. But, for most people in

Western society, there is much more to life than eliminating or adequately

controlling crime, drug addiction, urban pollution, daily stress, domestic

violence, overpopulation, and so on. To be sure, signiﬁcant levels of suc-

Serious Leisure

cess in these areas bring a noticeable measure of tranquility to the people

substantially affected by them, but they do not, in themselves, generate

positiveness in daily life. They generate only relief, tranquility, security,

and similar feelings. Compared with the mainstream this new ﬁeld must,

of necessity, start from some different premises. In general, explaining

positiveness must proceed from a non-problematic model, for ﬁnding

that positiveness is a separate step leading to fulﬁllment.

Second, I have also worked in the other direction to inform positive

psychologists about the importance of leisure (Stebbins, 2015). This,

too, is a tall order, for what is known about leisure from the standpoint

of psychology has been described as a “social psychology of leisure”

and “a child of leisure studies” (Mannell, Kleiber, & Staempﬂi, 2006, p.

119). These authors hold that “leisure has all but been ignored by social

psychologists in the ﬁeld of psychology during the past 100 years” (pp.

112-113). Still, there is recent evidence that some positive psychologists

are beginning see the importance of leisure for their own scholarly in-

terests (e.g., Freire, 2013).

As for a positive sociology, or less ambitious, the study of leisure from

within the discipline of sociology, the silence on the matter is deafening

(at least in North America). Notwithstanding some ﬁne work in this area

by, for example, Gary Fine, Marybeth Stalp, Leon Anderson, Jeffrey

Nash, and earlier, Donald Hastings—all in departments of sociology—the

overall scope of their discipline largely continues to omit this specialty

(for references to their works see the Bibliography [Amateurs and Hob-

byists] in www.seriousleisure.net). That is, leisure, in general, or a leisure

activity, in particular, is occasionally studied, but usually the main focus

of the research is on a mainstream interest (social problem) with leisure

being only a vehicle for carrying this interest (e.g., problems of gender,

ethnicity, social class). Fortunately, the sociology of leisure pursued as

it is within the ﬁeld of leisure studies continues to thrive.

The Extensions

The extensions discussed in Chapter 5 continue to generate a great deal

of research based on the SLP (for an up-to-date summary see Part III,

Elkington & Stebbins, 2014). Furthermore, new extensions are emerging

from time to time. One of these revolves around food. Thus, Isabelle de

Solier (2013) interviewed a sizeable sample of Australian foodies, using

the SLP to guide inquiry and interpret ﬁndings about these hobbyists.

Much of her work centers on eating out at restaurants. Meanwhile, James

xvi

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Farmer (2012) has been studying another food-related hobby, notably,

raising one’s own produce.

Second, recognizing the scholarly myopia of the reigning ap-

proach in consumption studies, which sees leisure as nothing other than

an identity with commercial consumption, I have written a counterview

(Stebbins, 2009b). This extension of the Perspective sets out the position

that commercial consumption facilitating the serious pursuits is dramati-

cally different from the kind of consumption that buys casual leisure (the

narrow focus of modern consumption research). Moreover, a signiﬁcant

amount of leisure is non-consumptive, requiring little or no monetary

outlay to engage in it.

Most recently philosophy and sociology have joined hands to

tackle the link between leisure and identity (Cohen-Gewerc & Stebbins,

2013). The central questions addressed in that book are twofold: how

leisure activities, particularly the serious pursuits, spawn distinctiveness

and what ramiﬁcations spring from such individuality. This extension

honors the ancient roots of leisure studies in the observations of Plato

and Aristotle about how man (i.e., elite man who had no need to work)

should spend his free time.

The SLP has, since its initial framing in this book, advanced

substantially and in a variety of directions. But stay tuned, for there is

more to come.

References

Cohen-Gewerc, E., & Stebbins, R.A. (2013). Serious leisure and individ-

uality. Montreal, QC & Kingston, ON: McGill-Queens University Press.

de Solier, I. (2013). Food and the self: Consumption, production and

material culture. London: Bloomsbury.

Elkington, S., & Stebbins, R.A. (2014). The serious leisure perspective:

An introduction. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Farmer, J. (2012). Leisure in living local through food and farming.

Leisure Sciences, 34, 490-495.

Freire, T. (2013). Positive leisure science: From subjective experience to

social contexts. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.

xvii

Serious Leisure

Mannell, R.C., Kleiber, D.A., & Staempﬂi, M. (2006). Psychology and

social psychology and the study of leisure. In C. Rojek, S.M. Shaw, &

A.J. Veal (Eds.), A handbook of leisure studies (pp. 109-124). New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Stebbins, R. A. (2009a). Personal decisions in the public square: Be-

yond problem solving into a positive sociology. New Brunswick, NJ:

Transaction.

Stebbins, R.A. (2009b). Leisure and consumption: Common ground,

separate worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stebbins, R.A. (2012). The idea of leisure: First principles. New Bruns-

wick, NJ: Transaction.

Stebbins, R.A. (2013). The longitudinal process of grounded theory de-

velopment: A case study in leisure research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/978144627305013509771.

Stebbins, R.A. (2014). Careers in serious leisure: From dabbler to

devotee in search of fulﬁllment. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stebbins, R.A. (in press). Leisure and positive psychology. Houndmills,

UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

xviii

xix

Preface

This book was, in part, born of the necessity to gather the widely scat-

tered literature on serious and casual leisure into a single handy, coherent,

comprehensive resource. My scholarly involvements as participant at

conferences, speaker on university campuses, evaluator of manuscripts,

supervisor of graduate students, and e-mail mentor have, together, made

me increasingly aware of the need for such a volume. More and more, I

discovered that people are overlooking critical parts of the Perspective,

and sometimes blaming it (and me) for being shortsighted in those ways.

It is not that the Perspective is above reproach. This book candidly shows

many of its weaknesses and limitations. Rather it is that so much has now

been written in its name and published in so great a variety of outlets that

fewer and fewer people are able to see the entire picture.

To start with, then, this book constitutes a stocktaking of the literature

on serious literature, the third such effort. The second occurred in 1999-

2000 and was published in New Directions in the Theory and Research

on Serious Leisure (Stebbins, 2001a) and the ﬁrst occurred in 1990-1991,

which was then published in Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure

(Stebbins, 1992a). This, the third stocktaking, has been revealing, in that

approximately one and one-half times as much was published since the

1999-2000 stocktaking in approximately half the time. This trend, in

itself, justiﬁes this book.

But, in fact, this book is far more than just another stocktaking, how-

ever greatly needed such a service. For the book is, most centrally, about

three forms of leisure synthesized into a common perspective. Serious

leisure is but one of these forms, the other two being casual leisure and

project-based leisure. Together they comprise the serious leisure per-

spective. This title may alarm some readers, but they should read the

ﬁrst paragraph of chapter 1 for an explanation. This Perspective can be

deﬁned simply as the theoretic framework that synthesizes three main

forms of leisure showing, at once, their distinctive features, similarities,

and interrelationships.

xii Serious Leisure

The three are brieﬂy deﬁned as follows:

• Serious leisure: systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer

core activity sufﬁciently substantial, interesting. and fulﬁlling in nature

for the participant to ﬁnd a career there acquiring and expressing a

combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience

• Casual leisure: immediately, intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-

lived pleasurable core activity, requiring little or no special training

to enjoy it.

• Project-based leisure: short-term, reasonably complicated, one-shot

or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in

free time, or time free of disagreeable obligation.

Although it was never my intention as I moved over the years from

one study of free-time activity to another, my ﬁndings and theoretic mus-

ings have nevertheless evolved and coalesced into a typological map of

the world of leisure. That is, so far as I can tell at present, all leisure (at

least in Western society) can be classiﬁed according to one of the three

forms and their several types and subtypes. More precisely the serious

leisure perspective offers a classiﬁcation and explanation of all leisure

activity and experience, as these two are framed in the social psycho-

logical, social, cultural, and historical contexts in which the activity and

experience take place.

On the way to this synthesis I set out in chapters 1 and 3 the basic

concepts and propositions that make up the three forms. My goal here

is to focus attention on their essential elements. The stocktaking of the

serious leisure literature is carried out in chapter 2, while that for casual

and project-based leisure, a much smaller undertaking, is left for chapter

3. I then present in chapter 4 the synthesis itself. It is realized by way

of a set of foundational concepts—organization, community, history,

lifestyle, and culture—and several of their component areas. Chapter

5 is devoted to extending the perspective, now reasonably synthesized,

into other disciplines and ﬁelds of research. Sixteen such extensions are

described, along with some additional ones that are, so to speak, waiting

to be formally recognized through publication. In chapter 6 we look at

the history of the Perspective, starting in early 1974 with serious leisure

and then adding historical commentary on, ﬁrst, casual leisure and, then,

project-based leisure. Chapter 7 centers on the future and importance of

the serious leisure perspective, its place in a globalizing world, and some

of its critical links with other ﬁelds of knowledge and practice, notably

the nonproﬁt sector and preventive medicine.

Preface xiii

My hope in writing this book is that many more people than presently

around will wake up to the fact that leisure, even if some of it is trivial,

is not, as a whole and as a phenomenon in the twenty-ﬁrst century, a

trivial matter. The study of serious leisure roots, in part, in the failure of

modern sociologists to view leisure as a distinctive aspect of society and

social life. In 1974, I could ﬁnd no sociological deﬁnition of amateur or

hobbyist and no recognition in sociology (the discipline I was trained in)

of the unique role and status played by those who pursue amateur and

hobbyist activities. Regrettably not much has changed since that year. To

be sure, the occasional leisure-oriented article is published in the socio-

logical journals, but institutional sociology still mostly ignores this area

of social life. For example one hunts in vain for a session on leisure at a

typical annual meeting of the American Sociological Association or the

Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. And it is Mission

Impossible trying to ﬁnd leisure listed as an area of specialization in the

graduate programs in sociology offered in North American universities.

And the latter situation is hardly surprising: virtually no faculty member

in these programs has been trained in the sociology of leisure. It is the

chicken and the egg.

Yet the sociology of leisure is alive and well, albeit living in academic

locations far a ﬁeld from sociology departments. In units variously named

Leisure Studies, Leisure and Recreation, Leisure and Physical Education,

Parks and Leisure, and more recently, Leisure and Health Studies, the

sociology of leisure has grown into a vibrant branch of knowledge. So

it is not really that branch of the discipline which is weak, rather weak-

ness lies within the discipline itself. It is weak because it is ignoring a

side of social life that society itself takes very seriously, spends a great

deal of money on, and, for much of that society, sets its sights on. Say-

ings like “thank God it’s Friday” and “all work and no play makes Jack

[and Jane] a dull boy” should be pondered more closely by sociology

as a discipline.

This book, offering as it does, an organized and coherent view of a

large segment of the scholarly side of the sociology of leisure, might just

be what it takes to get sociology back on track in a ﬁeld that it helped

pioneer. Does anyone remember Veblen, Lundberg, Hollingshead, and

Riesman?

xxi

xiv Serious Leisure

Preface xv

Acknowledgements

First, many thanks to Mary Thompson of the University of Lethbridge

who most convincingly put the bug in my ear that an idea like the seri-

ous leisure perspective was valid, important, and therefore in need of

cultivating. As she taught her initial undergraduate class on serious

leisure, we both came to realize that this conceptual story was, in fact,

impossible to tell properly without substantial mention of the other

two forms. Mary taught in winter term 2005. In August that year Jenna

Hartel and I met by chance in an elevator at the annual meeting of the

American Sociological Association. Pen pals for at least a year, owing

to her own interest in serious leisure and information science, she subse-

quently observed that the ﬁrst should have its own website and that she

would be willing to help me develop it. That possibility galvanized me

into action: the website should be about the entire Perspective, not only

about its namesake. But, to have an effective site, it was ﬁrst required

that I write this book. The site (www.soci.ucalgary.ca/seriousleisure)

was ofﬁcially launched in early April 2006, and is closely coordinated

with these pages.

Finally, the editorial assistance of Laurence Mintz was, as always, of

excellent quality. I deeply appreciate his contributions to this boo

xxiii

xvi Serious Leisure

The Serious Leisure Perspective

The phrase “serious leisure perspective” is my name for the theoretic

framework that synthesizes three main forms of leisure, known as seri-

ous leisure, casual leisure, and project-based leisure. Research began

early in 1974 on the ﬁrst of these, and has continued since that time,

while work on casual leisure and then on project-based leisure came

subsequently. Within each form a variety of types and subtypes has also

emerged over the years. That the Perspective (wherever Perspective ap-

pears as shorthand for serious leisure perspective, to avoid confusion,

the ﬁrst letter will be capitalized) takes its name from the ﬁrst of these

should, in no way, suggest that I regard it, in some abstract sense, as the

most important or superior of the three. I hope the following pages will

demonstrate the folly of that kind of thinking. Rather the Perspective is

so titled, simply because it got its start in the study of serious leisure;

such leisure is, strictly from the standpoint of intellectual invention, the

godfather of the other two.

Furthermore serious leisure has become the benchmark from which

analyses of casual and project-based leisure have often been undertaken.

So naming the Perspective after the ﬁrst facilitates intellectual recogni-

tion; it keeps the idea in familiar territory for all concerned. Be that as it

may, I might have titled it “core activity perspective,” for all three forms

are labels for kinds of distinctive sets of interrelated actions or steps that

must be followed to achieve an outcome or product that the participant

ﬁnds attractive. For instance, in serious leisure, a core activity of alpine

skiing is descending snow-covered slopes, that of cabinet making is shap-

ing and ﬁnishing wood, and that of volunteer ﬁre ﬁghting is putting out

blazes and rescuing people from them. In each case, the participant takes

several interrelated steps to successfully ski down hill, make a cabinet,

or rescue someone. In casual leisure core activities, which are much less

complex than in serious leisure, are exempliﬁed in the actions required

2 Serious Leisure

to hold sociable conversations with friends, savor beautiful scenery, and

offer simple volunteer services (e.g., handing out leaﬂets, directing traf-

ﬁc in a parking lot, clearing snow off the neighborhood hockey rink). In

leisure projects, core activities are intense, though limited in time and

moderate in complexity, as seen in the actions of serving as scorekeeper

during an amateur sports tournament or serving as museum guide during

a special exhibition of artifacts. Engaging in the core activity (and its

component steps and actions) is a main feature that attracts participants

to the leisure in question and encourages them to return for more. In

short the core activity is a value in its own right, even if more strongly

held for some leisure activities than others.

Similarly, I might have dubbed this framework the “leisure experience

perspective.” After all each of the three forms refers to an identiﬁable kind

of experience had during free time. Indeed, it ﬁts all three of Mannell’s

(1999) conceptualizations of this experience, as subjectively deﬁned lei-

sure, as immediate conscious experience, and as post hoc satisfaction.

Still this label would be too limiting, for the Perspective is broader

than what people experience in their leisure. It also provides a way of

looking on the social, cultural, and historical context of that experience.

A similar problem undermines the suggestion made by Tomlinson (1993)

that serious leisure be called “committed leisure.” Though we shall see

later in this chapter that commitment is certainly an important attitude in

serious leisure, it is, nevertheless, too narrow to serve as a descriptor of

the latter. Moreover, the other two forms in the Perspective also generate

commitment on occasion.

Because the serious and casual forms have sometimes stirred discus-

sion about the relative merit of one or the other, let us be clear from the

outset that the serious leisure perspective looks on each as important in

its own way. That is, it is much less a question of which is best, than a

question of how well combinations of two or three of the forms serve

individuals, categories of individuals (e.g., sex, age, social class, religion,

nationality), and their larger communities and societies. This, in turn,

leads to such considerations as leisure lifestyle, optimal leisure lifestyle,

and social capital, all of which are, themselves, important concepts in

this framework.

The idea of perspective communicates at least three important points.

One, any perspective is a way of theoretically viewing leisure phenom-

ena. So, this one, too, provides a unique prism through which to look

at what people do in their free time. Two, as a theoretic framework, the

serious leisure perspective synthesizes the three forms, showing at once

The Serious Leisure Perspective 3

their distinctive features, their similarities, and their interrelationships.

Three, although it was never my intention as I moved from one study of

free-time activity to the next, my ﬁndings and theoretic musings have

nevertheless evolved into a typological map of the world of leisure. That

is, so far as I can tell at present, all leisure (at least in Western society) can

be classiﬁed according to one of the three forms. But, consistent with the

exploratory approach that has guided much of basic research in this ﬁeld,

open-ended inquiry and observation could, some day, suggest one or more

additional forms. Brieﬂy put the construction of scientiﬁc typologies, in

principle, never results in completed intellectual ediﬁces.

Additionally the serious leisure perspective is the product of extensive

exploratory research (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Stebbins, 2001c), some

of it more systematic, some of it less so. In general, it may be said that

it arose directly from open-ended observations or interviews, often both,

conducted on a wide range of leisure activities. Today the serious leisure

perspective is, in the words of Glaser and Strauss, a “formal grounded

theory.” Moreover, as such it is no longer strictly exploratory in scope,

for as we shall see from time to time, considerable conﬁrmatory work

has now been carried out, work designed to add precision and detail to

the basic Perspective as previously explored.

In the present chapter we take a look at the basics of serious leisure,

then, in chapter 2, I review the research on serious leisure as published

from, in most instances, the year 2000. In chapter 3 we look at the basics

of casual and project-based leisure as well as the much sparser research

that has been done in their name. In chapter 4 I ﬁll in the Perspective,

making it, as much as is possible given current knowledge, a proper

synthesis of the three forms rather than a simple typology of them. This

is accomplished by a process of elaboration using several concepts that

ﬁnd expression in each of the three forms. Chapter 5 looks at the diverse

extensions of the basic Perspective into areas of life where it has already

provided, or looks as though it may provide, a valid and useful explana-

tion of human motivation, group formation, collective action, and the

like. The history of the serious leisure perspective is presented in the next

chapter. The ﬁnal chapter explores the question of why it is necessary to

classify leisure activities. It also considers how the Perspective applies

outside the West, what it can offer to the world, how it relates to health

and well-being as well as its place is in the nonproﬁt sector.

My aim in all this is to provide a stand-alone, though reasonably

in-depth statement of the serious leisure perspective, which will serve

both the scholarly community and the larger public who want to learn

4 Serious Leisure

about it. But many details must necessarily be left out, for to add them,

would make this book far too dense and unwieldy. To signal where this

has happened, I refer from time to time, mostly in chapters 1 and 3, to

sources where the subject at hand can be examined in greater detail (a

bibliography, continually updated, listing all publications bearing on the

Perspective is available at www.soci.ucalgary.ca/seriousleisure). Chapters

1, 3, and 4 present the serious leisure perspective, and are therefore “must

reads.” The other chapters are important for anyone who wants to know

where this Perspective ﬁts in the modern world.

Inasmuch as this is, at bottom, a disquisition about basics and basic

concepts in leisure studies, we must of necessity open it with a deﬁni-

tional statement on the most fundamental of all ideas in that ﬁeld, namely,

leisure itself.

A Deﬁnition of Leisure

Starting with Aristotle, scholars, clergy, and journalists, among other

categories of humankind, have been weighing in with their deﬁnitions

of leisure. Given the scope of this book, it is unnecessary to review these

conceptualizations. Rather what is called for in this book is a working

deﬁnition of the concept that respects their insights into such activ-

ity, but that also logically ﬁts the serious leisure perspective, while

demarcating clearly the sphere of human life to which it applies. To

this end, leisure is deﬁned here as: uncoerced activity engaged in dur-

ing free time, which people want to do and, in either a satisfying or a

fulﬁlling way (or both), use their abilities and resources to succeed at

this. “Free time” is time away from unpleasant obligation, with pleasant

obligation being treated here as essentially leisure since homo otiosus,

leisure man, feels no signiﬁcant coercion to enact the activity in question

(Stebbins, 2000b).

