Riesman—Abundance For What?

David Riesman
Abundance For What? and Other Essays
(1964)

"Work and Leisure: Fusion or Polarity"
(with Warner Bloomberg, Jr., 1957)
(pp. 147-161)

[149] Some workers responded to the exhausting demands of the workplace by a heroic effort to build up a counterlife outside the plant... Some retired into a close-knit family life and to home-improvement rather than self-improvement...

Where no other escape existed, the factory workers tended, like sailors, to fall back on the common denominator of the male sex as defining their leisure: gambling, fighting, whoring. ... Men became habituated to the factory, as children to school, but this "second nature" never overtook them completely nor turned them into enthusiastic addicts of monotony.

No wonder that a counterattack soon began against the central place of work on the simplest level of demanding shorter hours, with men choosing to take part of their increasing productivity in the form of time off rather than of an increase in real income. ...

[150] At a certain point, however, workers seem to want to buy leisure inside rather than outside the plant. No doubt this in part reflects still operative conventions as to a proper working day... And in part men may fear to have too much time outside—time perhaps on which their wives could make demands.

...

[155] ...the worker, as a parvenu, tends to have a more unequivocal relation to consumer goods than do people who have had a longer exposure to them. One of us supervised a study which illustrates this point. Working-class and middle-class parents were interviewed concerning their attitudes toward TV: for the former, this was an extrapolation of radio and the movies, and indubitably and good thing in a world of things, whereas for many middle-class parents TV presented a problem in self-definition, as well as in its possibly harmful effects on children.

This adherence to the tangible, then, characterizes working-class leisure activities in a wide gamut: the garden harvest which, like the fishing catch, can be counted and weighed; the travel mileages and car horsepowers which can be compared; and sex (whether marital or not), drinking, sports, and betting, which are all felt as essentially palpable. To be sure, we do not want to exaggerate...the lack of abstraction, nuance, and shadings of taste among factory workers. We know that even where the objects are the same, the meanings we assume to be attached to them

[156]

are of course attached only to their human possessors and that there is great variety here. ..

Beyond that, it is our impression that the simplicities of working-class leisure are under pressure not only from the tastes of the better educated strata as class consciousness and cultural encapsulation decline, but also from what we might term the feminizing of leisure. ...

"Leisure and Work in Postindustrial Society"
(1958)
(pp. 162-183)

[169] An informal poll a union local...found that the leaders did want a shorter work week whereas the rank and file did not. This was interpreted as suggesting that the leaders, better educated and more enterprising, feel cramped for time to do everything they want to do... Such men already had many hobbies... But the less active members...had no similar feeling of wanting the days to be longer. Such men, asked what they would do with an extra day, sometimes say, "sleep"; others could use it in hunting season—and already did so, to the dismay of the foreman. . . .

[In another study] some 80 per cent of industrial workers stated that they, in effect, kept on working for lack of alternatives, not for positive satisfactions. ... This clinging to the job is not simply a legacy of the Puritan ethic: it is rather a legacy of industrialism itself, of the old structures it has destroyed and the new structures it has created. Nor is it merely the feeling of shame in not having a job that is involved (although this is certainly an element). Work may not be an active presence in the life of American workers, but its absence would be an active absence. Or, more accurately, it is not so much work that would be missed as having a job...[as in] the self-definition (these data refer only to male workers) that comes from holding a job and the punctuations of life provided by regular employment.

...

[175] I have the impression that a general decline is occurring in the zest for work, a decline which is affecting even [certain] professional and intellectual groups... ...there is some slight evidence that application lists to medical school are no

[176]

longer so full, a decline which is attributed to the belief among young people that medical education is too arduous and takes too long before one is stabilized on a plateau of suburban life and domesticity. ... [In one study of medical students] three quarters of them are married, and, instead of sitting around waiting for night duty or talking about their work, they are eager to go home, help the wife get dinner, and relax with television.

