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Each year, for ten uninterrupted years, a group of middle aged adults told researchers about their wants and desires, their life stresses and strains, their sources of happiness and joy, and their perspectives on how their lives were—or were not—changing. This book summarizes the results of this unique and unprecedented study. Using extensive statistical analyses and qualitative case studies, it documents change and consistency in participants’ core values and perceptions of leisure. It describes the vast range of experiences people had each year in areas ranging from changing social relationships to employment and health, and examines how these experiences affected their lives and their views of their life structure, looking at both variations over time for individual participants and differences from one participant to another. This book provides important guidance for scholars and researchers of aging. It also offers fascinating insights for practitioners working with midlife and older adults, as well as for the reader anticipating or experiencing the midlife years.
Volunteering and its nonprofit organizations have commonly been analyzed in economic terms, with volunteering being referred to as "unpaid (productive) work". This economic definition has been around far longer than that of volunteering conceived of as leisure, which is discussed as the volitional definition. By means of a lengthy literature review, this book sets out the theoretical and empirical contributions of the serious leisure perspective to understanding volunteer motivation. This second approach began more than 40 years ago. It answers the key motivational question of why people engage in unpaid productive work, laborious or not. Since in this conception payment in cash or in kind is not an incentive to perform such work, what encourages people to volunteer? The serious leisure perspective, unlike mainstream economics, can shed considerable light on this question.
Douglas Kleiber argues that the value of leisure for development lies in the particular experiences derived from those leisure activities. Experiences that fulfill a need for autonomy, competence, self-expression, and relatedness; that provide a dialectical response to one's prevailing patterns of living; or that address age-related tasks are generative of development and self-actualization. Kleiber reviews the predictable changes in leisure behavior over the life span, noting that activities stimulating developmental change are adopted less often and less effectively than they might be. He then considers the role that leisure experience can play in addressing the problems of socialization, identity formation, and adjustment to life circumstances, concluding with a discussion of optimizing leisure later in life.
This landmark publication brings together some of the most perceptive commentators of the present moment to explore core ideas and cutting edge developments in the field of Leisure Studies. It offers important new insights into the dynamics of the transformation of leisure in contemporary societies, tracing the emergent issues at stake in the discipline and examining Leisure Studies’ fundamental connections with cognate disciplines such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, History, Sport Studies and Tourism. This book contains original work from key scholars across the globe, including those working outside the Leisure Studies mainstream. It showcases the state of the art of contemporary Leisur...
Serious Leisure offers a comprehensive view and analysis of the current state of the sociology of leisure. Defining and differentiating the way people use their free time, Stebbins divides such activity into categories of serious, casual, and project-based leisure that he further separates into a variety of types and subtypes. Together they comprise what he calls "serious leisure." In this perspective, serious leisure constitutes systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity sufficiently substantial and interesting in nature and requiring special skills, knowledge, and experience. Casual leisure, though immediately, intrinsically rewarding, is by contrast a relatively sho...
The Eighth Edition Of This Classic Textbook Continues To Provide A Detailed Overview Of The History, Developments, And Current Trends In Leisure Studies. It Has Been Heavily Revised To Reflect Recent Societal Changes And The Challenges That Face The Leisure-Services Industry In The 21St Century. Students Will Learn How Trends Such As Dramatic Shifts In Population Make-Up, The Impact Of Technology, And Marketing Affect Leisure-Service Systems And The Recreation And Park Professions. To Reflect These Trends, The Text Focuses On Ten Different Types Of Organizations, Ranging From Nonprofit Community Organizations Or Armed Forces Recreation To Sports Management And Travel And Tourism Sponsors.
Adult Supervision Required considers the contradictory ways in which contemporary American culture has imagined individual autonomy for parents and children. In many ways, today’s parents and children have more freedom than ever before. There is widespread respect for children’s autonomy as distinct individuals, and a broad range of parenting styles are flourishing. Yet it may also be fair to say that there is an unprecedented fear of children’s and parents’ freedom. Dread about Amber Alerts and “stranger danger” have put an end to the unsupervised outdoor play enjoyed by earlier generations of suburban kids. Similarly, fear of bad parenting has not only given rise to a cottage industry of advice books for anxious parents, but has also granted state agencies greater power to police the family. Using popular parenting advice literature as a springboard for a broader sociological analysis of the American family, Markella B. Rutherford explores how our increasingly psychological conception of the family might be jeopardizing our appreciation for parents’ and children’s public lives and civil liberties.
Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma illustrates how stories about ill health and suffering have been produced and received from a variety of perspectives. Bringing together the work of Canadian researchers, health professionals, and people with lived experiences of disease, disability, or trauma, it addresses central issues about authority in medical and personal narratives and the value of cross- or interdisciplinary research in understanding such experiences. The book considers the aesthetic dimensions of health-related stories with literary readings that look at how personal accounts of disease, disability, and trauma are crafted by writers and filmm...
A historical examination of the way parenting has changed and the position of children has shifted in the last century.