Note that reference to “free choice”—a long-standing component

of standard deﬁnitions of leisure—is for reasons discussed in detail

elsewhere (Stebbins, 2005b), intentionally omitted from this deﬁnition.

Generally put choice is never completely free, but rather hedged about

with all sorts of conditions. This situation renders this concept and allied

ones such as freedom and state of mind useless as essential elements in

a basic deﬁnition (Juniu and Henderson, 2001). Note, too, there is no

reference in this deﬁnition to the moral basis of leisure; that is, contrary

to some stances taken in the past (e.g., Kaplan, 1960, pp. 22-25), leisure

in the serious leisure perspective can be either deviant or non-deviant

(see chapter 4 of the present volume).

The Serious Leisure Perspective 5

Nor is free time treated here as synonymous with leisure. We can be

bored in our free time, which can result from inactivity (“nothing to

do”) or from activity, which alas, is uninteresting, unstimulating. The

same can, of course, happen at work and in obligated nonwork settings.

Since boredom is a decidedly negative state of mind, it can be argued

that, logically, it is not leisure at all. For leisure is typically conceived

of as a positive mindset, composed of, among other sentiments, pleasant

expectations and recollections of activities and situations. Of course, it

happens at times that expectations turn out to be unrealistic, and we get

bored (or perhaps angry, frightened, or embarrassed) with the activity

in question, transforming it in our view into something quite other than

leisure. And all this may happen in free time, which exempliﬁes well

how such time can occupy a broader area of life than leisure, which is

nested within (Stebbins, 2003a).

Serious Leisure

Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or

volunteer core activity that people ﬁnd so substantial, interesting, and

fulﬁlling that, in the typical case, they launch themselves on a (leisure)

career centered on acquiring and expressing a combination of its special

skills, knowledge, and experience (modiﬁed from Stebbins, 1992, p. 3).

Serious leisure has been typically contrasted with “casual” or “unseri-

ous” leisure, which is considerably less substantial and offers no career

of the sort just described. It is deﬁned as an immediately, intrinsically

rewarding, relatively short-lived pleasurable core activity, requiring little

or no special training to enjoy it (Stebbins, 1997a, p. 18). Although I once

viewed casual leisure as residual, as all leisure falling outside the three

main types of serious leisure, this has turned out to be erroneous. For I

have observed, in recent years, a third kind of leisure, namely, project-

based leisure. It is a short-term, reasonably complicated, one-off or oc-

casional, though infrequent, creative undertaking (core activity) carried

out in free time, or time free of disagreeable obligation (Stebbins, 2005a;

on obligation and free time, see Stebbins, 2000b).

The Basic Serious Leisure Framework

The basic framework of all three forms—serious, casual, and proj-

ect-based leisure—is made up of the central deﬁning concepts that help

distinguish each form from the other two and from related concepts in

adjacent ﬁelds of research. These sets of concepts are, in turn, anchored

in broader social contexts, which are the subject of chapter 4.

6 Serious Leisure

As for serious leisure, it is constituted of three types: amateur pursuits,

hobbyist activities, and career volunteering. Amateurs are found in art,

science, sport, and entertainment, where they are inevitably linked, one

way or another, with professional counterparts who coalesce, along

with the public whom the two groups share, into a three-way system of

relations and relationships (the professional-amateur-public, or P-A-P,

system). Earlier (e.g., Stebbins, 1992a, chap. 2) I argued that the profes-

sionals should be identiﬁed and deﬁned according to theory developed

in the sociological study of the professions, a substantially more exact

procedure than the ones relying on the simplistic and not infrequently

commercially shaped commonsense images of these workers. Yet, apart

from me, I know of no one who has conceived of the professional coun-

terparts of a particular group of amateurs in these sociological terms.

Rather leisure studies researchers have been content to use the simpler

economic deﬁnition of professional as a person who is paid for the activity

in question. I now see the merit of their position, for what is important for

the study of amateurs and hobbyists is that some of them begin to make

some sort of living at the activity. Freed partly or wholly from having

to make a living in another ﬁeld, it becomes possible for these people

to devote more time to their serious leisure and thus, in some instances,

excel over their counterparts in leisure who can only pursue the activity

after a full day’s work elsewhere. That in some ﬁelds, mostly those in art,

sport, science, and entertainment, sociological professionals are actually

present is, in leisure studies, beside the point. That is, reaching such an

advanced stage of professionalization is a concern of the sociology of

work, not of the sociology of leisure.

As a result of this reasoning I now want to redeﬁne “professional” in

(economic rather than sociological) terms that relate better to amateurs

and hobbyists, namely, as someone who is dependent on the income

from an activity that other people pursue with little or no remuneration

as leisure. The income on which the professional is dependent may be

this person’s only source of money (i.e., full-time professional) or it may

be one of two or more sources of money (i.e., part-time professional).

Although some of these professionals may be sociological profession-

als, as just described, many economic professionals are in ﬁelds where

professionalization is only beginning.

This condition suggests a critical precaution: enactment of the core

activity by the professionals in a particular ﬁeld, to inﬂuence amateurs

there, must be sufﬁciently visible to those amateurs. If the amateurs, in

general, have no idea of the prowess of their professional counterparts, the

The Serious Leisure Perspective 7

latter become irrelevant as role models, and the leisure side of the activity

remains at a hobbyist level. These deﬁnitional modiﬁcations retain the

integrity of the earlier model, which states that amateurs and professionals

are locked in and therefore further deﬁned, in most instances, by their

place in a professional-amateur-public (P-A-P) system of relations, an

arrangement too complex to describe further in this book (for details see

Stebbins, 1979; 1992a, pp. 38-41; 2002, pp. 129-130).

Yoder’s study (1997) of tournament bass ﬁshing in the United States

engendered an important modiﬁcation of the original P-A-P model. He

found, ﬁrst, that ﬁshers here are amateurs, not hobbyists, and second, that

commodity producers serving both amateur and professional tournament

ﬁshers play a role signiﬁcant enough to warrant changing the original

triangular professional-amateur-public (P-A-P) system of relationships

ﬁrst set out in Stebbins (1979). In other words, in the social world of

these amateurs the “strangers” (Unruh, 1979) are a highly important

group consisting, in the main, of national ﬁshing organizations, tourna-

ment promoters, and manufacturers and distributors of sporting goods

and services. Signiﬁcant numbers of amateurs make, sell, or advertise

commodities for the sport. And the professional ﬁshers are supported by

the commodity agents by way of paid entry fees for tournaments, provi-

sion of boats and ﬁshing tackle, and subsidies for living expenses. Top

professionals are given a salary to promote ﬁshing commodities. Yoder’s

(1997, p. 416) modiﬁcation results in a more complicated triangular

model, consisting of a system of relationships linking commodity agents,

professionals/commodity agents, and amateurs/publics (C-PC-AP).

The new C-PC-AP model sharpens our understanding of some other

amateur ﬁelds as well. One of them is stand-up comedy, where the in-

ﬂuence of a manager, booking agent, or comedy club owner can weigh

heavily on the career of the performer (see Stebbins, 1990, chap. 7). It is

likewise for certain types of entertainment magicians and the magic deal-

ers and booking agents who inhabit their social world (Stebbins, 1993a).

And Wilson (1995) describes a similar, “symbiotic” relationship between

British marathon runners and the media. But, for amateurs in other ﬁelds

of art, science, sport, and entertainment, who are also linked to sets of

strangers operating in their special social worlds, these strangers play a

much more subdued role compared with the four ﬁelds just mentioned.

Thus for many amateur activities, the simpler, P-A-P model still offers

the most valid explanation of their social structure.

It was through the study of amateurs that I came to realize that the

standard practice among sociologists of treating all professionals as of

8 Serious Leisure

a kind was short sighted. Professionals in the arts, science, sport, and

entertainment ﬁelds are quite different from those in the “professions”

(e.g., law, medicine, teaching, accounting, engineering). The ﬁrst set

of workers may be viewed as public-centered and the second as client-

centered. The ﬁrst serve publics in art, sport, science, and entertainment,

whereas the second serve various clients such as patients or purchasers

of a highly skilled service offered by, say, a lawyer, architect, counsellor,

engineer, or accountant (Stebbins, 1992a, p. 22).

Hobbyists lack the professional alter ego (as redeﬁned above) of

amateurs, although they sometimes have commercial equivalents and

often have small publics who take an interest in what they do. Hobby-

ists are classiﬁed according to ﬁve categories: collectors, makers and

tinkerers, activity participants (in noncompetitive, rule-based, pursuits

such as ﬁshing and barbershop singing), players of sports and games (in

competitive, rule-based activities with no professional counterparts like

long-distance running and competitive swimming) and the enthusiasts

of the liberal arts hobbies. The rules guiding rule-based pursuits are, for

the most part, either subcultural (informal) or regulatory (formal). Thus

seasoned hikers in North America’s Rocky Mountains know they should,

for example, stay on established trails, pack out all garbage, be prepared

for sudden changes in weather, and make noise to scare off bears.

The liberal arts hobbyists are enamored of the systematic acquisition

of knowledge for its own sake. Many of them accomplish this by read-

ing voraciously in a ﬁeld of art, sport, cuisine, language, culture, history,

science, philosophy, politics, or literature (Stebbins, 1994a). But some

of them go beyond this to expand their knowledge still further through

cultural tourism, documentary videos, television programs, and similar

resources. Although the matter has yet to be studied through research, it is

theoretically possible to separate buffs from consumers in the liberal arts

hobbies of sport, cuisine, and the ﬁne and entertainment arts. Some people

—call them consumers—more or less uncritically consume restaurant

fare, sports events, or displays of art (concerts, shows, exhibitions) as pure

entertainment and sensory stimulation (casual leisure), whereas others

—call them buffs—participate in these same situations as more or less

knowledgeable experts, as serious leisure (for more on this distinction,

see Stebbins 2002, chap. 5). The ever-rarer Renaissance man of our day

may also be classiﬁed here, even though such people avoid specializing

in one ﬁeld of learning to acquire, instead, a somewhat more superﬁcial

knowledge of a variety of ﬁelds. Being broadly well-read is a (liberal

arts) hobby of its own.

The Serious Leisure Perspective 9

What I have come to refer to as “the nature-challenge” hobbies (Steb-

bins, 2005c) fall under the theoretic heading of noncompetitive, rule-

based activity participation. True, actual competitions are sometimes

held in, for instance, snowboarding, kayaking, and mountain biking

(e.g., fastest time over a particular course), but mostly beating nature

is thrill enough. Moreover, other nature hobbies exist, which are also

challenging, but in very different ways. Some, most notably ﬁshing and

hunting, in essence exploit the natural environment. Still others center

on appreciation of the outdoors, among them hiking, backpacking, bird

watching, and horseback riding (Stebbins, 1998a, p. 59).

Turning now to volunteering, Cnaan, Handy, and Wadsworth (1996)

identiﬁed four dimensions they found running throughout the several

deﬁnitions of volunteering they examined. These dimensions are free

choice, remuneration, structure, and intended beneﬁciaries. The fol-

lowing volitional deﬁnition was created from these four: volunteering

is uncoerced help offered either formally or informally with no or, at

most, token pay and done for the beneﬁt of both other people (beyond the

volunteer’s family) and the volunteer (modiﬁed from Stebbins, 2004a, p.

5). This conception of volunteering revolves, in signiﬁcant part, around a

central subjective motivational question: it must be determined whether

volunteers feel they are engaging in an enjoyable (casual leisure), ful-

ﬁlling (serious leisure), or enjoyable or fulﬁlling (project-based leisure)

core activity that they have had the option to accept or reject on their own

terms. A key element in the leisure conception of volunteering is the felt

absence of moral coercion to do the volunteer activity, an element that,

in “marginal volunteering” (Stebbins, 2001d) may be experienced in

degrees, as more or less coercive. Nevertheless the reigning conception

of volunteering in nonproﬁt sector research is not that of volunteering

as leisure, but volunteering as unpaid work. This economic conception

deﬁnes volunteering as the absence of payment for a livelihood, whether

in money or in kind. This deﬁnition largely avoids the messy question

of motivation so crucial to the leisure conception.

Concerning the dimension of free choice, the language of (lack of)

“coercion,” is preferred, as indicated in the earlier section on the deﬁnition

of leisure, because that of “free choice” is hedged about with numerous

problems. The logical difﬁculties of including obligation in deﬁnitions

of volunteering militate against including this condition in the foregoing

deﬁnition (see Stebbins, 2001d). As for remuneration, volunteers retain

their voluntary spirit providing they avoid becoming dependent on any

money received from their volunteering. Structurally, volunteers may

10 Serious Leisure

serve formally in collaboration with legally chartered organizations or

informally in situations involving small groups, sets, or networks of

friends, neighbors, and the like that have no such legal basis. Finally, it

follows from what was said previously about altruism and self-interest

in volunteering that both the volunteers and those whom they help ﬁnd

beneﬁts in such activity. It should be noted, however, that the ﬁeld of

serious leisure, or career, volunteering, even if it does cover consider-

able ground, is still narrower than that of volunteering in general, which

includes helping as casual leisure and volunteering in projects as project-

based leisure.

The descriptive taxonomy published by the author (Stebbins, 1998a,

pp. 74-80), which consists of sixteen types of organizational volunteer-

ing, shows the scope of career volunteering. Career volunteers provide

a great variety of services in education, science, civic affairs (advocacy

projects, professional and labor organizations), spiritual development,

health, economic development, religion, politics, government (programs

and services), human relationships, recreation, and the arts. Some of

these volunteers work in the ﬁelds of safety or the physical environment,

whereas others prefer to provide necessities (e.g., food, clothing, shelter)

or support services. Although much of career volunteering appears to be

connected in some way with an organization of some sort, the scope of

this leisure can be even broader, including the kinds of helping devoted

individuals do for social movements or for neighbors or friends. Still,

the deﬁnition of serious leisure restricts attention everywhere to volun-

teering in which the participant ﬁnds a career in acquiring a combina-

tion of skill, knowledge, and experience gained through more or less

continuous and substantial helping. Therefore, one-time donations of

money, organs, services, and so forth are more accurately classiﬁed as

voluntary action of another sort, as are instances of casual volunteering,

which include ushering, stufﬁng envelops, and handing out programs

as an aid to commercial, professional, or serious leisure undertakings

(Stebbins, 1996b).

My own study of francophone volunteers in urban Alberta, Canada

(Stebbins, 1998d) concentrated on the careers, costs and rewards, life-

styles, and community contributions of “key” volunteers. A key volunteer

is a highly committed organizational or communitarian servant, working

in one or two enduring, ofﬁcial, responsible posts within one or more

grassroots groups or organizations. One section of the study dealt with

two questions, both being sources of considerable confusion in the ﬁeld

of research on voluntary action and citizen participation: is volunteer-

The Serious Leisure Perspective 11

ing done by choice or by obligation and is it done as work or as leisure?

The study revealed that most of the Alberta key volunteers feel a general

obligation to volunteer in their local francophone community, but that

they also say they may choose the particular posts they will work in and

how long they will stay in there.

Casual leisure volunteering and volunteering in leisure projects will

be considered in chapter 3.

Six Distinguishing Qualities

Serious leisure is further deﬁned by six distinguishing qualities (or

characteristics, as they are sometimes described), found among amateurs,

hobbyists, and volunteers alike (Stebbins, 1992a, pp. 6-8). One is the

occasional need to persevere, such as in confronting danger (Fine, 1988,

p. 181), supporting a team during a losing season (Gibson, Willming,

and Holdnak, 2002, pp. 405-408), or managing embarrassment (Floro,

1978, p. 198). Yet, it is clear that positive feelings about the activity

come, to some extent, from sticking with it through thick and thin, from

conquering adversity. A second quality is, as already indicated, that of

ﬁnding a leisure career in the endeavor, shaped as it is by its own special

contingencies, turning points and stages of achievement or involvement.

Because of the widespread tendency to see the idea of career as applying

only to occupations, note that, in this deﬁnition, the term is much more

broadly used, following Goffman’s (1961, pp. 127-128) elaboration of

the concept of “moral career.” Broadly conceived of, careers are available

in all substantial, complicated roles, including especially those in work,

leisure, deviance, politics, religion, and interpersonal relationships.

Careers in serious leisure commonly rest on a third quality: signiﬁ-

cant personal effort using their specially acquired knowledge, training,

experience, or skill, and, indeed at times, all four. Examples include such

characteristics as showmanship, athletic prowess, scientiﬁc knowledge,

and long experience in a role. Fourth, eight durable beneﬁts, or broad

outcomes, of serious leisure have so far been identiﬁed, mostly from

research on amateurs. They are self-actualization, self-enrichment, self-

expression, regeneration or renewal of self, feelings of accomplishment,

enhancement of self-image, social interaction and belongingness, and

lasting physical products of the activity (e.g., a painting, scientiﬁc paper,

piece of furniture). A further beneﬁt—self-gratiﬁcation, or the combina-

tion of superﬁcial enjoyment and deep personal fulﬁlment—is also one

of the main beneﬁts of casual leisure, to the extent that the enjoyable

part dominates. In general a beneﬁt is an agreeable outcome, anticipated

12 Serious Leisure

or not, of a person’s participation in a leisure activity. That outcome

may be anything appealing to the participant, whether physical, social,

psychological, or something else. Durable beneﬁts number among the

consequences of pursuing serious leisure, and are therefore not to be

confused with its motivational antecedents: the rewards of such activity

(discussed later).1

A ﬁfth quality of serious leisure is the unique ethos that grows up

around each instance of it. An ethos is the spirit of the community of

serious leisure participants, as manifested in shared attitudes, practices,

values, beliefs, goals, and so on. The social world of the participants is

the organizational milieu in which the associated ethos—at bottom a

cultural formation—is expressed (as attitudes, beliefs, values) or real-

ized (as practices, goals). Unruh (1980, p. 277) developed the following

deﬁnition of social world:

A social world must be seen as a unit of social organization which is diffuse and

amorphous in character. Generally larger than groups or organizations, social worlds

are not necessarily deﬁned by formal boundaries, membership lists, or spatial ter-

ritory....A social world must be seen as an internally recognizable constellation of

actors, organizations, events, and practices which have coalesced into a perceived

sphere of interest and involvement for participants. Characteristically, a social world

lacks a powerful centralized authority structure and is delimited by. . .effective com-

munication and not territory nor formal group membership.

In a second paper Unruh added that the typical social world is character-

ized by voluntary identiﬁcation, by a freedom to enter into and depart

from it (Unruh, 1979). Moreover, because it is so diffuse, ordinary

members are only partly involved in the full range of its activities. After

all, a social world may be local, regional, multiregional, national, even,

international. Third, people in complex societies such as Canada and the

United States are often members of several social worlds. Finally, social

worlds are held together, to an important degree, by semiformal, or me-

diated, communication. They are rarely heavily bureaucratized yet, due

to their diffuseness, they are rarely characterized by intense face-to-face

interaction. Rather, communication is typically mediated by newsletters,

posted notices, telephone messages, mass mailings, Internet communi-

cations, radio and television announcements, and similar means, with

the strong possibility that the Internet could become the most popular

of these in the future.

The sixth quality revolves around the preceding ﬁve: participants

in serious leisure tend to identify strongly with their chosen pursuits.

In contrast, casual leisure, though hardly humiliating or despicable, is

The Serious Leisure Perspective 13

nonetheless too ﬂeeting, mundane, and commonplace for most people

to ﬁnd a distinctive identity there. In fact, as the next section shows, a

serious leisure pursuit can hold greater appeal as an identiﬁer than a

person’s work role.