Indeed, when I was an undergrad at The U, many of the grad students were both married and quite eager to go home. This meant, among other things, that you couldn't expect to get a practice room before 5pm, and that scheduling rehearsals was always difficult. It also was, already to me at that age, just really annoying to find music being treated like just another job. (I hadn't seen nothin' yet.)

[178] I have largely been discussing the uneven distribution of leisure in terms of differential attitudes toward work in different occupational groups. In comparison with the achievements of our occupational sociology, however, we have little comparable information concerning the sociology of leisure. ... A more systematic study than most...found that radio and TV listening were the top two activities for both upper and lower prestige groups, followed by studying in the upper group

[179]

and do-it-yourself activities in the lower. The latter spend much more time just driving around, as well as polishing the car; they also spend much more time in taverns. Only in the upper group do people go out to parties, as against simply dropping in on a neighbor... In both groups, commercial recreation outside the home, such as going to the movies, plays little part. This and other, more impressionistic studies point to the conclusion that the busier people, the professionals and executives and better-educated groups generally, also lead a more active life in their time away from work; as the saying goes, they work hard and play hard. ... Contrastingly, at the other end of the social scale, the unemployed as we know from several studies have in a psychological sense no leisure time at all...

"Some Issues in the Future of Leisure"
(with Robert S. Weiss, 1961)
(pp. 184-195)

[188] While for a few [industrial workers] this [response that given an extra hour in the day they would "sleep"] may bespeak an overfull life, and for others a general irritation with a nettling or silly question, the answer seems to us to symbolize the lack of interests and resources that could give point to the leisure time that is now available. ...

[189]

... This relative indifference has not always been the case: in the period before the Civil War, energetic workmen, in a burst of enthusiasm for science and literacy, created and attended the Mechanics Institutes. Presently our education system tends to siphon off from the working class the more literate and ambitious...

It is discomfitting to reflect on the complexity and scope of the programs that would be required to overcome this legacy of passivity and aimlessness. ...

At the level of the society the problems are no less grave. Where

[190]

the recreationist works for the public rather than the private sector, he has as little leverage at his disposal as the city planner has. One of us has recently had the chance to observe the enormous resistance that developed in a small Vermont community to a recreation leader's idea that the town should build a swimming pool, rather than some monument, as a war memorial: the project was fought by the town's elders as frivolous and a waste of money, in spite of the fact that the nearby rivers had become too polluted for swimming. Only great civic effort finally carried the project through, and now "everyone" can see what a boon it is to children and their parents, to farmers and workers after a hot day, and to otherwise idle teenagers, who can display themselves on the high dives, or, if they swim well enough, make a little money and gain some sense of responsibility from helping act as lifeguards around the pool. One consequence of the political weakness of public recreation is a tendency to overideologize particular leisure-time activities, exaggerating their importance and their potential contribution to individual character and the fabric of society. The President's campaign for physical fitness as a way of beating the Russians is an illustration. College sports may have suffered in the same way; it has repeatedly been shown, in novels and in the newspapers, that football or basketball do not inevitably build character. Yet it is hard to see how social forms adequate to the new leisure can be developed without an ideology that will mobilize people and strengthen the power of the few groups who are now concerned with the preservation of wilderness areas, the setting aside of land in our sprawling metropolitan belts for the play of adults and children, and the general release of resources other than commercial ones for experimentation and research in the field of leisure.

In comparison with the organizational forms developed for the integration of effort at work, there barely exist the social forms within which the energies of leisure might be developed or even illustatrated. Yet such comments evoke the whole paradox of planning for the use of what is an uncommitted part of one's life. Leisure is supposed to be informal, spontaneous, and unplanned, and is often defined as unobligated time, not only free of the job but free of social or civic obligations, moolighting, or more or less requisite do-it-yourself activities. One re-

[191]

sult of this outlook, however, is to discourage whatever planning is possible (except, perhaps, in terms of the family, not always the optimal unit for leisure when one thinks of the development of its individual members). When we confront such problems, we are inclined to think that significant changes in the organization of leisure are not likely to come in the absence of changes in the whole society: in its work, its political forms, and its cultural style.