In an age where quests for spectator and sensual diversion dominate the world of leisure, the phrase "serious leisure" may have a rather curious ring. At least historically, such wording is oddly contradictory, for seriousness has commonly been associated only with work, while leisure has been seen as the happy, carefree refuge from our earnest pursuit of money and social standing the paying job provides. But this view now appears to be losing ground. Current values and behavior patterns in work and leisure hint at the presence of a serious orientation toward leisure among a significant proportion (albeit still a minority) of the population in today’s postindustrial society, and the likelihood that this proportion will continue to grow for some time. Confirmation of this trend comes from several sources.

A number of writers, among them Kreps and Spengler (1973: 89-90), Bryan (1973: 8-9), and Jenkins and Sherman (1979), envision a major reduction in the future in the amount of time the typical worker puts in on the job. This reduction is partly accounted for by a likely decline in the number of jobs available at all levels of skill and training. Jenkins and Sherman (1979: 123), for instance, forecast a 23.2% decline in Britain by the year 2003. As significant is their (1979: 163-164) observation that tomorrow's work week will be shorter, leaving us with more leisure time on our hands than previously and with the problem of how to use it effectively:

They go on to recommend four-day work weeks, three-week work months, extra vacation periods, sabbatical leaves, and job-sharing as possible ways of optimizing our work and leisure in our own interest. Lefkowitz's (1979) interviews with a sample of Americans indicate that some of them are already informally expanding their leisure involvements by voluntarily accepting early retirement or unemployment.

Lefkowitz’s (1979) findings signal a change in attitude toward gainful employment. His interviewees want to do things that fulfill their human potential, that develop them as persons. Increasingly, they are searching for this opportunity in their leisure. Only one in five of this "New Breed," as Yankelovich (1979: 11-13) refers to them, said that their work means more to them than-their leisure. Bosserman and Gagan (1972: 113-114) and Best (1973) are among the writers to point out that leisure in postindustrial society is no longer seen as chiefly a means of recuperating from the travail of the job. Like Lefkowitz’s and Yankelovich's respondents, they now see leisure as offering a prime opportunity for personal expression, self-identity enhancement, and self-fulfillment. Seltzer and Wilson (1980) found that males and people with incomes above the median used more of their nonwork time for self-development than did those outside these categories.

The proposition to emerge from these impressionistic and descriptive studies is that, more and more, people work primarily because they need the money to sustain their leisure interests, interests that consume a growing proportion of their waking hours. As Aristotle put it, "The end of labor is to gain leisure." A recent newspaper article describes this orientation among three men who have chosen a career in secretarial work. They argue that it has clear-cut hours of employment, which frees two of them to write poetry and the third to take university courses (Brewer, 1979).

If leisure is to become, for many, an improvement over work as a way of finding personal fulfillment, identity enhancement, self-expression, and the like, then people must be careful to adopt those forms returning the greatest payoff. The theme here is that we reach this goal through engaging in serious rather than casual or unserious leisure. My aim is to define, describe, and interrelate three types of this leisure: amateurism, hobbyist pursuits, and career volunteering. They contrast with a bewildering array of unserious forms, such as sitting at a football game, riding a roller coaster, taking an afternoon nap, watching television, observing a fireworks display, going on a picnic, and so on.

The theme just mentioned is in no way a denial of the fact that a small segment of the population will always find their work

and leisure merging. For them, the first is as fulfilling and exciting as any leisure activity can ever be (Dunnette el al., 1973). Nevertheless, most people in the future are apt to shift their "central life interest" (Dubin, 1979) to some leisure involvement.

Lest my emphasis on work versus nonwork circumscribe attention, it should be noted that this treatment of serious leisure types may also be applied to those who have no job and perhaps even no intention of seeking one (such as the aging, the willfully unemployed, the occupationally disabled). It depends on how they define leisure. Some may view amateur or volunteer pursuits as something other than leisure, as either work or some special category. For instance, nearly 13% of the aging women sampled by Roadburg (1980) define volunteering as work, while another 4% define it as leisure. lt. is seen as leisure most frequently by those who hold paying jobs.

That the three types of serious leisure—amateurism, hobbyist pursuits, and volunteering— are not work for most of those who engage in them is patent. That they are leisure is possibly less so. Thus, I begin by comparing them with the seven "essential elements of leisure" set out by Kaplan (1960: 22-25):

Kaplan's conception of leisure is congruent with the subjective one guiding this analysis, namely, leisure is activity defined as such by those engaging in it.

Although amateurs and volunteers are sometimes paid for their efforts or expenses or both (see Stebbins, 1979: 206-207; 1981a; Carter, 1975: 92-95), these types of leisure hardly constitute a main source of income. It is characteristic of serious leisure that its practitioners are not dependent on whatever remuneration they derive from it. Moreover, while amateurs, hobbyists, and volunteers frequently incur obligations, and important ones at that, they are freer than breadwinners to renounce their leisure altogether (when particular obligations are not pressing for immediate fulfillment). Nonetheless, serious leisure enthusiasts are usually more obliged to engage in their pursuits than are their unserious counterparts. But like those counterparts, their broad impression of their involvement here is a pleasant one. For the amateurs and the volunteers, and for a small number of hobbyists, this positive view rests on the contribution the activity makes to the individual's well-being and to the life of the community. lt. follows that the element of play is uncommon in serious leisure.