Rewards, Costs, and Motivation

In addition, research on serious leisure has led to the discovery of a

distinctive set of rewards for each activity examined (Stebbins, 2001a,

p. 13). In these studies the participant’s leisure fulﬁlment has been found

to stem from a constellation of particular rewards gained from the activ-

ity, be it boxing, ice climbing, or giving dance lessons to the elderly.2

Furthermore, the rewards are not only fulﬁlling in themselves, but also

fulﬁlling as counterweights to the costs encountered in the activity. That

is, every serious leisure activity contains its own combination of tensions,

dislikes and disappointments, which each participant must confront in

some way. For instance, an amateur football player may not always like

attending daily practices, being bested occasionally by more junior play-

ers when there, and being required to sit on the sidelines from time to

time while others get experience at his position. Yet he may still regard

this activity as highly fulﬁlling—as (serious) leisure—because it also

offers certain powerful rewards.

Put more precisely, then, the drive to ﬁnd fulﬁllment in serious leisure

is the drive to experience the rewards of a given leisure activity, such

that its costs are seen by the participant as more or less insigniﬁcant by

comparison. This is at once the meaning of the activity for the participant

and his or her motivation for engaging in it. It is this motivational sense

of the concept of reward that distinguishes it from the idea of durable

beneﬁt set out earlier, a concept that, as I said, emphasizes outcomes

rather than antecedent conditions. Nonetheless, the two ideas constitute

two sides of the same social psychological coin.

The rewards of a serious leisure pursuit are the more or less routine

values that attract and hold its enthusiasts. Every serious leisure career

both frames and is framed by the continuous search for these rewards,

a search that takes months, and in many pursuits, years before the par-

ticipant consistently ﬁnds deep fulﬁllment in his or her amateur, hobby-

ist, or volunteer role. The ten rewards presented below emerged in the

course of various exploratory studies of amateurs, hobbyists, and career

volunteers. As the following list shows, the rewards of serious leisure

are, numerically speaking, predominantly personal.

14 Serious Leisure

Personal rewards

1. Personal enrichment (cherished experiences)

2. Self-actualization (developing skills, abilities, knowledge)

3. Self-expression (expressing skills, abilities, knowledge already

developed)

4. Self-image (known to others as a particular kind of serious leisure

participant)

5. Self-gratiﬁcation (combination of superﬁcial enjoyment and deep

fulﬁlment)

6. Re-creation (regeneration) of oneself through serious leisure after

a day’s work

7. Financial return (from a serious leisure activity)

Social rewards

8. Social attraction (associating with other serious leisure participants,

with clients as a volunteer, participating in the social world of the

activity)

9. Group accomplishment (group effort in accomplishing a serious

leisure project; senses of helping, being needed, being altruistic)

10. Contribution to the maintenance and development of the group

(including senses of helping, being needed, being altruistic in making

the contribution)

In the various studies on amateurs, hobbyists, and volunteers, these

rewards, depending on the activity, were often given different weight-

ings by the interviewees to reﬂect their importance relative to each other.

Nonetheless, some common ground exists, for the studies do show that,

in terms of their personal importance, most serious leisure participants

rank self-enrichment and self-gratiﬁcation as number one and number

two. Moreover, to ﬁnd either reward, participants must have acquired

sufﬁcient levels of relevant skill, knowledge, and experience and be in

a position to use these acquisitions (Stebbins, 1979; 1993c). In other

words, self-actualization, which was often ranked third in importance,

is also highly rewarding in serious leisure.

Recently several scholars have joined me in arguing that serious lei-

sure experiences also have a negative side that must not be overlooked

(Codina, 1999; Harries and Currie, 1998; Siegenthaler and Gonsalez,

1997; Lee, Dattilo, and Howard, 1994). In line with this reasoning, I

have always asked my respondents to discuss the costs they face in their

serious leisure. But so far, it has been impossible to develop a general

list of them, as has been done for rewards, since the costs tend to be

highly speciﬁc to each serious leisure activity. Thus each activity I have

The Serious Leisure Perspective 15

studied to date has been found to have its own constellation of costs, but

as the respondents see them, they are invariably and heavily outweighed

in importance by the rewards of the activity. In general terms the costs

discovered to date may be classiﬁed as disappointments, dislikes, or ten-

sions. Nonetheless, all research on serious leisure considered, its costs

are not nearly as commonly examined as its rewards, leaving thus a gap

in our understanding that must be ﬁlled.

The costs of leisure may also be seen as one type of leisure constraint.

Leisure constraints, are deﬁned as “factors that limit people’s participation

in leisure activities, use of services, and satisfaction or enjoyment of cur-

rent activities” (Scott, 2003, p. 75). Costs certainly dilute the satisfaction

or enjoyment participants experience in pursuing certain leisure activities,

even if, in their interpretation of them, those participants ﬁnd such costs,

or constraints, overridden by the powerful rewards also found there.

Thrills and Psychological Flow

Thrills are part of this reward system. Thrills, or high points, are the

sharply exciting events and occasions that stand out in the minds of those

who pursue a kind of serious leisure. In general, they tend to be associated

with the rewards of self-enrichment and, to a lesser extent, those of self-

actualization and self-expression. That is, thrills in serious leisure may

be seen as situated manifestations of certain more abstract rewards; they

are what participants in some ﬁelds seek as concrete expressions of the

rewards they ﬁnd there. They are important, in substantial part, because

they motivate the participant to stick with the pursuit in hope of ﬁnding

similar experiences again and again and because they demonstrate that

diligence and commitment may pay off.

Over the years, I have identiﬁed a number of thrills that come with the

serious leisure activities I studied. These thrills are exceptional instances

of the ﬂow experience. Thus, although the idea of ﬂow originated with

the work of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1990), and has therefore an intel-

lectual history quite separate from that of serious leisure, it does never-

theless happen, depending on the activity, that it is a key motivational

force there. For example I found ﬂow was highly prized in the hobbies of

kayaking, mountain/ice climbing, and snowboarding (Stebbins, 2005c).

What then is ﬂow?

The intensity with which some participants approach their leisure

suggests that, there, they may at times be in psychological ﬂow. Flow,

a form of optimal experience, is possibly the most widely discussed and

studied generic intrinsic reward in the psychology of work and leisure.3

16 Serious Leisure

Although many types of work and leisure generate little or no ﬂow for their

participants, those that do are found primarily the “devotee occupations”

(Stebbins, 2004b) and serious leisure. Still, it appears that each work and

leisure activity capable of producing ﬂow does so in terms unique to it.

And it follows that each of these activities must be carefully studied to

discover the properties of their core that contributes to the distinctive ﬂow

experience it offers.

In his theory of optimal experience, Csikszentmihalyi (1990, pp. 3-

5, 54) describes and explains the psychological foundation of the many

ﬂow activities in work and leisure, as exempliﬁed in chess, dancing,

surgery, and rock climbing. Flow is “autotelic” experience, or the

sensation that comes with the actual enacting of intrinsically reward-

ing activity. Over the years, Csikszentmihalyi (1990, pp. 49-67) has

identiﬁed and explored eight components of this experience. It is

easy to see how this quality of complex core activity, when present,

is sufﬁciently rewarding and, it follows, highly valued to endow it

with many of the qualities of serious leisure, thereby rendering the

two, at the motivational level, inseparable in several ways. And this even

though most people tend to think of work and leisure as vastly different.

The eight components are

1. Sense of competence in executing the activity;

2. Requirement of concentration;

3. Clarity of goals of the activity;

4. Immediate feedback from the activity;

5. Sense of deep, focused involvement in the activity;

6. Sense of control in completing the activity;

7. Loss of self-consciousness during the activity;

8. Sense of time is truncated during the activity.

These components are self-evident, except possibly for the ﬁrst and the

sixth. With reference to the ﬁrst, ﬂow fails to develop when the activity

is either too easy or too difﬁcult; to experience ﬂow the participant must

feel capable of performing a moderately challenging activity. The sixth

component refers to the perceived degree of control the participant has

over execution of the activity. This is not a matter of personal competence;

rather it is one of degree of maneuverability in the fact of uncontrollable

external forces, a condition well illustrated in situations faced by the

mountain hobbyists mentioned above, as when the water level suddenly

rises on the river or an unpredicted snowstorm results in a whiteout on

a mountain snowboard slope.

The Serious Leisure Perspective 17

Flow was found to be a cardinal motivator in mountaineering, kayak-

ing, and snowboarding, even while it is only an occasional state of mind

for participants. That is, in any given outing in one of these hobbies,

participants only experience ﬂow some of the time. Meanwhile it is not

even this central, or even present at all, in some other outdoor hobbies.

It does not, for instance, seem to characterize much of mountain scram-

bling (hiking to mountain peaks, possible when technical equipment is

not needed), backpacking, or horseback riding. By contrast, it is certainly

a motivational feature in mountain biking as well as cross-country and

downhill skiing. Similar patterns of ﬂow show up in the performing ﬁne

and entertainment arts, the active hobbies (especially activity participa-

tion and sport and games), and certain career volunteering ﬁelds such as

emergency medical service and volunteer ﬁre ﬁghting.

Is ﬂow experienced in casual and project-based leisure? Certainly

there are thrills to be found there as well, as in a roller coaster ride or

volunteer ushering at a concert of a symphony orchestra (hearing thrilling

passages of the music being played). But components of ﬂow 1, 2, and 6

are found only in serious leisure (and some forms of work), suggesting

that, in the serious leisure perspective, ﬂow is truly experienced only in

certain kinds of serious leisure.

Costs, Uncontrollability, and Marginality

From the earlier statement about costs and rewards, it is evident why

the desire to participate in the core amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer ac-

tivity can become for some participants some of the time signiﬁcantly

uncontrollable. This is because it engenders in its practitioners the de-

sire to engage in the activity beyond the time or the money (if not both)

available for it. As a professional violinist once counseled his daughter,

“Rachel, never marry an amateur violinist! He will want to play quartets

all night” (from Bowen, 1935, p. 93). There seems to be an almost universal

desire to upgrade: to own a better set of golf clubs, buy a more pow-

erful telescope, take more dance lessons perhaps from a renowned (and

consequently more expensive) professional, and so forth. The same

applies to hobbyist and volunteer pursuits.

Chances are therefore good that some serious leisure enthusiasts will be

eager to spend more time at and money on the core activity than is likely

to be countenanced by certain signiﬁcant others who also makes demands

on that time and money. The latter may soon come to the interpretation

that the enthusiast is more enamored of the core leisure activity than of,

say, the partner or spouse.4 Charges of selﬁshness may, then, not be long

18 Serious Leisure

off. I found in my research on serious leisure that attractive activity and

selﬁshness are natural partners (Stebbins, 2001a, chap. 4). Whereas some

casual leisure and even project-based leisure can also be uncontrollable,

the marginality hypothesis (stated below) implies that such a proclivity

is generally signiﬁcantly stronger among serious leisure participants.

Selﬁshness is an ethical question seldom raised in leisure studies.

Uncontrollable or not serious leisure activities, given their intense

appeal, can also be viewed as behavioral expressions of the participants’

central life interests in those activities. In his book by the same title,

Robert Dubin (1992) deﬁnes this interest as “that portion of a person’s

total life in which energies are invested in both physical/intellectual

activities and in positive emotional states.” Sociologically, a central life

interest is often associated with a major role in life. And since they can

only emerge from positive emotional states, obsessive and compulsive

activities can never become central life interests.

Finally, I have argued over the years that amateurs, and sometimes

even the activities they pursue, are marginal in society, for amateurs are

neither dabblers (casual leisure) nor professionals (see also Stebbins,

1979). Moreover, studies of hobbyists and career volunteers show that

they and some of their activities are just as marginal and for many of

the same reasons (Stebbins, 1996a; 1998d). Several properties of serious

leisure give substance to these observations. One, although seemingly

illogical according to common sense, is that serious leisure is charac-

terized empirically by an important degree of positive commitment to

a pursuit (Stebbins, 1992a, pp. 51-52). This commitment is measured,

among other ways, by the sizeable investments of time and energy in

the leisure made by its devotees and participants. Two, serious leisure is

pursued with noticeable intentness, with such passion that Erving Goff-

man (1963, pp. 144-145) once branded amateurs and hobbyists as the

“quietly disafﬁliated.” People with such orientations toward their leisure

are marginal compared with people who go in for the ever-popular forms

of much of casual leisure.

Career

Leisure career, introduced earlier as a central component of the deﬁ-

nition of serious leisure and as one of its six distinguishing qualities, is

important enough as a concept in this exposition of the basics of this form

of leisure to warrant still further discussion. One reason for this special

treatment is that a person’s sense of the unfolding of his or her career

in any complex role, leisure roles included, can be, at times, a powerful

The Serious Leisure Perspective 19

motive to act there.5 And, in attempting to counter Parker’s (1996, pp.

327-328) criticism of my use of the idea of career in the serious leisure

perspective, note that I am speaking, here, of “subjective career,” as

opposed to the “objective” kind (Stebbins, 1970a; 2001a, pp.129-131).

For example, a woman who knits a sweater that a friend praises highly

is likely to feel some sense of her own abilities in this hobby and be

motivated to continue in it, possibly trying more complicated patterns.

Athletes who win awards for excellence in their sport can get from this

a similar jolt of enthusiasm for participation there.

Exploratory research on careers in serious leisure has so far proceeded

from a broad, rather loose deﬁnition: a leisure career is the typical course,

or passage, of a type of amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer that carries the per-

son into and through a leisure role and possibly into and through a work

role. The essence of any career, whether in work, leisure, or elsewhere, lies

in the temporal continuity of the activities associated with it. Moreover,

we are accustomed to thinking of this continuity as one of accumulating

rewards and prestige, as progress along these lines from some starting

point, even though continuity may also include career retrogression. In the

worlds of sport and entertainment, for instance, athletes and artists may

reach performance peaks early on, after which the prestige and rewards

diminish as the limelight shifts to younger, sometimes more capable

practitioners. Serious leisure careers have been empirically examined in

my own research and that of Baldwin and Norris (1999).

Career continuity may occur predominantly within, between, or outside

organizations. Careers in organizations such as a community orchestra or

hobbyist association only rarely involve the challenge of the “bureaucratic

crawl,” to use the imagery of C. Wright Mills. In other words, little or no

hierarchy exists for them to climb. Nevertheless, the amateur or hobby-

ist still gains a profound sense of continuity, and hence career, from his

or her more or less steady development as a skilled, experienced, and

knowledgeable participant in a particular form of serious leisure and

from the deepening fulﬁlment that accompanies this kind of personal

growth. Moreover some volunteer careers may be intra-organizational,

a good example of this being available in the world of the barbershop

singer (Stebbins, 1996a, chap. 3).

Still, many amateurs and volunteers as well as some hobbyists have

careers that bridge two or more organizations. For them, career continuity

stems from their growing reputations as skilled, knowledgeable practi-

tioners and, based on this image, from ﬁnding increasingly better leisure

opportunities available through various outlets (as in different teams,

20 Serious Leisure

orchestras, organizations, tournaments, exhibitions, journals, confer-

ences, contests, shows, and the like). Meanwhile, still other amateurs and

hobbyists who pursue noncollective lines of leisure (e.g., tennis, paint-

ing, clowning, golf, entertainment magic) are free of even this marginal

afﬁliation with an organization. The extra-organizational career of the

informal volunteer, the forever willing and sometimes highly skilled and

knowledgeable helper of friends and neighbors is of this third type.

Serious leisure participants who stick with their activities eventually

pass through four, possibly ﬁve career stages: beginning, development,

establishment, maintenance, and decline. But the boundaries separating

these stages are imprecise, for as the condition of continuity suggests,

the participant passes largely imperceptibly from one to the next. The

beginning lasts as long as is necessary for interest in the activity to take

root. Development begins when the interest has taken root and its pursuit

becomes more or less routine and systematic. Serious leisure participants

advance to the establishment stage once they have moved beyond the

requirement of having to learn the basics of their activity. During the

maintenance stage, the leisure career is in full bloom; here participants

are now able to enjoy to the utmost their pursuit of it, the uncertainties

of getting established having been, for the most part, put behind them.

By no means all serious leisure participants face decline, but those who

do, may experience it because of deteriorating mental or physical skills.

And it appears to happen—though I know not how often—that the bloom

simply falls off the rose; that leisure participants sometimes reach a point

of diminishing returns in the activity, getting out of it all they believe is

available for them. Now it is less fulﬁlling, perhaps on occasion even

boring. Now it is time to search for a new activity. A more detailed de-

scription of the career framework and its ﬁve stages, along with empirical

support for them, is available elsewhere (Stebbins, 1992a, chap. 5; on

hobbyist careers, see Stebbins, 1996a; Heuser, 2005).

Although this can vary according to where in their careers participants

in serious leisure are, I have observed over the years that, at any one

point time, they can be classiﬁed as either devotees or participants. The

devotees are highly dedicated to their pursuits, whereas the participants

are only moderately interested in it, albeit signiﬁcantly more so than

dabblers. Participants typically greatly outnumber devotees. Along this

dimension devotees and participants are operationally distinguished

primarily by the different amounts of time they commit to their hobby,

as manifested in engaging in the core activity, training or preparing for

it, reading about it, and the like.

The Serious Leisure Perspective 21

This is, however, a rather crude scale of intensity of involvement in a

serious leisure activity, a weakness not missed by Siegenthaler and O’Dell

(2003, p. 51). Their ﬁndings from a study of older golfers and successful

aging revealed that data on leisure career are more effectively considered

according to three types, labeled by them as “social,” “moderate,” and

“core devotee.” The moderate is equivalent to the participant, whereas

the social player falls into a class of players who are more skilled and

involved than dabblers but less skilled and involved than the moderates

(participants). To keep terminology consistent with past theory and

research and the generality of the earlier two terms, I suggest we cali-

brate this new, more detailed, involvement scale with appropriate, new

terms: participant, moderate devotee, and core devotee. The important

contribution by Siegenthaler and O’Dell to revision of this part of the

Perspective is acknowledged.

Recreational Specialization

Recreational specialization and serious leisure have in common that

they are complex leisure activity: activity requiring some combination

of substantial skill, knowledge, and experience to carry out in a fulﬁlling

way its many different and highly interrelated facets. Recreational special-

ization is both process and product. As process it refers to a progressive

narrowing of interests within a complex leisure activity; ‘a continuum

of behavior from the general to the particular’ (Bryan, 1977, p. 175). As

product it refers to the fact that a person has, in this fashion, narrowed

his interests in the activity. Hobson Bryan coined the term and pioneered

the theoretical perspective in which it is embedded. An inductive, partici-

pant observational study of specialization in trout ﬁshing served as the

empirical basis for his theoretical ideas. Bryan observed that, as people

become more immersed in this hobby, they tend to specialize in it. That

is, they come, for instance, to ﬁsh only a certain species of trout, ﬁsh

using only “barbless” hooks, ﬁsh only with artiﬁcial ﬂies, or ﬁsh in either

streams or lakes. Thus there is often also a specialization in equipment

accompanying this narrowing of interests.

Bryan found a historical sense of growing personal involvement and

improvement was seen, in itself, to spur people on in their participation

in and commitment to their specialty. Scott and Schafer (2001), after

reviewing the literature on recreational specialization, developed

their own conceptualization of it, seeing it as a process entailing a

progression in behavior, skill, and commitment. That is, with increasing

skill, knowledge, and commitment related to a complex leisure activity,

22 Serious Leisure

behavior tends to become ever more focused on a specialized facet of it,

usually accomplished in parallel with a growing emotional attachment

to it.

The similarities and differences between serious leisure and recre-

ational specialization are considered in detail in a separate publication

(Stebbins, 2005g). In general the easiest way to compare the two is to

show where recreational specialization ﬁts within the serious leisure

framework. Taken as an aspect of serious leisure, specialization may be

seen as part of the leisure career experienced in those complex activities

that offer participants who want to focus their interests an opportunity

to specialize. In particular, when specialization occurs, it unfolds as a

process within the development or establishment stage, possibly spanning

the two, or should the participant change specialties, it unfolds within

the maintenance stage. In career terminology, developing a specialty is

a career turning point.

Conclusions

This, then, is the basic conceptualization of serious leisure. It repre-

sents my latest thinking on this form, including my most recent efforts to

shape the deﬁnitions of key terms. It also includes either reference to or,

more profoundly, incorporation of several related ideas that add clarity

and depth to this basic statement. Thus constraint, beneﬁt (in the broad

sense), and involvement have been referenced here for the ﬁrst time in

the serious leisure perspective. This reference is superﬁcial, and much

remains to be done to bring these three into the Perspective as integral

concepts. But at least initial mention has now been made of them. The

subject has been broached. By comparison I have given here, for the ﬁrst

time, somewhat more attention to recreational specialization; it now plays

a more visible role in the serious leisure side of the Perspective. Here

too, however, some theoretic work remains to be done.

Some time ago I introduced ﬂow in the discussion of motivation and

serious leisure (see chap. 6 for information on when this occurred). Yet,

every time I write about ﬂow and serious leisure, I seem to ﬁnd some

more ways of relating the two. As noted ﬂow is not experienced in

many kinds of serious leisure, but in those where it is experienced,

it is highly valued; it is a powerful reason for engaging in the core

activity. So the present statement is quite likely not the last word on

ﬂow and serious leisure; the appeal of ﬂow is such that it will continue

to be studied, and as a result, theory in this area will continue to grow

and change.

The Serious Leisure Perspective 23

So, while research and theorizing continue in the area of ﬂow, work

is also being carried out on other aspects of serious leisure. It is to this

latest empirical support for this form that we now turn.

Notes

1. This deﬁnition of durable beneﬁt is similar, if not identical, to the ﬁrst of Driver’s

(2003, p. 31) three deﬁnitions of beneﬁt. Driver’s work makes it clear that the

concept of beneﬁt in leisure studies is far broader than that of durable beneﬁt used

in the serious leisure perspective.

2. I have recently taken to using the term “fulﬁllment,” because it points to a fulﬁll-

ing experience, or more precisely, to a set of chronological experiences leading

to development to the fullest of a person’s gifts and character, to development of

that person’s full potential, which is certainly both a reward and a beneﬁt of seri-

ous leisure. “Satisfaction,” the term I once used, sometimes refers to a satisfying

experience that is fun or enjoyable (also referred to as gratifying). In another sense

this noun may refer to meeting or satisfying a need or want. In neither instance

does satisfaction denote the preferred sense of fulﬁllment just presented (Stebbins,

2004d).

3. Flow has also been conceptualized in leisure studies as “situational involvement”

(see McIntyre, 2003, p. 269).

4. One of my respondents in the baseball study (Stebbins, 1979) actually said as

much, though he said he loved his girlfriend more than he loved football (which

he did not play). He did not seem to be joking.

5. “Enduring involvement,” as examined in the social psychology of leisure, bears a

close relationship to the idea of leisure career. For example enduring involvement,

unlike situational involvement (see note 3, this chapter), is seen as a continuum.

McIntyre (2003) offers a summary of theory and research on this concept.

24 Serious Leisure

Recent Research on Serious Leisure

Chapter 8 in Stebbins (2001) is a review of empirical and theoretic

works bearing on serious leisure that were published prior to approxi-

mately 2000. The studies reported there served to support, in varying

degrees, several aspects of the Perspective. This chapter, then, bears on

material published since that year. In covering it I will follow the order

in which the basic Perspective was presented in the preceding chapter.

That is the most recent empirical and theoretic works concerning seri-

ous leisure in general were presented and integrated in chapter 1 into the

basic statement. In the present chapter we will look, more particularly, at

works concerned with amateurism, then hobbyist activities, and ﬁnally,

career volunteering. As in Stebbins (2001), to be considered for this

review, each work discussed has to center substantially, if not wholly,

on serious leisure or, in a few instances, provide rare ethnographic data

on a serious leisure activity. Note, however, that not all recent research

on serious leisure is considered in this chapter, for some of it is more

appropriately discussed in relation to synthesizing the Perspective (chap.

4) or to extending it (chap. 5).

Amateur Activities

The decision, taken in chapter 1, to abandon the sociological deﬁni-

tion of professional in favor of a simpler though more relevant economic

deﬁnition harmonizes well with many amateur and hobbyist activities

of recent origin. Economic professionals work in some of these new

ﬁelds, which have not, however, been in existence long enough to allow

a sociological profession to evolve. Indeed one may never evolve, for

such a development is by no means inevitable. Several hobbyist ﬁelds

(most being the subtypes of activity participation and sports and games)

have shown a tendency over the years to remain essentially non-profes-

26 Serious Leisure

sional, among them scrap booking, ultimate Frisbee, sport hunting, and

mountain trekking.

Notwithstanding the theoretic relationship between amateurs, hobby-

ists, and professionals, rather few studies of the ﬁrst two have addressed

themselves to this issue (exceptions will be discussed in the hobbyist

section of this chapter). Failure to do so does not generally invalidate the

data collected in this research, but it does leave that research in concep-

tual limbo. I have always tried to establish the nature of the professional

relationship with the amateur group under investigation (e.g., Stebbins,

1993a [magic]; 1982b [astronomy]), and with respect to hobbies, have

always striven to determine that no economic profession exists (e.g.,

Stebbins, 1996a [barbershop]; 2005c [mountain hobbies]). It would be

good for theoretic development in the serious leisure perspective were

other researchers to follow this lead.

Finally it is interesting to observe that, since the second stocktaking

(Stebbins, 2001a), there has been comparatively little work to report on

amateurs done in the name of serious leisure, compared with the sub-

stantially larger volume of work carried out in this vein on hobbyists and

career volunteers. In my view this is as it should be, for the Perspective

got its start in the study of amateurs, and the bulk of the early investiga-

tions there were on this type of leisure. Research on hobbies and career

volunteer ﬁelds has now multiplied to ﬁll this gap, however, giving this

part of the Perspective a much more even empirical foundation.

Nevertheless Puddephatt’s recent work on chess players does extend

the tradition of research on amateurs. Although his ﬁrst publication from

this study deals mostly with questions arising out of the ﬁeld of symbolic

interactionism, he does report on the ﬂow these enthusiasts experience

while playing in a match (Puddephatt, 2003, pp. 272-278). Referring to

it as “engrossment,” he notes how players ﬁnd this state of mind at once

exciting and absolutely essential for good chess. For, with engrossment,

comes the level of concentration so necessary for winning matches. A

later report from the same study centers on, among other considerations,

the leisure careers of chess players (Puddephatt, 2005). Here he shows

how they advance through a six-stage rating system, starting with begin-

ner and moving on, with growing competence and self-conﬁdence, to

weak club player, intermediate club player, expert, master, and ﬁnally,

grand master.

Puddephatt’s research, though he remains silent about the professional

side of this ﬁeld, is still the ﬁrst to frame chess players in the serious

leisure perspective. This is also, so far as I know, the ﬁrst application of

Recent Research on Serious Leisure 27

ﬂow theory to chess. Furthermore his study provides some uncommon

data on leisure career.

Hobbyist Activities

Most of the new work in the hobbyist ﬁeld centers on three subtypes:

activity participation, sports and games, and the liberal arts hobbies. Bar-

tram (2001) examined the leisure careers of kayakers, as experienced by

men and women in this hobby. In studying the ﬁve stages of the serious

leisure career of her two samples, she learned that, as they participate in

this form of leisure, certain contingencies serve to stratify the two sexes.

For instance she found that, in this activity, as in others where physical

risk is possible, men, compared with women, are more likely to use their

bodies aggressively and take risks. From the men’s standpoint this makes

many females less desirable as kayaking partners than other males. Kane

and Zink (2004) also studied the leisure careers of kayakers, noting as

a signiﬁcant turning point, or “marker,” development to the level where

they could go on an adventure tour and express their acquired kayaking

skill, knowledge, and experience. Kane and Zink described their research

subjects as “amateurs,” who were guided on their tours by professional

kayakers working as tour guides.

Stebbins (2005c) also studied risk among kayakers as well as among

snowboarders and mountain and ice climbers. Both sexes were found,

in general, to put a premium on taking no more than “manageable” risk.

Such risk is that felt to be within the range of skill and knowledge of the

participant, meeting thereby one of the eight conditions for ﬂow. When

risk becomes unmanageable, because of fortuitous conditions or social

pressure to go beyond personal ability and knowledge, for example, the

sense of ﬂow recedes and so, consequently, does that of leisure. Replacing

these sentiments is a signiﬁcant level of fear, fear of breaking something,

of possibly sustaining permanent or long-term injury, of even dying.

All three of these studies provide useful ethnographic data on the

leisure careers of kayakers, as one genre of activity participant. Their

classiﬁcation as such is not, however, to suggest that they entirely avoid

competition, whereby their activity would become a sport. In fact a mi-

nority of Stebbins’s respondents did occasionally compete against other

people, even while most of the time they competed against nature (i.e., a

river or creek). In fact this was the preference of nearly all in the sample.

Further, the work of Kane and Zink suggests that kayaking may have

professionalized to the point where analyzing it as an amateur activity

is at least as valid as analyzing it as a hobby.

28 Serious Leisure

Sport, deﬁned as a serious leisure hobby, has continued to generate

research interest. Major (2001), using the list of costs and rewards pre-

sented in the preceding chapter, has become the ﬁrst to examine them in

competitive running. He found in his sample of twelve male and twelve

female runners that sense of accomplishment was a main reward to come

from successfully running a race. Health and social afﬁliation were also

cited as important rewards. These rewards and others offset diverse costs,

among them, injury, letting oneself down (a sort of disappointment), and

for females, fear for personal safety.

Hastings continues with his work on masters swimming, a longitudinal

project now over twenty years old. Most recently Hastings and Cable

(2005) examined the global diffusion and commodiﬁcation of this hob-

byist sport, demonstrating that the role of commodity agent in serious

leisure is by no means limited to the C-PC-AP system described in the

previous chapter for bass ﬁshers. Indeed, such an intermediary is a main

avenue by which some hobbyists, at ﬁrst only a handful, gain the status

of economic professional in their sport. Obtaining product endorsements

and product sponsorships of competitions are two principal turning points

marking this change in career.

Even more recently the hobby of bird-watching has been examined

from the combined perspectives of serious leisure and recreational spe-

cialization. Lee and Scott (2006) surveyed a large sample of members

of the American Birding Association in the United States, to learn how

these hobbyists balance the costs and rewards of their pastime and, in

this regard, what difference leadership in the hobby might make. They

developed and tested a model that contains, among other propositions,

the one that specialization involves accepting leadership posts that lead

to beneﬁts, while also leading to the perception of diminished self-de-

termination. Yet their results show that, with increasing specialization,

birders ﬁnd that the beneﬁts they experience far outweigh this cost and

the others that they incur. Lee and Scott’s study stands as a rare look at

the process of weighing costs and rewards in a serious leisure activity.

Liberal Arts Hobbies

Jones’s (2000) research on football fans in Britain provides further sup-

port for the validity of the six distinguishing qualities of serious leisure.

Additionally he uses exploratory data to build a model explaining how

these fans continue in this role when costs seem to outweigh rewards, the

principal cost being a losing team. He found that this unhappy situation

is made palatable through perseverance and emphasis on one or more

Recent Research on Serious Leisure 29

of the following four rewards: in-group favouritism, out-group deroga-

tion, unrealistic optimism, and voice. Unrealistic optimism refers to the

tendency of group members to anticipate that the possible rewards of

belonging to the group will outweigh predicted costs. Voice is the process

wherein fans selectively focus on what they see as positive features of

belonging to the group. Gibson, Willming, and Holdnak (2002) followed

with a similar analysis of American football, in which they supplied

further data supporting the six qualities as well as data supporting the

uncontrollability proposition. They also presented a rich description of

the substantial social world their fans inhabit. Both studies deal with the

liberal arts hobby of sports buff, as distinguished in chapter 1 from the

consumer of sport as casual leisure.

Kennett (2002) provides us with the ﬁrst study of language learners,

whom she conceptually framed as participants in a liberal arts hobby.

In particular, she interviewed a sample of six intermediate to advanced

Australian speakers of Japanese who were cultural tourists ﬁred by the

goal of further learning that language and its associated culture. This study

gives still more evidence for the six distinguishing qualities in addition

to some ethnographic data about the Australians as cultural tourists.

Other Hobbies

Compared with the other four subtypes of hobby, the making and tin-

kering pastimes remain understudied. This makes all the more valuable

King’s (2001) research on American quilters. In addition to observing the

passion her respondents had for quilting (some said it is “addictive”), she

noted several rewards, including self-expression, re-creation (regenera-

tion), and social attraction. King found in her all-female sample a special

manifestation in quilting of the reward of self-expression: the quilts they

make enable them to express themselves as women through a medium

that many other women understand.

Gillespie, Lefﬂer, and Lerner’s (2002) study of people who go in for

“dog sports” may also be classiﬁed as a making and tinkering hobby.

That is some dog owners breed and train their pets to compete in various

competitions, including obedience trials, hunt trials, sled dog racing,

and draft pulling. In this sense they “make” their dogs into competitive

animals (see Stebbins, 1994a, for further discussion of this category).

Gillespie et al. found that this kind of serious leisure, like many others,

is often intensely pursued, creating in the process tensions with other

spheres of everyday life such as family, work, and religion. Such tensions

generate the need to continuously negotiate between spheres, so as to

30 Serious Leisure

be able to continue pursuing the hobby as well as honoring obligations

elsewhere. Indeed, this research looked, as only a few studies have, at

the costs that come with engaging in this serious leisure activity, these

tensions being one category of them.

Drew (1997), in a study of karaoke singers in fourteen bars in Phila-

delphia, has given us a rare look at some of the conditions that encourage

people to move from casual leisure to the early stages of a career in seri-

ous leisure. He refers to his interviewees as “amateurs,” though without

evidence of even a rudimentary professional counterpart, I will discuss the

serious leisure aspect of his study as a kind of hobbyist activity participa-

tion (karaoke singing resembles, in certain ways, barbershop singing, see

Stebbins, 1996a). Drew’s investigation contains some valuable insights

into how dabblers become more committed to the art of singing, as they

learn to conquer stage fright and come to view themselves as singers

with a noticeable level of talent and experience. His research shows how

participants discover that they can do something more substantial in the

core activity than dabble at it.

Volunteering

Although hobbies have received much greater attention since 2000

than previously, it is the ﬁeld of career volunteering that stands out for

its increased volume of scholarship. Within this ﬁeld, volunteering in

sport continues to be one of the more heavily studied areas. Cuskelly,

Harrington, and Stebbins (2002/2003) surveyed a sample of Australian

volunteer administrators in sport. Some of the respondents could be classi-

ﬁed as marginal volunteers—they felt pressure to give time to the sporting

organization—whereas others met the criteria for career volunteers (the

six distinguishing qualities). Levels of organizational commitment varied

over time, but the career volunteers remained noticeably more committed

to their serious leisure than their marginal counterparts. This research un-

derscores the importance of examining serious leisure involvement from

the perspective of career, in that, over the years, motivation to participate

can ﬂuctuate signiﬁcantly. But some volunteering in sport, because it is

done to provide help for a sporting event, is now, given the newly-arrived

conceptual statement on project-based leisure, better interpreted in light

of that framework (see the two studies reviewed in chap. 3).

Yarnal and Dowler (2002/2003) continue a long-standing, if not spo-

radic, interest that both nonproﬁt sector studies and leisure studies share

in volunteer ﬁreﬁghters. They studied ﬁre ﬁghters in Pennsylvania, in

whom they observed a number of tensions arising from the fact that they

Recent Research on Serious Leisure 31

are, at once, both amateurs and volunteers. That is there are professional

ﬁreﬁghters, and it is their standards by which society judges the work

of these amateurs. At the same time these amateurs give altruistically of

their time in a way typical of volunteers, doing so in emotionally charged

situations where considerable risk may exist. Others who have studied

this kind of serious leisure have argued that these enthusiasts are purely

volunteers (e.g., Benoit and Perkins, 1997; Thompson, 1997a).

Be that as it may the volunteer label seems to ﬁt best the nonprofes-

sional ﬁreﬁghters. They offer a service, which amateurs do not. And hav-

ing a professional counterpart is by no means unusual in volunteering. For

example Pearce (1993, p. 142), in her study, comments on the discord that

sometimes emerged between professionals and volunteers in paid-staff,

nonproﬁt groups, where the two types performed the same core activities.

She observed that such tension arises, in part, because the professionals

have more legitimacy—that is, they are formally trained—whereas the

volunteers have more dedication—that is, they are inspired by altruism.

She also found (pp. 143-144) that tension may occur between the two

types over the level of expertise itself, as in formal training (professional)

vis-à-vis long experience (volunteer). Such friction boils up around the

standards Yarnal and Dowler observed in their research. The condition

of whether professionals exist in a ﬁeld of leisure activity appears to be

limited to sorting out hobbyists from amateurs.

Museum volunteering has also been receiving signiﬁcant attention

since the last stock taking. Noreen Orr (2003; 2005) examined volun-

teers serving in six heritage museums in England to determine whether

they could be regarded as engaging in serious leisure. Her interviews

conﬁrmed this hypothesis. Additionally, her data revealed that the in-

terviewees experienced many of the rewards typically found in serious

leisure, particularly, self-gratiﬁcation, self-actualization, and self-ex-

pression. Of the ten rewards self-enrichment was the least important

for her respondents. Edwards (2005) looked at volunteers working in

arts museums in Australia, where she, too, found them motivated by

several of the ten rewards. She also found they were further motivated

by a sense of career in their volunteer role. As for some other kinds of

volunteers, those in Edwards’s sample were somewhat more motivated

by self-interest than by altruism. Graham (2004) provides an overview of

the literature on museum volunteering, as well as a report on data on such

volunteering as leisure as pursued in museums in Scotland. She found

that, for some participants, heritage volunteering offers the distinctive

rewards of developing new knowledge and conserving that knowledge

and, more broadly, local heritage.

32 Serious Leisure

Whatever the type of career volunteering, be it sport, museum, or

something else, the question of whether such activity is leisure or some-

thing else is, it appears, difﬁcult to answer when posed to volunteers

themselves. Stebbins (2001c) asked such a question of a sample of

Canadian volunteers, who responded in equal numbers that what they

did was work, leisure, or neither of these two (i.e., a third category). On

a theoretic plane we have an answer for this question, but I ﬁnd that,

among practicing volunteers themselves, it is seldom raised and, when

raised, tends to generate confusion.

Social Capital and Civil Labor

Whereas volunteering has been identiﬁed as a pillar of social capital

as generated through civil labor, the proposition that the volunteering in

question is primarily career volunteering, and hence leisure, has been

recognized much more slowly and by many fewer thinkers. Rojek (2002,

p. 25) has put the case most bluntly: “Serious leisure adds to social capital

through the voluntary, informal supply of caring, helping, and educative

functions for the community.” He goes on to observe that in analyses of

the postwork society, as conducted for example by Beck and Giddens,

“the notion of the leisure society is given short shrift” (p. 30). A year

earlier I registered a similar complaint about the works of Rifkin and

Aronowitz and DiFazio (Stebbins, 2001a, pp. 149-152).

Moreover this point has still not sunk in. For instance volunteering is

as close as Halpern (2005) comes in his otherwise excellent overview of

the research and thought on social capital to addressing himself to what

I hold to be a critical missing link in his chain of reasoning about how

social capital is generated. That link is leisure, and it is in leisure that

true volunteer activities are undertaken. Volunteering is leisure activity,

and so having considered leisure, Halpern is partly exonerated from this

charge, even while he fails to conceptualize the former in these terms. But

what about the role played by other kinds of leisure? Social capital also

gets a mighty boost when people from various walks of local community

life come together in amateur and hobbyist activities, say, to perform

in a civic orchestra or play on a football team, meet monthly to discuss

making quilts or building model trains. To understand either the rise or

the decline of social capital, also requires knowing, among other things,

why people engage in such leisure and what organizational arrangements

inﬂuence their participation in this way. And, by the way, Putnam (2000),

in his celebrated book, Bowling Alone, did discuss leisure.