At this time, it is neither possible nor desirable, given the lack of data on the subject, to offer a crisp definition of serious leisure. That must come later, after systematic research has been conducted on at least some of its many forms. Yet, such research can only take place if we have some idea of what we wish to study and why. The aim here is to point the way to the study of serious leisure by conceptualizing it and its three types to the degree of clarity required for them to serve as analytic and sensitizing concepts (Blumer, 1969: 147-149; Glaser and Strauss, 1967: 38-39).

During the current exploratory stage of research on serious leisure, seriousness is most effectively examined as a dichotomous quality, with casual or unserious leisure as its opposite. Even today, nonetheless, there is evidence among amateurs, for instance (Stebbins, 1979: 35-37), to suggest that seriousness and casualness, as personal approaches to leisure, are merely the poles of a complicated dimension along which individuals may be ranked by their degrees of involvement in a particular activity. Hence, a more sophisticated, research-informed construct will likely abandon eventually this primitive categorical terminology for terminology conveying continuousness.

When research concepts are "analytic," they are "sufficiently generalized to designate characteristics of concrete entities, not the entities themselves" (Glaser and Strauss, 1967: 38). Six distinct qualities give the concept of serious leisure this important breadth of scope.

One quality of serious leisure distinguishing it from unserious forms is the occasional need to persevere at it. Despite participants' generally pleasant memory of such activity, there are moments when they suffer stage fright (Stebbins, 1981b), embarrassment (Floro, 1978: 198), freezing cold (Stebbins, 1981c) anxiety (Dannefer, 1980: 396), fatigue and injury (Thompson et al., 1979; Hershkowitz, 1972), and other strains. Still, it is clear that the positive feelings about the activity come, to some extent, from sticking with it through thick and thin, through conquering adversity.

Another quality of serious leisure separating it from other types of leisure is the tendency for amateurs, hobbyists, and volunteers to have careers in their endeavors. These endeavors are enduring pursuits with their own histories of turning points, stages of achievement or involvement, and background contingencies. They are anything but evanescent occurrences devoid of social or psychological continuity. The volunteer, for instance, might return several days each week for many years to counsel delinquent girls; the amateur might paint and sell a dozen canvases in the span of a decade; the hobbyist runner (Nash, 1979: 213-215) might, recognize his progressive improvement in conditioning as he trains for an upcoming race.

Careers in serious leisure frequently rest on a third quality, namely, significant personal effort based on special knowledge, training, or skill, and sometimes all three. As subsequent sections of this analysis demonstrate, such characteristics as manual dexterity, scientific knowledge, verbal skills, long experience in a role, showmanship, athletic prowess, and, above all, persistent individual effort, differentiate amateurs and hobbyists from dabblers and the public, and volunteers from trainees and clients.

Fourth, research (Stebbins, 1979, 1981a, 1981c) has shown eight durable benefits (Stebbins, 1980) found by amateurs in their various pursuits: self-actualization, self-enrichment, recreation or renewal of self, feelings of accomplishment, enhancement of self-image, self-expression, social interaction and belonginess, and lasting physical products of the activity. A ninth benefit—self-gratification or pure fun—which is considerably more evanescent than the preceding eight, is the only one that is also characteristic of unserious leisure. Self-gratification and, to a lesser extent, social interaction are usually the sole benefits accruing to those who partake of the latter type of pastime. There is reason to believe that systematic study of samples of hobbyists and volunteers would result in similar listings of benefits or rewards, with lasting physical products being the least prevalent among the volunteers (see Altheide and Pfuhl, 1980; Houston, 1968: 56-58; Irwin, 1973; Neulinger, 1974: 62).

A fifth quality differentiating serious and unserious leisure is the unique ethos that grows up around each instance of the former. Because of the previously mentioned qualities, amateurs, hobbyists, and volunteers tend to develop subcultures composed of special beliefs, values, moral principles, norms, and performance standards. Put otherwise, serious leisure participants carry on their interests within their own social worlds, which have been described as

Much of popular or unserious leisure cannot be conceived of in

these terms.

The sixth quality turns on the preceding five: participants in

serious leisure tend to identify strongly with their chosen pursuits. They are inclined to speak proudly, excitedly, and frequently about them to other people, and to present themselves in terms of them when conversing with new acquaintances. Research on amateurs indicates they realize they are sometimes too enthusiastic about their avocations when discussing them with others (Stebbins, 1979). By contrast, unserious leisure, though hardly humiliating or despicable, is nonetheless too fleeting, mundane, and commonplace for most people to find a distinctive identity in it.

It should be clear from the contents of this section that the senses to be stressed of the adjective "serious" are earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness, rather than gravity, solemnity, joylessness, distress, and anxiety. Though items in the second list occasionally describe serious leisure events, they are not characteristic of them, and they fail to nullify or, in many cases, even dilute the overall pleasure participants gain from them.