Recent Research on Serious Leisure 33

With this preamble in mind, it is noteworthy that a handful of studies

have directly focused on the question of volunteering as leisure and, si-

multaneously, viewing it as civil labor and a contribution to social capital.

Arai (2000) studied Canadian volunteers engaged in civic planning and

how their efforts contributed to citizenship and democratic participation.

Her respondents were identiﬁed as career volunteers, as people pursuing

serious leisure as board members or service volunteers in three different

social planning organizations. Burden (2000; 2001), who, as Arai does,

treats volunteers as participants in serious leisure, studied the develop-

ment of social networks of trust as these support personal volunteering.

Burden’s action research project helped a small sample of female vol-

unteers in community theater in Australia learn about running such an

organization, empowering them in the process by developing in them

a capacity for self-direction. And in an entirely different ﬁeld, Perkins

and Benoit (2004) list the substantial contributions to local social capital

made by volunteer ﬁreﬁghters.

Bramante (2004) describes a training project he mounted in Brazil,

which he designed to stimulate civil labor among youth, thereby enabling

them to contribute to their country’s social capital. Youth were trained to

engage in career volunteering, as both a personal and a communitarian

beneﬁt. This included instruction on the importance of volunteers in the

community, the role of art and sport there, the psychological development

of the individual, the volunteer and the media, and the future of volun-

teering. Bramante’s program has demonstrated its capacity to develop

in those who participate in it a sense of commitment to volunteering.

Serious and casual leisure are central concepts in the program, which

was inaugurated in 2001 and continues to this day.

Other Kinds of Volunteering

Cassie and Halpenny (2003) provide qualitative evidence on the moti-

vation of career volunteering in a sample of Canadian nature conservation

workers. The motives pertaining to serious leisure included learning about

nature and the principles and practices of conservation, development of

skills related to their volunteer role, and meeting certain challenges posed

by nature. Altruism was also an important attitude motivating these vol-

unteers. In addition they had “fun,” although the way the authors describe

it, it could easily pass for the complex reward of self-gratiﬁcation (reward

no. 5). Because these volunteers could take up their role with no special

skills, knowledge, or training, Cassie and Halpenny classiﬁed them as

participants in casual leisure. I wish to argue, however, that it would be

34 Serious Leisure

more accurate, to identify the latter as neophyte career volunteers at the

beginning of their serious leisure career in such leisure. The acquisition

of skills, knowledge, experience, and so on quickly puts them on the

road to personal development, self-fulﬁllment, and a career in this kind

of serious leisure.

Wearing (2004) has pioneered the analysis of “volunteer tourism,” a

kind of alternative tourism the goal of which is to “provide sustainable

alternative travel that can assist in community development, scientiﬁc

research, or ecological restoration. It could be further added that they

should be ideologically sound travel experiences that contribute to the

natural, economic, social, and cultural environments” (pp. 217-218).

Wearing argues that volunteer tourism is a subtype of career volunteering,

which enables understanding and elaboration of its potential beneﬁts not

found in purely economic analyses. That is it is sustainable because its

impact is minimal, because it is typically small in scale while requiring

little specialized infrastructure. Therefore it thus causes little damage to

the environment on which ecotourism and other forms of tourism depend.

At the same time, as serious leisure, it contributes mightily to personal

development (Wearing, 2001).

Mixed Serious Leisure

The idea of mixed serious leisure was ﬁrst considered in Stebbins

(2001a, pp. 126-127), which was done, however, without formal deﬁni-

tion. Let us now deﬁne it as involvement in two or more types or subtypes

of serious leisure that, together, constitute for the participant an integrated

pursuit of a more encompassing free-time activity than either of the two

pursued alone. Examples are abundant: the violinist in the civic orchestra

(amateur artist) who is also president of the organization (volunteer),

the variable star observer (amateur scientist) who also goes in for astral

photography (amateur artist), and the entertainment magician (amateur

entertainer) who also reads voraciously on the history of magic (liberal

arts hobbyist). Apart from these categorizations, pursuit of mixed serious

leisure also falls, it is clear, in the domain of leisure lifestyle, possibly

one that is “optimal” (see chap. 4).

Mixed serious leisure is especially evident in the ﬁeld of historical

reenactment, on which I have already identiﬁed some research (Steb-

bins, 2001a, p. 127). Since then Hunt (2004) has added to this literature

through his study of selected activities of the American Civil War Society

(ACWS), which he treated as a hobby and type of serious leisure. Much

of the research on reenactment fails to regard “living history” as a leisure

Recent Research on Serious Leisure 35

pursuit, so questions of who joins such groups and why they do this

have remained largely unanswered. Hunt’s study of a sample of ACWS

members in Britain, guided as it was by the serious leisure framework,

revealed that they see their activities here as leisure.

Harrington, Cuskelly, and Auld (2000) studied the “hybrid” role of the

volunteer/amateur in Australian motorsport. Thus, the same person could

be a ﬂag marshal or timekeeper (volunteer) and when he or she was not

ﬁlling this role, compete in races as member of a pit crew or as a driver

(amateur). The authors also analyzed the omnipresent commodity agent

in motorsport, placing this person in the social world of the volunteer

and amateur there. These agents purvey automotive supplies and racing

equipment, doing so through highly visible sales and promotional strat-

egies. Similar commodity-intensive social worlds are evident in alpine

skiing, ﬁgure skating, major team sports, and as we saw in chapter 1,

bass ﬁshing and masters swimming.

Conclusions

According to a rough count of published theory and research on seri-

ous leisure, this literature has increased by approximately 60 percent in

approximately half the time, the comparison periods being 2000 through

2005 vis-à-vis 1991 through 1999. This count excludes my publications

printed during both reporting periods. This proliferation of work in the

area is one of the justiﬁcations for this book: a stocktaking had become

necessary.

We should expect exploratory research to continue on serious leisure,

since many established activities have yet to be examined while new

activities are appearing with remarkable frequency. But the time has

also come for detailed conﬁrmatory work in areas of the Perspective

where a solid foundation of formal grounded theory has now been built.

One such area is the set of six distinguishing qualities. This review and

the one reported in Stebbins (2001a) indicate that most researchers in

serious leisure have shown admirable caution against simply declaring

a heretofore unexplored leisure activity as being of the serious variety.

Rather they have made an effort to empirically demonstrate the presence

of all or a majority of the six qualities.

To do this, takes considerable time and effort, the hallmark of the

qualitative ﬁeld studies that are typically mounted under these explor-

atory conditions. Moreover the data collected in such research are only

generalizable to the leisure activity being examined. The need for a

measurement scale that will do this more efﬁciently has been apparent

36 Serious Leisure

to many scholars in this ﬁeld for many years. (It is at least ten years ago

since I received the ﬁrst inquiry asking about whether someone has con-

structed such a scale.) Fortunately, shortly after the publication of this

book, a serious leisure scale measuring the six distinguishing qualities

will become available for use by qualiﬁed researchers.

James Gould is the principal author of this scale, which he has named

the “Serious Leisure Inventory and Measure,” or SLIM. The seventy-two-

item scale—this is its long form (there is also a 54-item short form)—and

its development are described in Gould, Moore, and Stebbins (in press).

It is the product of Gould’s doctoral thesis research conducted at Clem-

son University. He used a q-sort, an expert panel (e.g., I was frequently

consulted on the validity of his proposed measures of various serious

leisure concepts), and conﬁrmatory factor analysis to develop the scale,

which he subsequently demonstrated to have acceptable ﬁt, reliability,

and equivalence across several different samples.

I have tried to stir interest in developing a companion scale to measure

the ten rewards, but so far, to my knowledge, without success. It is pos-

sible to ask respondents to rank the rewards they say they experience in

their serious leisure activities, producing thereby an ordinal scale pecu-

liar to each person. This I have done with every kind of serious leisure I

have explored, and have been able to construct a summative ranking of

rewards for entire samples of participants. Still, I believe a generalized

scale of the rewards could be constructed, which could be administered

on a survey basis to study motivation to pursue serious leisure in large

populations. SLIM could be used beforehand to separate participants in

serious leisure from those in casual leisure and then identify the activities

in which the ﬁrst are involved. A properly constructed scale of rewards

would also enable us to measure quantitatively self-fulﬁllment, a state

of mind that was said earlier to stem from a constellation of particular

rewards that people gain from their serious leisure activities.

In short, the serious leisure part of the Perspective is no longer strictly

exploratory in methodological approach. In fact, several studies reviewed

in this chapter were quantitative—some even being analyzed with infer-

ential statistics—thereby adding to the basic Perspective, in all instances,

both precision and detail. Little of this has been truly conﬁrmatory,

however, in that hypotheses were seldom explicitly stated and tested.

Still such testing will undoubtedly come in time.

With the theory and research on serious leisure now set out, time has

come to examine the other two forms that make up the Perspective.

Casual and Project-Based Leisure:

The Basics

I have no doubt that, some day, these two forms will be treated of in

separate chapters, much as we have done with serious leisure. But for

reasons that will become apparent in this chapter and chapter 6, casual

and project-based leisure, as conceptual frameworks, developed more

recently. More precisely, casual leisure, as a concept, is as old as serious

leisure, but I only began in the late 1990s giving concerted scholarly at-

tention to the ﬁrst (Stebbins, 1997a; 2001b). And project-based leisure

saw the light of day even more recently (Stebbins, 2005a). Furthermore,

as this chapter demonstrates, research expressly conducted in the name

of these two forms also lags, though both have been extensively studied

under other theoretic rubrics. What research there is has, unlike that

on serious leisure with its separate chapter, been incorporated into this

chapter on the basics of the two forms. And, as with some recent research

on serious leisure, some of that on the casual and project-based forms is

most appropriately considered in chapter 5. Chapter 6 contains a detailed

look at the emergence of the latter two vis-à-vis serious leisure.

Casual Leisure

The term “casual leisure” is as old as its fraternal twin, “serious lei-

sure,” for the ﬁrst came into this world in the same article that contained

the initial conceptual statement about the second (Stebbins, 1982a). In

that article and a number of later works, to further clarify the meaning

of serious leisure, I frequently contrasted it with casual, or unserious,

leisure, exemplifying the latter with activities like taking a nap or strolling

in the park or, when pursued as diversions, watching television or reading

a newspaper. Moreover, I occasionally added to these deﬁnitional state-

ments the observation that casual leisure can also be understood as all

leisure falling outside the realm of serious leisure. Over the years, other

38 Serious Leisure

writers, perhaps inspired by my example, have also delineated serious

leisure in these two ways.

Thus from 1982 to the present among those researchers who have

written on serious leisure, casual leisure has usually been cast in a re-

sidual role. I am perhaps the most culpable in this regard, for I have used

casual leisure, among other ways, as a foil to illuminate the distinguish-

ing qualities of serious leisure (e.g., Stebbins, 1992a, pp. 6-7) and to

describe its enthusiasts by showing how they are much more than mere

dabblers, players, or dilettantes, all basically casual leisure participants.

Looking back at them now, I can see that these brief, sketchy portrayals

of casual leisure have sometimes been painted in depreciatory colors,

which become ever more vivid when contrasted with the appreciatory

portrayals of serious leisure (e.g., Stebbins, 1996a, 1996b), leisure activ-

ity commonly venerated for its work like character.

Nevertheless, the place accorded casual leisure in the larger world of all

leisure is, in signiﬁcant part, a matter of personal perspective; researchers

have different views of it and so do the people who participate in it. For

the person presently studying or participating in serious leisure, it is the

most important activity of the moment, an orientation that temporarily

forces casual leisure to the sidelines. Yet, beyond the spheres of research

and participation in serious leisure, it is evident that casual leisure is

anything but marginal. Thus, far more people participate in it than in

serious leisure, and many of the interviewees in my studies of amateurs,

hobbyists, and career volunteers pointed out that they also enjoy and

therefore value their casual leisure. In other words, casual leisure is an

important form of leisure in itself and, for that reason alone, should be

conceptually clariﬁed and elaborated. And although such clariﬁcation

and elaboration will also sharpen our understanding of serious leisure

by further differentiating the two, the principal goal of this chapter is to

present a theoretical statement centering on casual leisure as a ﬁeld of

its own demarcated by its own distinctive properties.

Types of Casual Leisure

Casual leisure, which in comparison with serious leisure is consider-

ably less substantial and offers no career, was deﬁned in the previous

chapter as an immediately, intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived

pleasurable core activity, requiring little or no special training to enjoy

it (Stebbins, 1992a; 1997a, p. 18). Over the years eight types have been

identiﬁed.

Casual and Project-Based Leisure: The Basics 39

• Play (including dabbling, dilettantism)

• Relaxation (e.g., sitting, napping, strolling)

• Passive entertainment (e.g., through TV, books, recorded music)

• Active entertainment (e.g., games of chance, party games)

• Sociable conversation (e.g. gossip, “idle chatter”)

• Sensory stimulation (e.g., sex, eating, drinking, sight seeing)

• Casual volunteering (e.g., handing out leaﬂets, stufﬁng envelops)

• Pleasurable aerobic activity

The ﬁrst six types are more fully discussed in Stebbins (1997a), while

casual volunteering is considered further in Stebbins (2003b). The last and

newest addition to this typology—pleasurable aerobic activity—refers to

physical activities that require effort sufﬁcient to cause marked increase

in respiration and heart rate. Here I am referring to “aerobic activity”

in the broad sense, to all activity that calls for such effort, which to be

sure, includes the routines pursued collectively in (narrowly conceived

of) aerobics classes and those pursued individually by way of televised

or video-taped programs of aerobics (Stebbins, 2004e). Yet, as with its

passive and active cousins in entertainment, pleasurable aerobic activity

is, at bottom, casual leisure. That is, to do such activity requires little

more than minimal skill, knowledge, or experience. Examples include

the game of the Hash House Harriers (a type of treasure hunt held in the

outdoors), kickball (described in the Economist, 2005a, as a cross between

soccer and baseball), and such children’s games as hide-and-seek.

It is likely that people pursue the eight types of casual leisure in

combinations of two and three at least as often as they pursue them

separately. For instance, every type can be relaxing, producing in this

fashion play-relaxation, passive entertainment-relaxation, and so on.

Various combinations of play and sensory stimulation are also possible,

as in experimenting with drug use, sexual activity, and thrill seeking in

movement. Additionally, sociable conversation accompanies some ses-

sions of sensory stimulation (e.g., drug use, curiosity seeking, displays

of beauty) as well as some sessions of relaxation and active and passive

entertainment, although such conversation normally tends to be rather

truncated in the latter two.

This brief review of the types of casual leisure reveals that they share

at least one central property: all are hedonic. More precisely, all produce

a signiﬁcant level of pure pleasure, or enjoyment, for those participat-

ing in them. In broad, colloquial language, casual leisure could serve as

the scientiﬁc term for the practice of doing what comes naturally. Yet,

paradoxically, this leisure is by no means wholly frivolous, for we shall

40 Serious Leisure

see shortly that some clear beneﬁts come from pursuing it. Moreover,

unlike the evanescent hedonic property of casual leisure itself, its beneﬁts

are enduring, a property that makes them worthy of extended analysis

in their own right.

It follows that terms such as “pleasure” and “enjoyment” are the more

appropriate descriptors of the rewards of casual leisure in contrast to

terms such as “fulﬁlment” and “rewardingness,” which best describe the

rewards gained in serious leisure. At least the serious leisure participants

interviewed by the author were inclined to describe their involvements as

fulﬁlling or rewarding rather than pleasurable or enjoyable.1 Still, overlap

exists, for both casual and serious leisure offer the hedonic reward of

self-gratiﬁcation (see reward number 5, chap. 1). The activity is fun to

do, even if the fun component is considerably more prominent in casual

leisure than in its serious counterpart.

Shinew and Parry (2005) conducted a rare study focused directly on

casual leisure, in which the concept and its various types were used to

explain, in their research, university drinking and illegal drug consump-

tion. The hedonic character of casual leisure helps us understand use of

these substances among those in their sample of 740 university students

who indulged in them. More particularly it was through two types of

casual leisure—sociable conversation and sensory stimulation (described

by the respondents as “fun”)—that this kind of leisure was routinely

pursued. No differences were observed in these patterns across sex, race,

or membership in a fraternity or sorority. Given its concern with illegal

drug use, this study also contributes some needed data on deviant leisure,

in this instance deviant casual leisure.

Kerr, Fujiyama, and Campano (2002) attempted to study the emotional

return from sport experienced in a sample of Japanese tennis players,

some of whom were serious leisure participants, some of whom played

the game as casual leisure. Their results suggested that casual leisure is

“not necessarily more pleasurable” (p. 286) than serious leisure, a ﬁnding

that supports my most recent revisions to Reward number 5, which states

that self-gratiﬁcation is a combination of superﬁcial enjoyment and deep

fulﬁlment (see chap. 1). These revisions were ﬁrst published in Stebbins

(2001a, p. 13, see also n. 3), and it is highly likely that Kerr and his col-

leagues would have been unaware of them. Instead they were guided by

the earlier version of number 5 as purely superﬁcial enjoyment.

Moreover, my own observations of casual leisure suggest that hedon-

ism, or self-gratiﬁcation, although it is a principal reward here, must still

share the stage with one or two other rewards. Thus any type of casual

Casual and Project-Based Leisure: The Basics 41

leisure, like any type of serious leisure, can also help re-create, or re-

generate, its participants following a lengthy stint of obligatory activity.

Furthermore, some forms of casual and serious leisure offer the reward of

social attraction, the appeal of being with other people while participating

in a common activity. Nevertheless, even though some casual and serious

leisure participants share certain rewards, research on this question will

likely show that these two types experience them in sharply different

ways. For example, the social attraction of belonging to a barbershop

chorus or a company of actors with all its specialized shoptalk diverges

considerably from that of belonging to a group of people playing a party

game or taking a boat tour where such talk is highly unlikely to occur.

Beneﬁts

I have so far been able to identify ﬁve beneﬁts, or outcomes, of casual

leisure. But since this is a preliminary list—my ﬁrst attempt at making

one—it is certainly possible that future research and theorizing could

add to it (Stebbins, 2001b).

One lasting beneﬁt of casual leisure is the creativity and discovery

it sometimes engenders. Serendipity, “the quintessential form of infor-

mal experimentation, accidental discovery, and spontaneous invention”

(Stebbins, 2001c), usually underlies these two processes, suggesting that

serendipity and casual leisure are at times closely aligned. In casual lei-

sure, as elsewhere, serendipity can lead to highly varied results, including

a new understanding of a home gadget or government policy, a sudden

realization that a particular plant or bird exists in the neighborhood,

or a different way of making artistic sounds on a musical instrument.

Such creativity or discovery is unintended, however, and is therefore

accidental. Moreover, it is not ordinarily the result of a problem-solv-

ing orientation of people taking part in casual leisure, since most of the

time at least, they have little interest in trying to solve problems while

engaging in this kind of activity. Usually problems for which solutions

must be found emerge at work, while meeting nonwork obligations, or

during serious leisure.

Another beneﬁt springs from what has recently come to be known as

edutainment. Nahrstedt (2000) holds that this beneﬁt of casual leisure

comes with participating in such mass entertainment as watching ﬁlms

and television programs, listening to popular music, and reading popular

books and articles. Theme parks and museums are also considered sources

of edutainment. While consuming media or frequenting places of this

sort, these participants inadvertently learn something of substance about

42 Serious Leisure

the social and physical world in which they live. They are, in a word,

entertained and educated in the same breath.

Third, casual leisure affords regeneration, or re-creation, possibly

even more so than its counterpart, serious leisure, since the latter can

sometimes be intense. Of course, many a leisure studies specialist has

observed that leisure in general affords relaxation or entertainment, if

not both, and that these constitute two of its principal beneﬁts. What is

new, then, in the observation just made is that it distinguishes between

casual and serious leisure, and more importantly, that it emphasizes the

enduring effects of relaxation and entertainment when they help enhance

overall equanimity, most notably in the interstices between periods of

intense activity. Still, strange as it may seem, this blanket recognition of

the importance of relaxation has not, according to Kleiber (2000), led to

signiﬁcant concern with it in research and practice in leisure studies.

A fourth beneﬁt that may ﬂow from participation in casual leisure

originates in the development and maintenance of interpersonal relation-

ships. One of its types, the sociable conversation, is particularly fecund in

this regard, but other types, when shared, as sometimes happens during

sensory stimulation and passive and active entertainment, can also have

the same effect. The interpersonal relationships in question are many

and varied, and encompass those that form between friends, spouses,

and members of families. Such relationships, Hutchinson and Kleiber

(2005) note, can foster personal psychological growth by promoting

new shared interests and, in the course of this process, new positive ap-

praisals of self.

Well-being is still another beneﬁt that can ﬂow from engaging in

casual leisure. Speaking only for the realm of leisure, perhaps the great-

est sense of well-being is achieved when a person develops an optimal

leisure lifestyle. Such a lifestyle is “the deeply satisfying pursuit during

free time of one or more substantial, absorbing forms of serious leisure,

complemented by a judicious amount of casual leisure” (Stebbins,

2000a). People ﬁnd optimal leisure lifestyles by partaking of leisure

activities that individually and in combination realize human potential

and enhance quality of life and well-being. Project-based leisure can also

enhance a person’s leisure lifestyle. The study of kayakers, snowboard-

ers, and mountain and ice climbers (Stebbins, 2005c) revealed that the

vast majority of the three samples used various forms of casual leisure to

optimally round out their use of free time. For them their serious leisure

was a central life interest, but their casual leisure contributed to overall

well-being by allowing for relaxation, regeneration, sociability, entertain-

ment, and other activities less intense than their serious leisure.

Casual and Project-Based Leisure: The Basics 43

Still well-being, as achieved during free time, is more than this, as

Hutchinson and Kleiber (2005) have found in a set of studies of some of

the beneﬁts of casual leisure. They observed that this kind of leisure can

contribute to self-protection, such as by buffering stress and sustaining

coping efforts. Casual leisure can also preserve or restore a sense of self.

This was sometimes achieved in their samples, when subjects said they

rediscovered in casual leisure fundamental personal or familial values

or a view of themselves as caring people.

Project-Based Leisure

In the past I have argued that, between them, casual and serious leisure

cover the entire leisure domain. For example, I wrote not so long ago that

“casual leisure can also be deﬁned residually as all leisure not classiﬁ-

able as amateur, hobbyist, or career volunteering” (Stebbins, 2001b, p.

305). I now realize, however, that this is false. My ongoing observations

of contemporary leisure have revealed a third form (and there may well

be others), identiﬁed here as “project-based leisure.” Although probably

less common than casual leisure, and perhaps even less so than serious

leisure, it is nonetheless sufﬁciently prevalent and important for those who

pursue it to justify singling it out for special conceptual treatment.

Project-based leisure (Stebbins, 2005a) is a short-term, moderately

complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative

undertaking carried out in free time. It requires considerable planning,

effort, and sometimes skill or knowledge, but for all that is neither seri-

ous leisure nor intended to develop into such. The adjective “occasional”

describes, widely spaced, undertakings for such regular occasions as

religious festivals, someone’s birthday, or a national holiday. The adjec-

tive “creative” stresses that the undertaking results in something new or

different, showing imagination and perhaps routine skill or knowledge.

Though most projects would appear to be continuously pursued until

completed, it is conceivable that some might be interrupted for several

weeks, months, even years (e.g., a stone wall in the back garden that

gets ﬁnished only after its builder recovers from an operation on his

strained back).

Examples include surprise birthday parties, elaborate preparations for

a major holiday, and volunteering for a sporting event or arts festival.

Though only a rudimentary social world springs up around the project,

it does in its own particular way, bringing together friends, neighbors, or

relatives (e.g., through a genealogical project, Christmas celebrations)

or drawing the individual participant into an organizational milieu (e.g.,

through volunteering for a sporting event or a major convention).

44 Serious Leisure

Moreover, it appears that, in some instances, project-based leisure

springs from a sense of obligation to undertake it. If so, it is nonethe-

less, as leisure, uncoerced activity, in the sense that the obligation is in

fact “agreeable”—the project creator in executing the project anticipates

ﬁnding fulﬁllment, obligated to do so or not (for further discussion of

this point, see Stebbins, 2000a). And worth exploring in future research,

given that some obligations can be pleasant and attractive, is the nature

and extent of leisure-like projects carried out within the context of paid

employment. Furthermore, this discussion jibes with the additional crite-

rion that the project, to qualify as project-based leisure, must be seen by

the project creator as fundamentally uncoerced, fulﬁlling activity. Finally,

note that project-based leisure cannot, by deﬁnition, refer to projects ex-

ecuted as part of a person’s serious leisure, such as mounting a star night

as an amateur astronomer or a model train display as a collector.

Though not serious leisure, project-based leisure is enough like it to

justify using the serious leisure framework to develop a parallel frame-

work for exploring this neglected class of activities. A main difference is

that project-based leisure fails to generate a sense of career. Otherwise,

however, there is here need to persevere, some skill or knowledge may

be required and, invariably, effort is called for. Also present are recogniz-

able beneﬁts, a special identity, and often a social world of sorts, though

it appears, one usually less complicated than those surrounding many

serious leisure activities. And perhaps it happens at times that, even if

not intended at the moment as participation in a type of serious leisure,

the skilled, artistic, or intellectual aspects of the project prove so attrac-

tive that the participant decides, after the fact, to make a leisure career

of their pursuit as a hobby or an amateur activity.

Project-based leisure is also capable of generating many of the rewards

experienced in serious leisure (discussed in detail in chap. 1). And, as in

serious leisure so in project-based leisure: these rewards constitute part

of the motivational basis for pursuing such highly fulﬁlling activity.

Furthermore, motivation to undertake a leisure project may have an

organizational base, much as do many other forms of leisure (Stebbins,

2002). My observations suggest that small groups, grassroots associa-

tions (Smith, 2000), and volunteer organizations (paid-staff groups using

volunteer help) are the most common types of organizations in which

people undertake project-based leisure.

Motivationally speaking, project-based leisure may be attractive in

substantial part because it does not demand long-term commitment,

as serious leisure does. Even occasional projects carry with them the

Casual and Project-Based Leisure: The Basics 45

sense that the undertaking in question can be terminated at will. Thus

project-based leisure is not a central life interest (Dubin, 1992). Rather it

is viewed by its creator as fulﬁlling (as distinguished from enjoyable or

hedonic) activity that can be experienced comparatively quickly, though

certainly not as quickly as casual leisure.

Project-based leisure ﬁts into leisure lifestyle in its own peculiar way

as interstitial activity, like some casual leisure but not like most serious

leisure. It can therefore help shape a person’s “optimal leisure lifestyle”

(Stebbins, 2000b). For instance, it can usually be pursued at times con-

venient for the participant. It follows that project-based leisure is nicely

suited to people who, out of proclivity or extensive non-leisure obligations

or both, reject serious leisure and, yet, who also have no appetite for a

steady diet of casual leisure. Among the candidates for project-based

leisure are people with heavy workloads; homemakers, mothers, and

fathers with extensive domestic responsibilities; unemployed individu-

als who, though looking for work, still have time at the moment for (I

suspect, mostly one-shot) project-based leisure; and avid serious leisure

enthusiasts who want a temporary change in their leisure lifestyle. Retired

people, who often do have time for plenty of leisure, may ﬁnd project-

based leisure attractive at times as a way of adding variety to their leisure

lifestyle. Beyond these special categories of participant, project-based

leisure offers a form of substantial leisure to all adults, adolescents, and

even children looking for something interesting and exciting to do in free

time that is neither casual nor serious leisure.

Finally, comparing it with most serious leisure, it is evident that, at

most, only a rudimentary social world springs up around the project. Still,

the project can in its own particular way bring together friends, neighbors,

or relatives (e.g., through a genealogical project), or draw the individual

participant into an organizational milieu (e.g., through volunteering for a

sporting event). This further suggests that project-based leisure often has,

in at least two ways, potential for building community. One, it can bring

into contact people who otherwise have no reason to meet, or at least

meet frequently. Two, by way of event volunteering and other collective

altruistic activity, it can contribute to carrying off community events and

projects. Project-based leisure is not, however, civil labor, which must

be classiﬁed as exclusively serious leisure (Rojek, 2002).

Types of Project-Based Leisure

It was noted in the deﬁnition presented earlier that project-based

leisure is not all the same. Whereas systematic exploration may reveal

46 Serious Leisure

others, two types are presently evident: one-shot projects and occasional

projects. These are presented next using a classiﬁcatory framework for

amateur, hobbyist, and volunteer activities that I developed earlier (see

Stebbins, 1998d, chaps. 2-4).

One-Shot Projects

In all these projects people generally use the talents and knowledge

they have at hand, even though for some projects they may seek certain

instructions beforehand, including reading a book or taking a short

course. And some projects resembling hobbyist activity participation

may require a modicum of preliminary conditioning. Always, the goal

is to undertake successfully the one-shot project and nothing more, and

sometimes a small amount of background preparation is necessary for

this. It is possible that a survey would show that most project-based

leisure is hobbyist in character and the next most common, a kind of

volunteering. First, the following hobbyist-like projects have so far been

identiﬁed:

• Making and tinkering:

• Interlacing, interlocking, and knot-making from kits

• Other kit assembly projects (e.g., stereo tuner, craft store proj-

ects)

• Do-it-yourself projects done primarily for fulﬁllment, some of

which may even be undertaken with minimal skill and knowledge

(e.g., build a rock wall or a fence, ﬁnish a room in the basement,

plant a special garden). This could turn into an irregular series of

such projects, spread over many years, possibly even transforming

the participant into a hobbyist.

• Liberal arts:

• Genealogy (not as ongoing hobby)

• Tourism: special trip, not as part of an extensive personal tour

program, to visit different parts of a region, a continent, or much

of the world

• Activity participation: long back-packing trip, canoe trip; one-shot

mountain ascent (e.g., Fuji, Rainier, Kilimanjaro)

One-shot volunteering projects are also common, though possibly

somewhat less so than hobbyist-like projects. And less common than

either are the amateur-like projects, which seem to concentrate in the

sphere of theater.

• Volunteering

• Volunteer at a convention or conference, whether local, national,

or international in scope.

Casual and Project-Based Leisure: The Basics 47

• Volunteer at a sporting competition, whether local, national, or

international in scope.

• Volunteer at an arts festival or special exhibition mounted in a

museum.

• Volunteer to help restore human life or wildlife after a natural

or human-made disaster caused by, for instance, a hurricane,

earthquake, oil spill, or industrial accident.

• Entertainment Theater: produce a skit (a form of sketch) or one-shot

community pageant; create a puppet show; prepare a home ﬁlm or a

set of videos, slides, or photos; prepare a public talk.

Occasional Projects

The occasional projects seem more likely to originate in or be moti-

vated by agreeable obligation than their one-shot cousins. Examples of

occasional projects include the sum of the culinary, decorative, or other

creative activities undertaken, for example, at home or at work for a re-

ligious occasion or someone’s birthday. Likewise, national holidays and

similar celebrations sometimes inspire individuals to mount occasional

projects consisting of an ensemble of inventive elements.

Unlike one-shot projects occasional projects have the potential to

become routinized, which happens when new creative possibilities no

longer come to mind as the participant arrives at a fulﬁlling formula want-

ing no further modiﬁcation. North Americans who decorate their homes

the same way each Christmas season exemplify this situation. Indeed, it

is possible that, over the years, such projects may lose their appeal, but

not their necessity, thereby becoming disagreeable obligations that their

authors no longer deﬁne as leisure.

And, lest it be overlooked, note that one-shot projects also hold the

possibility of becoming unpleasant. Thus, the hobbyist genealogist gets

overwhelmed with the details of family history and the difﬁculty of verify-

ing dates. The thought of putting in time and effort doing something once

considered leisure but which she now dislikes makes no sense. Likewise,

volunteering for a project may turn sour, creating in the volunteer a sense

of facing a disagreeable obligation, which must still be honored. This

is leisure no more.

Research on Project-Based Leisure

It is hardly surprising that, given the recent date of the basic conceptual

statement of project-based leisure (2005), no systematic research yet ex-

ists in its name. Of course there are nearly innumerable studies of projects

under the headings of arts festivals, sporting events, historical enactments,

48 Serious Leisure

and the like, which, however, have been examined using other theoretic

frameworks (e.g., event analysis, tourism studies, volunteer studies). Not

infrequently leisure is part of these investigations, but it is not conceived

of conceptually, as we have in this chapter, as project-based.

On occasion casual or serious leisure has been the subject of research

in these studies, but in comparison, neither form explains this kind of lei-

sure experience nearly as well as the project-based framework. Twynam,

Farrell, and Johnston (2002-2003) offer a case in point, who by the way,

cannot be blamed for failing to consider the project-based conception, it

having been published well after publication of their study. The authors

tried to explain motivation to volunteer at a World Junior Curling Tourna-

ment as the pursuit of serious leisure. Still they found the ﬁt imperfect;

the sporting event was too short for commitment to develop and a career

to unfold, as happens in long-term serious leisure. They observed:

Stebbins emphasized the commitment, skill development, challenge, accomplishment,

and specialist nature of serious leisure that paralleled career and work specialization.

These aspects of volunteering [in this sporting event] need to be conceptualized in

somewhat of a different manner so that motivation for serious leisure can be fully

understood. (Twynam, et al., 2002-2003, pp. 375-376)

What was really needed was recognition that a new form of leisure

had to be conceptualized, serious leisure offering only a Procrustean bed

for explaining leisure motivation of the sort they were studying.

Gravelle and Larocque’s (2005) study of volunteers at the 2001 fran-

cophone games in Canada can be reinterpreted in the same manner. These

volunteers served at a sporting event, where they “did not perceive their

involvement in the Games themselves as a long-term commitment” (p.

50). Nonetheless, they did need to persevere, for they lacked background

skills and knowledge prior to becoming involved with this volunteer

project. Indeed, 46 percent of the respondents said they volunteered spo-

radically, suggesting (to me) that a signiﬁcant part of their volunteering

was of the project-based variety.

Green and Chalip (2004), using the career volunteering framework,

studied volunteers at the Sydney Olympic Games. From a review of

previous work in the area, they derived several hypotheses bearing on

commitment to the role of volunteer. In their survey they found, among

things, support for the proposition that a volunteer’s sense of commitment

to the event, once it was over, was a function of that person’s satisfaction

with his or her experience of the event. They also learned that this sense

of commitment at the end of the event is positively related to the beneﬁts

Casual and Project-Based Leisure: The Basics 49

they gained, which included prestige, excitement, and opportunities to

learn and help as well as social and professional beneﬁts.

The family may turn out to be one of the more fruitful areas to study

project-based leisure. Some parents create projects for their children to

undertake in the children’s free time. Indeed a certain amount of what

Shaw and Dawson (2001) call “purposive leisure” appears to be of the

project-based variety. They note that family leisure “seen as a form of

purposive leisure, is planned, facilitated, and executed by parents in

order to achieve particular short- and long-term goals” (Shaw and Daw-

son, 2001, p. 228). In purposive leisure parents occasionally organize,

expressly for the beneﬁt of their children, free-time activities for the

whole family. Further, domestic projects await many a householder,

running from developing a garden to renovating a bedroom or rumpus

room, with each being done as leisure if it is to escape being labelled an

unpleasant obligation.

Conclusions: Leisure, Complexity, and Life Course

We have now completed the review of the basics of the three forms

that comprise the serious leisure perspective. People are attracted to the

types and subtypes of each form, in signiﬁcant part, because they ﬁnd

irresistible its core activity. Obviously not all people fall in love with every

possible core activity or with the same activity; one person’s leisure is

another’s poison. Some people like to box, while others think knitting is a

wonderful pastime. And chances are that knitters think boxing a dreadful

activity and the boxers regard knitting as strictly for sissies.

The core activities that constitute leisure can be classiﬁed as simple

or complex, the two concepts ﬁnding their place at opposite poles of a

continuum. The location of a core activity on this continuum partly ex-

plains its appeal. For the most part casual leisure is comprised of a set of

simple core activities. Here homo otiosus need only turn on the television

set, observe the scenery, drink the glass of wine (no oenophile is he), or

gossip about someone. Complexity in casual leisure increases slightly

when playing a board game using dice, participating in a Hash House

Harrier treasure hunt, or serving as a casual volunteer by, say, collecting

bottles for the Scouts or making tea and coffee after a religious service.

And Harrison’s (2001) study of upper-middle-class Canadian (mass)

tourists revealed a certain level of complexity in their sensual experience

of the touristic sites they visited. For people craving the simple things in

life, this is the kind of leisure to head for.

50 Serious Leisure

But if complexity is what they want, they must look elsewhere. Leisure

projects are necessarily more complex than casual leisure. The types of

projects listed earlier in this chapter are, I believe, clear proof of that.

Nonetheless, they are not nearly as complex as the core activities around

which serious leisure revolves. The accumulated knowledge, skill, train-

ing, and experience of, for instance, the amateur trumpet player, hobbyist

stamp collector, and volunteer emergency medical worker are vast, and

defy full description of how they are applied during execution of the core

activity. Of course, neophytes in the serious leisure activities lack these

acquisitions, though it is unquestionably their intention to acquire them

to a level where they will feel fulﬁlled.

So the serious leisure perspective embraces all levels of complexity of

core activity. As a result this Perspective enables us to study and compare

the full range of core activities as they vary from simple to complex and

to learn how people, who desire more or less complexity at particular

points in life or, alternatively, in their daily or weekly routine, decide

to engage in another core activity or set of activities that better suits

them. With the serious leisure perspective we can effectively examine

how people adapt to life’s demands and opportunities, taking on more

complex free-time activities at some points in their life course and sim-

pler ones at other points in it. We can see, too, how they try to balance

simple and complex core activities, so as to maximize the amount and

level of positive experience available to them at any one point in time

in their leisure lifestyle.

Analytically speaking, it follows from what was just said that the seri-

ous leisure perspective becomes an indispensable concept when examin-

ing leisure across the life course. Life course is a broader idea than career,

linked as the latter is to particular roles. In contrast a person’s life course

subsumes multiple roles, which evolve, interweave, and are assumed or

abandoned across the lifetime of a person (Bush and Simmons, 1981,

pp. 155-157). Furthermore, when viewed sociologically, life course also

has to do with age-graded roles and generational effects.

With the three leisure forms lodged in the same frame, where they

may be viewed individually or in combination, all remain visible even

when the analytic spotlight shines momentarily on only one or two of

them. And this visibility pertains throughout the life course of individu-

als, generations, and diverse demographic categories of people (as based,

for example, on sex, religion, education, rural-urban residence). For

instance, people who go in for rigorous physical sport in middle-age

tend to abandon in old age this kind of complex leisure, many taking up

Casual and Project-Based Leisure: The Basics 51

simpler forms such as watching television or doing casual reading. Or

parents, suddenly faced with an empty nest, may move from the simple

leisure they enjoyed while raising their children to leisure having more

complexity, which is appealing for its greater potential for fulﬁlment

than their earlier casual leisure.

In using the serious leisure perspective to analyze leisure across the

life course as leisure varies in complexity of its core activities according

to the interests, needs, and life circumstances of individual actors, it is

best that the Perspective be reasonably coherent. Coherence results from

careful, logically integration of the concepts that knit together the three

forms. Achieving this coherence is the goal of chapter 4, where the three

forms are linked to each other using a variety of related concepts leading

to a synthesis of the Perspective.

Note

1. The distinction between pleasurable/enjoyable and satisfying/rewarding, although

it appears to be valid in the commonsense world of leisure participants, often

goes unrecognized in the social psychology of leisure. In this ﬁeld, enjoyment is

regarded as one possible correlate of ﬂow, well-being, or even leisure in general.

See, for example, studies by Haworth and Hill (1992) and Haworth and Drucker

(1991). Still, Mannell and Kleiber (1997, pp. 185-186) deﬁne satisfaction in

much the same way as I deﬁned fulﬁlment in chapter 1. Moreover, they link their

conception of satisfaction with rewards and motivation, as I did in that chapter.

52 Serious Leisure

Synthesizing the Forms

A number of social scientiﬁc concepts have emerged over the years

that, each in its own way, helps synthesize the three forms, thereby making

for a truly integrated, theoretic perspective. In the main this integration,

which I refer to as a synthesis, is accomplished by situating the forms,

which, at bottom, are experiential (each of the three forms refers to a

distinctive kind of experience found in the core activity), in broader social

scientiﬁc context. That is each concept has its own place in the larger

social scientiﬁc literature, while also ﬁnding a special place in one or

more of serious, casual, and project-based leisure. In other words they

synthesize the Perspective as much by being differentially manifested

within it as they do by occupying certain common ground across two or

three of the forms.

Let there be no mistake: these synthesizing concepts are as much a part

of the serious leisure perspective as the basic concepts, those fundamental

ideas undergirding the basics presented in chapters 1 and 3. For both sets

of concepts help explain the three forms, including their similarities,

differences, and interrelationships, in addition to serving as guides for

research. The following synthesizing concepts and bundles of concepts

are considered here, with relevant research noted where it exists: (1)

organization (groups, associations, social worlds, etc.); (2) community

(family; work; gender; social class; contributions, including civil society,

citizen involvement, and social capital; deviance); (3) history; (4) lifestyle

(including discretionary time commitment, optimal leisure lifestyle); and

(5) culture (commitment, obligation, values, selﬁshness).

Organization

The chief point to be made in this section is that leisure, whichever its

form, is often organized in one or more of several ways. Note that I say

“often,” for many kinds of leisure also appear to allow for, if not require,

54 Serious Leisure

solitary participation, volunteering being the chief exception. Thus, one

can, in solitude, play the piano or the guitar, collect rocks or seashells, sit

and daydream, or assemble a complicated electronic device from a kit.

Volunteering, however, is inherently organizational in the broad sense

of the word, since by deﬁnition, it involves directly or indirectly serving

other people, as individuals or in groups. What, then, do I mean by “the

broad sense” of the concept of organization?

“Organization” is used here as shorthand for the range of collectivi-

ties that add social and psychological structure to leisure life, extending

from dyads, triads, small groups, and social networks through larger

organizations of various kinds to the broadest formations, notably tribes,

social worlds, and social movements. Accordingly, discussion in this sec-

tion will center primarily on these different types manifested as leisure

organizations rather than on the community or societal organization of

leisure, as seen in the sweeping communitarian arrangements that make

available leisure services and opportunities.

In keeping with the announced procedure of this book, readers wanting

a fuller treatment of the organization of leisure should see my book on

the matter (Stebbins, 2002). The present book requires only an aperçu of

the different kinds of organization common in leisure. So some leisure is

organized in dyads (e.g., brother and sister organizing a surprise birthday

party for a parent, two friends going to the cinema), triads (e.g., three

men on a ﬁshing trip, a classical music trio), or small groups (e.g., church

basketball team, several friends who routinely hike together, four couples

who dine monthly at a restaurant). These three types of organization are

found in all three forms of leisure.

The deﬁnition of social network that best ﬁts the small amount of

work done on this form of organization within the domain of leisure is

that of Elizabeth Bott (1957, p. 59). Her deﬁnition is simple: a social

network is “a set of social relationships for which there is no common

boundary.” In the strict sense of the word, a network is not a structure,

since it has no shared boundaries (boundaries recognized by everyone

in the social network) and no commonly recognized hierarchy or central

coordinating agency. Nevertheless, interconnections exist between others

in the network, in that some members are directly in touch with each

other while others are not.

As individuals pursue their leisure interests, they develop networks

of contacts (friends and acquaintances) related in one way or another to

these interests. As a person develops more such interests, the number of

networks grows accordingly, bearing in mind that members of some of

Synthesizing the Forms 55

these will nevertheless sometimes overlap. For instance, a few members

of John’s dog breeding network—they might be suppliers, veterinarians,

or other breeders—are also members of his golf network—who might be

suppliers, course personnel, or other golfers. Knowing people’s leisure

networks helps explain how they socially organize their leisure time. In

this manner, as Blackshaw and Long (1998, p. 246) point out, we learn

something new about leisure lifestyle.

In one of the few studies of leisure networks, Stebbins (1976) examined

those of amateur classical musicians. One analytic characteristic of social

networks is their reachability, which denotes in a person’s network the

number of intermediaries who must be contacted to reach certain others

in it. Reachability is relatively great when few or no intermediaries are

needed for this purpose, as opposed to when many are needed. Thus, in a

community orchestra, the concertmaster usually has greater reachability

than any other instrumentalist in the ensemble, because of responsibilities

demanding direct contact with the majority of its members. For example,

this person may be simultaneously assistant conductor, chief recruiter,

and disciplinarian, all in addition to being the orchestra’s subleader. In

the ﬁeld of leisure studies, Stokowski has devoted by far the most at-

tention to social networks (see Stokowski, 1994, for an overview of her

contributions to this area).

At the next level of organization—the grassroots association—

serious leisure predominates, though some examples can also be

found in casual leisure. The very nature of project-based leisure

would seem to preclude grassroots associations from developing

there. According to Smith (2000, p. 8): “grassroots associations are

locally based, signiﬁcantly autonomous, volunteer-run formal non-

proﬁt (i.e., voluntary) groups that manifest substantial voluntary

altruism as groups and use the associational form of organization

and, thus, have ofﬁcial membershi

ps of volunteers who perform most,

and often all, of the work/activity done in and by these nonproﬁts.”

The term formal in this deﬁnition refers in fact to a scale of structure

and operations that, in an actual association, may be informal, semifor-

mal, or formal. Moreover, the line separating grassroots associations

from paid-staff voluntary groups—treated of in the next paragraph as

volunteer organizations—is unavoidably fuzzy, distinguishing the two

being primarily a matter of gradation. Both types fall under the heading

of voluntary groups: “nonproﬁt groups of any type, whether grassroots

associations or based on paid staff, and whether local, national, or inter-

national in scope” (Smith, 2000, p. ix). Accordingly all the groups listed

56 Serious Leisure

in the preceding paragraph are also grassroots associations, as are such

formal entities as Girl Guide troops, stamp collectors societies, singles

clubs, and outlaw bikers organizations.

By comparison, volunteer organizations offer leisure only to career

and casual volunteers and to volunteers serving projects. Volunteer or-

ganizations are distinguished by their reliance on paid staff, and by the

fact that they are established to facilitate work for a cause or provision

of a service rather than pursuit of a pastime. They nonetheless depend

signiﬁcantly on volunteer help to reach their goals.

Pearce (1993, p. 15) holds that by far the largest number of

volunteers work in these organizations. But some volunteer or-

ganizations may be staffed entirely by remunerated employees,

volunteers only being involved as unpaid members of their boards

of directors. Hospitals and universities are two main examples.

Many foundations can be similarly classiﬁed. Other volunteer

organizations have a more even mix of paid and volunteer per-

sonnel; they include Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and the

Red Cross. Finally, some have only one or two employees, with

all other work being conducted by volunteers. They are, at bottom,

grassroots associations that have grown complicated enough to

justify hiring someone to help with certain of the group’s routine

operations.

Leisure service organizations are not voluntary groups, as just deﬁned.

Rather, they are collectivities consisting of a paid staff who provide one

of more leisure services to a certain clientele. To be sure, these clients are

engaging in particular leisure activities, but the organizations providing

them are not themselves leisure organizations of the sort considered in

this book. Leisure service organizations are established to either make

a proﬁt, the goal of many a health spa, amusement park, and bowling

center, for example, or in some instances, simply make enough money

to continue offering their services. This is the goal of charitable, non-

proﬁt groups like Meals on Wheels, the YMCA and YWCA, and the

Elderhostel Programs.

The next two types of organization germane to leisure have either been

covered, in the case of social worlds (chap. 1), or in the case of tribes,

will be covered later in this chapter. Let me add here that the richest

manifestation of social worlds can be observed in serious leisure, and if

found at all in casual and project-based leisure, they are by comparison

much simpler in composition. That leaves for the present section discus-

sion of social movements.

Synthesizing the Forms 57

The ﬁrst question here is whether participation in a social movement

is a leisure activity. The answer is both yes and no, for it depends on the

movement in question. Movements abound that gain members through

their own volition, suggesting that the members experience no coercion

to become involved. Some religious movements serve as examples, as do

movements centered on values like physical ﬁtness and healthy eating.

Still, the latter two also attract people who feel pressured by outside forces

to participate, as when their physician prescribes exercise or weight loss

or face an early death. Thus some social movements are composed of

enthusiasts who are there for leisure reasons and other people who are

compelled to be there (not leisure). Finally, there are movements that seem

to ﬁnd their impetus primarily in people who feel driven to champion a

particular cause, such as the celebrated temperance movement of early

last century and the vigorous antismoking movement of modern times.

A strong sense of obligation fuels their participation. Those who make

up the gun control and nuclear disarmament movements seem cut from

the same cloth. Whether this is leisure must be determined empirically

through interviews with members.

Social movements, be they primarily of the leisure variety, the forced

variety, or a combination of the two, have left a prominent mark on mod-

ern and postmodern life. A social movement is a noninstitutionalized set

of networks, small groups, and formal organizations that has coalesced

around a signiﬁcant value, which inspires members to promote or resist

change with reference to it. Thus, considered alone, a social movement

is a distinctive form of organization, which provides serious and casual

leisure for volunteers. Further there are also likely to be leisure projects

for volunteers, as they become involved for a limited period of time with

a movement through participating in a fund-raising campaign, organizing

a major rally, or lobbying for a certain piece of legislation.

Community

Community is a large subject, and by no means all possible aspects of

it have been brought to bear on the serious leisure perspective in the name

of that framework. There has nevertheless been research or discussion,

sometimes both, on family, work, social class, contributions of the three

forms to the community, and deviance. We turn ﬁrst to family.

Family

In much of the discussion that follows “family” is a summative term

for spouses, partners, boyfriends, girlfriends, and other members of im-

58 Serious Leisure

mediate or locally available extended family. At times, to be sure, such

global treatment of the subject will not do, at which point I will be more

discriminating.

My research on amateurs routinely covered the relations the respon-

dents had with their families as these bore on their serious leisure (see

Stebbins, 1992a, pp. 108-111). The aforementioned concept of uncon-

trollability was born of these discussions, signaling that family relations

may, on occasion, become contentious and testy over such issues as

expenditure of time and money on the leisure activity in question. From

such conﬂict talk of divorce sometimes arose, which was sometimes fol-

lowed by dissolution, the serious leisure of the respondent being cited

as a primary cause of it.

But the same research on amateurs suggests that serious leisure may

also have a favorable effect on family life. For example it can contribute

to stronger bonds between two or more people when all share an inter-

est in the activity (“a family that plays together stays together”). The

serious leisure of one member may become a rallying point for other

members, as in the parent or spouse who supports (presumably as an

agreeable obligation) the amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer involvements

of the participant. And the sense of well-being generated by most seri-

ous leisure can favorably affect the family, in that the participant is, as

a result, content, high-spirited, and possibly more accepting of others

in the household.

There no equivalent research on family in casual or project-based lei-

sure, that is research done under the rubric of these two forms. It is likely

that much of what have been observed for serious leisure could also be

observed for these two, albeit differently expressed. Thus a husband can,

in the eyes of his wife, spend too much time before the television set or

at the neighborhood pub, provoking thereby frequent marital spats. By

contrast both could enjoy time spent together at the cinema, going out

for dinner, or taking a walk. In general casual leisure is less regimented,

less bound by schedules and rules, than its serious counterpart, leaving

fewer grounds for family conﬂict in this area. But the relationship of

family and casual leisure is vastly understudied, so little can be said here

that is not speculative.

It is likewise with project-based leisure; no research exists yet linking

it to family. There is reason to expect differences, however, for its limited

duration could well keep conﬂict to a minimum. Family members could

well reason that it is better not to contest a member’s involvement in a

project that is due to end soon, especially if that person ﬁnds it fulﬁlling.

Synthesizing the Forms 59

And the possibility exists that other members might participate in the

same project, giving all concerned a shared, appealing, leisure interest.

Or the project might beneﬁt one or more other members of the family,

as might a new sweater, stone wall, or developed basement.

Work

My research on amateurs also routinely covered the relations the

respondents had with their jobs as these relations bore on their serious

leisure (see Stebbins, 1992a, pp. 111-114). Conﬂict here has been found

to be infrequent, though serious leisure participants of all types try to

avoid work that could create major tension with their free-time passion.

This was especially evident in the study of the three mountain hobbies,

where many of the respondents not only sought work that had ﬂexible

hours but also pointed out how much more exciting and interesting their

hobby was compared with their job (Stebbins, 2005c, pp. 108-111). Still

we may say for serious leisure, in general, that work comes ﬁrst in any

showdown between the two.

Looking at participation in serious leisure from a managerial stand-

point, McQuarrie (1999; 2000), in a unique set of studies in this area,

examined the issue of organizational support for employee commitments

associated with such free-time activity (e.g., time off to present a noon-

hour play, travel to a distant city to run a marathon). Her results show

that the amount and type of organizational support for such employee

commitments vary widely. Moreover she found positive organizational

support for serious leisure to have a positive inﬂuence on the job-related

attitudes of employees. She discovered, further, that supervisors and co-

workers differed in their level of support for such leisure, with the latter

being more encouraging than the former.

As with the family we lack research speciﬁcally focused on the rela-

tionship of work and casual leisure as well as work and project-based

leisure. It is hard to imagine employers being as generous as the ones

McQuarrie studied, were their employees to ask for time off to, for in-

stance, sleep in during a work morning, spend an afternoon at the beach,

or even take in the local community fair. But, from the point of view of

the typical employee, casual leisure may well look better than the job he

or she must hold to maintain personal economic existence. Beauschesne

(2005) reports data from a Workopolis poll indicating that nearly one in

ﬁve Canadian employees dread going to work, while another three in

ﬁve feel their employment is merely a job, a signiﬁcantly disagreeable

obligation. Belbin’s (2003) set of interviews with working-age women

60 Serious Leisure

who had left the workforce, considered with the Workopolis data, sug-

gest that leisure, when juxtaposed with most work, seems for many

people to be the more appealing of the two. For most of these people

this leisure is of the casual variety, since serious leisure is not estimated

to be widespread (Stebbins, 1992a, pp. 125-126).1 Project-based leisure

is possibly more sympathetically viewed, providing however, that it is

one-shot volunteering or other activity having obvious beneﬁt for the

local community.

Turning now to another link between leisure and work, note that all

three forms of leisure may be experienced as employment-based volun-

teering: volunteering done at the request of the volunteer’s employer.

Such activity, Thompson (1997b) observes, may amount to an agreeable

assignment for the volunteer (experienced as leisure) or a disagreeable one

(experienced as disagreeable obligation). What are variously known as

“corporate,” or “employee,” “volunteer programs” are designed to enable

and encourage employees in a work organization to serve as volunteers,

whether of the career, casual, or project-based kind.

Finally, work organizations may foster other kinds of extracur-

ricular leisure, some of it serious, some of it casual. Serious leisure is

offered when a company holds an intra-organizational golf tournament

or arranges for an outing of ﬁshing at a remote camp. By contrast the

company picnic or annual Christmas party and dinner, is classiﬁable as

casual leisure.

Gender

The matter of the gendered nature of serious leisure was examined

in the preceding stock-taking (Stebbins, 2001a, pp. 158-159), which

included a review of research to that date. Exploration in serious leisure

has continued since. Bartram (2001) found that female kayakers were

sometimes rejected by males as partners on kayaking trips on grounds that

the former are insufﬁciently aggressive and tolerant of risk and injury to

provide rescue should such be required. King’s (2001) study of quilters

centered on an essentially female hobby, the products of which express

the “women’s voice.” Major (2001) found that male and female runners

were distinguished, among other ways, by a fear for personal safety felt

exclusively by the latter.

When research gets more systematically underway on casual and

project-based leisure, we should expect gender differences to sometimes

be evident here as well. Consider, as an example, party shopping. In an

event that is almost exclusively female, a woman organizes in her own

Synthesizing the Forms 61

home a shopping party the centerpiece of which is a set of products she

hopes to sell to invited guests and their interested friends and relatives.

In the casual leisure (sociable conversation/sensory stimulation subtypes)

atmosphere of such gatherings, some food and drink is served as those

present talk socially among themselves, while examining and sometimes

seeing demonstrations of commodities they may want to buy. The or-

ganizer gets a prearranged share of the proﬁt from such sales, with the

remainder going to the manufacturer and wholesaler of the products

vended. It is possible that Tupperware (house wares) started, perhaps as

far back as ﬁfty years, the party shopping trend, which is now emulated

by Shaklee (health care products), Pampered Chef (kitchen ware), Fifth

Avenue Jewelry (jewelry), among several others (Stebbins, 2006a). In

rare look at party shopping as leisure, Storr (2003) studied Ann Summers

Parties (lingerie and sex toys) in Britain. Leslie Bella’s (1992) research

on the “Christmas imperative” (the cooking, baking, buying gifts, and

decorating of the home for Christmas done by the mother/wife of the

household) sometimes exempliﬁes occasional project-based leisure.

But Bella also found an unsettling problem: a number of the Canadian

women she interviewed came, over the years, to think of this project as

disagreeable obligation, as drudgery.

Although gender differences will not always be found in studies of

serious, casual, and project-based leisure (e.g., Shinew and Parry, 2005),

it is wise, when conducting exploratory research on these three forms,

to treat gender as a “sensitizing concept.” This is Blumer’s (1969) term

for basic social science ideas that help guide open-ended inquiry, lead-

ing thereby to new data on the subject in question. By asking ourselves

if there are important gender issues in the activity we are exploring, we

will avoid overlooking them when they are, in fact, there.

Social Class

The issue of social class and serious leisure was addressed earlier

(Stebbins, 2001a, p. 112), where is it was noted that a great deal of such

leisure, at least that studied so far, has been of, broadly put, middle-

class participants. There (p. 106) I also noted that we should be on the

lookout for serious leisure activities, where the working/middle-class

ratio may be nearly 50:50 or possibly reversed. It may turn out that the

predominantly working-class activities are mainly hobbies, among the

possibilities being pool, snowmobiling, snowboarding, dirt-bike racing,

motor sports, and the martial arts. Other hobbies like darts, hunting, and

ﬁshing may be found upon examination to attract a reasonably even mix

62 Serious Leisure

of middle- and working-class enthusiasts. The snowboarders Stebbins

(2005, p. 112) interviewed can be described, using as measures levels

of education and occupation, as working-class. Still, they were also a

young group (average age: twenty-four), suggesting that some of them

might eventually achieve middle-class status. Harrington, Cuskelly,

and Auld (2000, p. 432) found that those associated with motorsport in

Australia, including the volunteers they studied, were generally working

class. Adorjánÿ and Lovejoy (2003), using the novels of Australian writer

Robert G. Barrett and arguing in contrast to the element of purpose in

serious leisure, found that his principal characters indulged in a variety

of casual leisure activities salted with the attitude of working-class re-

sistance to middle-class values.

Class is not an issue when it comes to casual leisure, in the broad sense

that all classes appear to engage in some form of it. Of course, such factors

as money, time, and taste undoubtedly separate who goes in for what, so

that class patterns could be determined should researchers investigating

casual leisure as such care to do this. The same may be said for project-

based leisure. It is, in principle, classless, but the different classes would

seem to go in for different expressions of it (e.g., building a stone wall

[working class] vis-à-vis taking a special, one-shot, expensive trip to a

remote region of the world [upper-middle-class]).

In sum, serious leisure is the only one of the three forms that may

have a built-in class bias, skewing overall participation toward the more

moneyed and educated groups. Parker (1996) argues that, at least in part,

this pattern can be traced to ﬁnding a leisure career there, career being, he

says, a middle-class idea. But much research remains to be done on this

question, for not all serious leisure is expensive (e.g., reading hobbies,

collecting natural objects [e.g., leaves, rocks], much of volunteering) and

therefore out of reach for low-income people. In fact it may be, more

than anything, a matter of leisure education (see chap. 5), of informing

all people in all classes about the serious leisure perspective and what

is in it for them.

Also at issue here is whether people of all classes can ﬁnd a leisure

career in a serious leisure activity. The idea of a work career may be for-

eign to some working-class folks (as Parker argues), but leisure careers

for them are quite another matter. As observed in chapter 1, they are

based on the person’s sense of acquisition of skill, knowledge, and so

forth in a core leisure activity. So far as we know, these acquisitions are

available to anyone, regardless of class, acknowledging the constraints,

stated above, that some kinds of serious leisure do require sufﬁcient time

and money to pursue it.

Synthesizing the Forms 63

Contributions to the Community

Much of what I have written in the past under this heading has borne

on contributions serious leisure participants make to culturally enriching

their local community. Thus the local civic orchestra provides classical

music to it or the local astronomy club may offer an annual “star night”

for public observation of the heavens using the telescopes of members.

And local model railroaders sometimes mount for popular consumption

exhibitions of the fruits of their hobby.

A broader contribution to the community (and sometimes even the

larger society) comes from pursuing serious leisure activities as well as

becoming involved in some project-based leisure. This contribution is

known as “community involvement” or “civil labor.” Community involve-

ment is local voluntary action, where members of a local community

participate together in nonproﬁt groups or other community activities.

Often the goal here is to improve community life (Smith, Stebbins, and

Dover, 2006). Civil labor, which is synonymous with community involve-

ment, differs only in its emphasis on human activity that is devoted to

unpaid renewal and expansion of social capital (Rojek, 2002, p. 21). Beck

(2000, p.125) says that civil labor comprises housework, family work,

club work, and volunteer work. This is an extremely broad conception,

however, which encompasses the wide ﬁeld of unpaid work, or unpaid

obligation.

Rojek (2002, pp. 26-27) argues that, for the most part, civil labor is

the community contribution that amateurs, hobbyists, and career volun-

teers make when they pursue their serious leisure. Civil labor, however

conceived of, generates social capital, deﬁned here as the connections

among individuals manifested in social networks, trustworthiness, acts

motivated by the norm of reciprocity, and the like that develop in a com-

munity or larger society (Putnam, 2000, p. 19). The term is an analogy to

the concepts of human capital and physical capital (e.g., natural resources,

ﬁnancial resources); it emphasizes that human groups of all kinds also

beneﬁt from and advance their interests according to the salutary inter-

connections of their members.

With one exception casual leisure appears not to make this kind of

contribution to community. True, people are sometimes joined in such

leisure with strangers, especially these days, over the Internet. This also

happens with tribes: fragmented groupings left over from the preceding era

of mass consumption, groupings recognized today by their unique tastes,

lifestyles, and form of social organization. Maffesoli (1996) identiﬁes and

64 Serious Leisure

describes this postmodern phenomenon, which spans national borders.

In this regard, he observes that mass culture has disintegrated, leaving

in its wake a diversity of tribes, including the followers of heavy metal

music and those youth who participate in raves. Tribes are special leisure

organizations, special ways of organizing the pursuit of particular kinds of

casual leisure. Tribes are also found in serious leisure, but not, however, in

project-based leisure (see Stebbins, 2002, pp. 69-71). Tribes, social worlds,

casual leisure, and serious leisure are related in ﬁgure 4.1.

Figure 4.1

Structural Complexity: From Tribes to Social Worlds

Taste-based Activity-based Activity-based Social Worlds

tribes (e.g., tribes: consumers tribes: buffs (e.g., of (e.g., amateurs

amateurs, music, (e. g., jazz, basketball) StarTrek, opera) career volunteers)

least most

complex complex

Casual leisure Casual leisure Serious leisure Serious leisure

From: R.A. Stebbins, The organizational basis of leisure participation: A motivation

exploration. State College, PA: Venture, p. 70.

But no contribution is made to the community in the casual leisure

just mentioned. Hence it cannot be qualiﬁed as civil labor. The glaring

exception here is, of course, casual volunteering; it is done expressly

for this reason. And, in the course of doing it, volunteers may well meet

and serve with people never before encountered. This, too, is civil labor.

So we can conclude that such labor is not limited to serious leisure and

volunteer project-based leisure, but also ﬁnds its place in one type of

casual leisure.

As for project-based leisure it may, in at least two ways, have po-

tential for building community. One, it can bring into contact people

who otherwise have no reason to meet, or at least meet frequently. Two,

by way of event volunteering and other collective altruistic activity, it

can contribute to carrying off community events and projects. In other

words some project-based leisure (mostly one-shot volunteer projects, it

appears) can also be conceived of as civil labor, as just deﬁned, suggest-

ing that such activity is not strictly limited to serious leisure. In fact the

mountain hobbyists studied by the author (Stebbins, 2005c) occasionally

rounded out their leisure lifestyles by undertaking or participating in

(typically volunteer) projects of this kind.

Synthesizing the Forms 65

Deviance

Chris Rojek (1997, pp. 392-393) has been virtually alone in his critique

of leisure studies as having, in general, “turned a blind eye” to deviant

leisure. He noted that, if scholars in this ﬁeld want to know about this

kind of leisure, they must, for published material, turn to the study of

crime and deviance. Nevertheless, studying deviant leisure is extremely

important for leisure research, for “students of leisure will not only throw

light on a shadowy area of leisure activity; they will also contribute to

a clearer understanding of how the rules which shape normal leisure

practice operate.”

Treatments of deviant leisure have now begun to appear (see Steb-

bins, 1996d, 1997; Rojek, 2000, chap. 4; Cantwell, 2003; special issue of

Leisure/Loisir, v. 30, no. 1, 2006), and readers interested in it are encour-

aged to turn to these sources. What is important to note with respect to

the serious leisure perspective is that deviant leisure may take either the

casual or the serious form (there appears to be no project-based deviant

leisure). Casual leisure is probably the more common and widespread

of the two.

Casual or serious, deviant leisure mostly ﬁts the description of “toler-

able deviance” (exceptions are discussed below). Although its contraven-

tion of certain moral norms of a society is held by most of its members

to be mildly threatening in most social situations, this form of deviance

nevertheless fails to generate any signiﬁcant or effective communal at-

tempts to control it (Stebbins, 1996d, pp. 3-4). Tolerable deviance under-

taken for pleasure—as casual leisure—encompasses a range of deviant

sexual activities including cross-dressing, homosexuality, watching sex

(e.g., striptease, pornographic ﬁlms), and swinging and group sex. Heavy

drinking and gambling, but not their more seriously regarded cousins

alcoholism and compulsive gambling, are also tolerably deviant forms

of casual leisure, as are the use of cannabis and the illicit, pleasurable,

use of certain prescription drugs. Social nudism has also been analyzed

within the tolerable deviance perspective (all these forms are examined

in greater detail with accent on their leisure qualities in Stebbins, 1996d,

chaps. 3-7, 9).

In the ﬁnal analysis, deviant casual leisure roots in sensory stimula-

tion and, in particular, the creature pleasures it produces. The majority

of people in society tolerate most of these pleasures even if they would

never think, or at least not dare, to enjoy themselves in these ways. In

addition, they actively scorn a somewhat smaller number of intolerable

66 Serious Leisure

forms of deviant casual leisure, demanding decisive police control of, for

example, incest, vandalism, sexual assault, and what Jack Katz (1988,

chap. 2) calls the “sneaky thrills” (certain incidents of theft, burglary,

shoplifting, and joyriding).2 Sneaky thrills, however, are motivated not

by the desire for creature pleasure, but rather by the desire for a special

kind of excitement, namely, going against the grain of established social

life.

Beyond the broad domains of tolerable and intolerable deviant casual

leisure lies that of deviant serious leisure, composed primarily of aber-

rant religion, politics, and science. Deviant religion is manifested in the

sects and cults of the typical modern society, while deviant politics is

constituted of the radical fringes of its ideological left and right. Deviant

science centers on the occult which, according to Truzzi (1972), consists

of ﬁve types: divination, witchcraft-Satanism, extrasensory perception,

Eastern religious thought, and various residual occult phenomena revolv-

ing around UFOs, water witching, lake monsters, and the like (for further

details, see Stebbins, 1996d, chap. 10). Thus deviant serious leisure, in

the main, is pursued as a liberal arts hobby or as activity participation,

or in ﬁelds like witchcraft and divination, as both.

In whichever form of deviant serious leisure a person participates, he or

she will ﬁnd it necessary to make a signiﬁcant effort to acquire its special

belief system as well as to defend it against attack from mainstream sci-

ence, religion, or politics. Moreover, here, the person will discover two

additional rewards of considerable import: a special personal identity

grounded, in part, in the unique genre of self-enrichment that invariably

comes with inhabiting any marginal social world.

Youth Deviance

Leisure studies research, such as that of Iso-Ahola and Crowley (1991),

shows that boredom in free time is an antecedent of deviant leisure, as

when bored youth (the group most commonly examined) seek stimula-

tion in drugs and alcohol or criminal thrills like gang ﬁghting, illegal

gambling, and joy riding in stolen cars. The authors were primarily

concerned with substance abusers, citing research indicating that these

deviants are more likely than non-abusers to seek thrilling and adven-

turous pursuits, while showing little taste for repetitious and constant

experiences. In other words, such youth were looking for leisure that

could give them optimal arousal, that was at the same time a regular

activity -- not sporadic like bungee jumping or roller coaster riding -- but

that did not, however, require long periods of monotonous preparation.

Synthesizing the Forms 67

Such preparation is necessary to become, for instance, a good football

player or skateboarder.

To the extent that wayward youth have little or no taste for repetitious

and constant experiences, then what kind of leisure will alleviate their

boredom? Some forms of casual leisure, if accessible for them, can ac-

complish this, but do so only momentarily. Such leisure is by deﬁnition

ﬂeeting. As for serious leisure, though all activities do require signiﬁcant

levels of perseverance, not all require repetitious preparation of the kind

needed, say, to learn a musical instrument or train for a sport. For ex-

ample, none of the volunteer activities and liberal arts hobbies calls for

such preparation. The same can be said for amateur science, hobbyist

collecting, various games, and many activity participation ﬁelds. Spe-

lunking, orienteering, and some kinds of sports volunteering exemplify

non-repetitive serious leisure that is both exciting and, with the ﬁrst two,

reasonably adventurous.

Yet, the problem here is, rather, more one of lack of known and acces-

sible activities that amount to true leisure, than one of being forced into

inactivity or to do something boring (Stebbins, 2003a). Being coerced

suggests to the coerced person that no palatable escape from his condi-

tion exists. Thus, he must work, since money for necessities will come

from nowhere else, or he must give the mugger his money or risk getting

shot or beaten. With boring activities, however, palatable alternatives do

exist, some of which are deviant, as we have just seen, some of which

are not.

Those that are not must nevertheless be brought to light, which is a

central goal of leisure education. But what would leisure educators (in-

cluding leisure counselors and leisure volunteers) teach to chronically

bored youth? In general, in keeping with what will be said about leisure

education in the next chapter, they should focus not on so much casual

leisure but largely on serious and project-based leisure. So this is not the

last word on the matter.

History

There is a general history of leisure, of which serious, casual, and

project-based leisure are most certainly a part (the standard reference

here is Cross, 1990). Of interest in this synthesis of the serious leisure

perspective, however, is the history of leisure activities as deﬁned and

explained according to one or more of the three forms. In this regard the

main point to be made in this section is that, where it is possible to frame

an activity in historical perspective, this should be done. The history pre-

68 Serious Leisure

sented gives another context, another face on the prism, through which

to describe, analyze, and thereby understand the activity in question.

Many serious leisure activities have histories, especially the amateur

ﬁelds, but so do some hobbyist and volunteer ﬁelds. Examples of his-

torical framing of research data are available in entertainment magic,

Canadian football, stand-up comedy, barbershop singing, volunteering,

and selected mountain hobbies (Stebbins, 1993a; 1993c; 1990; 1996a;

1998d; 2005c). Gelber (1999, pp. 11-12) provides a general history of

American hobbies, which he brieﬂy acknowledges are serious leisure.

Some casual leisure is amenable to historical framing. For instance a

study of contemporary television watching could undoubtedly be enriched

by historical data, as could studies of contemporary mass tourism, dining

out, social nudism, recreational drug use, and patronization of cinemas.

Other casual activities such as napping, window shopping, and informal

sociable conversation might be difﬁcult to ﬁnd or generate historical data

on. The same seems to hold for project-based leisure: some types, like

volunteering for major events, would be amenable to historical descrip-

tion and analysis, whereas others, like the many personal projects people

mount (e.g., a genealogy, rock garden, surprise party) have a chronology

of personal decisions and actions, but not a formal history. The very

short-term nature of project-based leisure would seem to discourage, if

not obviate, historical treatment of much of it.

Lifestyle

A deﬁnition of lifestyle that ﬁts well in the serious leisure perspective

is the following: a distinctive set of shared patterns of tangible behavior

that is organized around a set of coherent interests or social conditions or

both, that is explained and justiﬁed by a set of related values, attitudes,

and orientations and that, under certain conditions, becomes the basis for

a separate, common social identity for its participants (Stebbins, 1997b;

see also Veal, 1993). At bottom leisure lifestyle centers on the ways people

allocate their minutes, hours, days, weeks, and so on to free-time pursuits.

In leisure studies free time has long been considered a key resource for

the individual to manipulate to his or her personal ends.

In other words people taking their leisure make discretionary time

commitments, which are essentially, noncoerced, allocations of a certain

number of minutes, hours, days, or other measure of time that a person

devotes, or would like to devote, to carrying out an activity (Stebbins,

2006e). Such commitments are both process and product. That is people

either set (process) their own time commitments (products) or willingly

Synthesizing the Forms 69

accept such commitments (i.e., agreeable obligations) set for them by oth-

ers. It follows that disagreeable obligations, which are invariably forced

on people by others or by circumstances, fail to constitute discretionary

time commitments, since the latter, as process, rest on personal agency.

In short, this conception of time commitment ﬁnds expression in leisure

and the agreeable sides of work (which, in effect, are experienced as

leisure, see Stebbins 2004b).

Note, however, that we can, and sometimes do, make time commit-

ments to carry out disagreeable activities, whether at work or outside

it. Such commitments—call them coerced time commitments—are,

obviously, not discretionary. Hence they fall beyond the scope of this

discussion and, with some interesting exceptions, beyond the scope of

leisure (see discussion on leisure costs, chap. 1).

More generally we commonly speak of past, present, and future time

commitments (discretionary and coerced) at work, leisure, and in the area

of nonwork obligations. The kinds of time commitments people make

help shape their work and leisure lifestyles, and constitute part of the

patterning of those lifestyles. In the realm of leisure the nature of such

commitments varies substantially across its three forms.

Generally speaking serious leisure requires its participants to allocate

more time than participants in the other two forms, if for no other reason,

than that, of the three, it is pursued over the longest span of time. In addi-

tion certain qualities of serious leisure, including especially perseverance,

commitment, effort, and career, tend to make amateurs, hobbyists, and

volunteers especially cognizant of how they allocate their free time, the

amount of that time they use for their serious leisure, and the ways they

accomplish this.

There are many examples. Amateur and hobbyist activities based on

the development and polishing of physical skills (e.g., learning how to

juggle, ﬁgure skate, make quilts, play the piano) require the aspiring

entertainer, skater, quilter, and so on to commit a fair amount of time on

a regular basis, sometimes over several years, to acquiring and polish-

ing necessary skills. And once acquired the skills and related physical

conditioning must be maintained through use. Additionally some serious

leisure enthusiasts take on (agreeable) obligations (Stebbins, 2000b) that

demand their presence at certain places at certain times (e.g., rehears-

als, matches, meetings, events). But most important, the core activity,

which is the essence of a person’s serious leisure, is so attractive that

this individual very much wants to set aside sufﬁcient time to engage in

it. In other words, serious leisure, as mentioned earlier, often borders on

70 Serious Leisure

being uncontrollable; it engenders in its practitioners a desire to pursue

the activity beyond the time or the money (if not both) available for it.

So, even though hobbies such as collecting stamps or making furniture

usually have few schedules or appointments to meet, they are nonethe-

less enormously appealing, and as such encourage these collectors and

makers to allocate, whenever possible, time for this leisure.

Project-based leisure may be accompanied by similar demands. There

are often scheduled meetings or responsibilities, if not both, and though

of short range, the condition of uncontrollability can also be a concern.

But project-based leisure does not, by deﬁnition, involve developing,

polishing, and maintaining physical skills, this being one of the key dif-

ferences in use of discretionary time separating it from serious leisure.

Furthermore, with project-based leisure comes a unique sense of time

allocation: time use is more or less intense but limited to a known and

deﬁnite period on the calendar (e.g., when the athletic games are over,

when the stone wall is built, when the surprise birthday party has taken

place). Indeed one of the attractions of projects for some people is that

no long-term commitment of time is foreseen.

Finally casual leisure may, in its own way, generate time commitments,

as in the desire

to set aside an hour each week to watch a television

program or participate as often as possible in a neighborhood coffee

klatch. Further some casual leisure, famously watching television,

is attractive, in part, because it is often available on a moment’s

notice—call it “spontaneous discretionary time commitment”; it

can ﬁll in gaps between discretionary and coerced time commit-

ments, and in the process, stave off boredom. Additionally casual

volunteering commonly has temporal requirements, as in joining

for the week

end an environmental clean-up crew, serving on Thanks-

giving Day free meals to the poor, and collecting money for a charity by

going door-to-door or soliciting on a street corner.

Moreover, in fashioning their leisure lifestyles, people blend and

coordinate their participation and allocation of free time in one or more

of the three forms. In this regard, some people try to organize their free

time in such a way that they approach an “optimal leisure lifestyle” (Steb-

bins, 2000a). The term, refers to the deeply rewarding and interesting

pursuit during free time of one or more substantial, absorbing forms of

serious leisure, complemented by judicious amounts of casual leisure or

project-based leisure or both. People ﬁnd optimal leisure lifestyles by

partaking of leisure activities that individually and in combination help

them realize their human potential, leading thereby to self-fulﬁlment and

enhanced well-being and quality of life.

Synthesizing the Forms 71

Culture

I draw here on Alan Tomlinson’s (1993) idea of “culture of com-

mitment,” my intent being to generalize it to a broader conception of

culture in the sphere of leisure. Tomlinson wrote about the commitment

“of human actors to the collective forms of everyday cultural life” (p.

9), centering his observations on the creation of cultural products by

participants in serious leisure. By generalizing his concept, we may also

speak of a culture of obligation, key values, and selﬁshness, all as related

to leisure. They, too, bear on creating the cultural products of serious

leisure, and I will argue, those of project-based leisure. Furthermore

this is culture that participants both produce and consume, hence most

casual leisure, which is only consumptive and not productive, must be

excluded from this discussion. As before, the principal exception is

casual volunteering.

Commitment

One, although seemingly illogical according to common sense, is

the proposition that serious leisure is characterized empirically by an

important degree of positive commitment to a pursuit (Stebbins, 1992a,

pp. 51-52). This commitment is measured, among other ways, by size-

able investments of time and energy in the leisure made by its devotees