The foregoing discussion also indicates that serious leisure is as often described and analyzed in terms appropriate to the world of work as it is in those appropriate to the world of leisure. Hobbyists and volunteers, it seems, join the amateurs in the ranks of the marginal men and women of leisure (see Stebbins. 1979: 40-43).

Modern amateurs (not the nineteenth-century types) in art, science, sport, and entertainment pursue an activity chosen because of its strong appeal. The durable benefits of this type of leisure, however, spring from the refusal to remain a player, dabbler, or novice at it. Rather, the activity is transformed into an avocation in which the participant is motivated by seriousness and commitment, as these are expressed both in regimentation (such as practice or rehearsals) and in systematization (such as schedules or organization).

In distinguishing amateurs from other types of serious leisure participants, one definition is particularly appropriate. It presents amateurs as part of a professional-amateur-public (P-A-P) system of functionally interdependent relationships, an institutional location that is both cause and effect of their serious, committed orientation toward the activity in question. It is evident that amateurs are linked to professionals or publics or both in at least seven ways, which, to avoid needless repetition, are only sketchily summarized here (for more detail, see Stebbins, 1977: 585-588).

These links between amateurs and professionals constitute the most important and distinctive criteria for differentiating amateurs from hobbyists and volunteers. The latter two types have no such ties with this part of the occupational world. Hence they experience few, if any, of the consequences of those ties, whether they be advantageous or disadvantageous.

Both hobbyists and amateurs are practitioners with definite and lasting purposes. Hobbyists are serious about and committed to their endeavors, even though they frequently feel no necessity or obligation to engage in them. In other words, they are no dabblers or people aimlessly doing something as a temporary diversion. A hobby is a specialized pursuit beyond one's occupation, a pursuit one finds particularly interesting and enjoys doing because of its durable benefits.

A crucial difference between hobbyists and amateurs is that the first are external to any complete P-A-P system. Though uncommon, hobbyists may have a commercial public, for example, the part-time toy maker who sells to a local market, but they lack professional counterparts. A commercial equivalent may also exist, as in the case of hobbyist flytiers versus fishing-equipment manufacturers. But the latter differ significantly from members of a "profession" as this term is conventionally defined and used in occupational sociology. Indeed, hobbyists are likely to be enamored of pursuits bearing little or no resemblance to ordinary work roles.

Any monetary interests in a hobby are secondary when compared with its other durable benefits. The studies of hobbyists cited at various points in this article support this proposition, in the sense that remuneration is never mentioned as a reason for engaging in hobbies. To the extent that hobbies are like amateur pursuits, evidence of the low priority of remuneration as a durable benefit among the latter (see Stebbins, 1979: 66, 140-141, 208-210; 1981a: Chapter 6) constitutes additional indirect support. In other words, neither hobbies nor amateur pursuits are entered primarily as a form of moonlighting to supplement the practitioner's main income. They are not "second jobs." There is a devotion to these forms of serious leisure that suggests they would be practiced regardless of the financial gain or loss that adheres to them. If a substantial amount of money is made in them, that is but one reward of many and, it appears from the evidence at hand, one of the least significant. Many "sideline" businesses, including some hobby farms, are thus excluded from consideration as true hobbies.

Hobbyists fall into four categories: collectors of, for instance, stamps, rare books, butterflies, violins, minerals, or paintings develop a technical knowledge of the commercial, social, and physical circumstances in which their fancied items are acquired. They also develop a sophisticated appreciation of those items, along with a broad understanding of their historical and contemporary production and use. This knowledge, appreciation, and understanding is illustrated in Dannefer's (1980) ethnography of the social world of the old-car collector. Elkoff (1970) dwells on the technical knowledge art collectors need when they try to locate original paintings with a good probability of high future value.

Hobbyist collectors are distinguishable from commercial dealers. Dealers acquire their stock in order to profit from and hence make a living by subsequent sales—a wholly different motive from the motive driving hobbyist collectors. The latter may make money by selling a violin or painting for one more valuable, but they are interested in gaining a prestige item for personal and social reasons, or possibly for hedging inflation rather than in earning a livelihood.

The casual collecting of such things as matchbooks, beer bottles, or travel pennants is, at best, a marginal instance of "hobbyism" (to coin a new word). Here, there is no equivalent complex of commercial, social, and physical circumstances to learn about; no substantial aesthetic or technical appreciation possible; no comparable level of understanding of their production and use to be developed. Casual collecting is most accurately classified as part of unserious leisure, as a pastime.

Makers and tinkers comprise the second group of hobbyists. This is the conceptual home of such enthusiasts as inventors, furniture and toy makers, flytiers, automobile repairers, boat builders, seamstresses, knitters and weavers, lapidary workers, home remodelers (where this is a recurrent activity), and handicrafters (where no professional counterpart exists). The do-it-yourself drudge who paints the exterior of his house to avoid the expense of a full-time tradesperson is no example of the hobbyist home remodeler. Nor can we regard the branches of commercial automobile repair, clothing manufacture, and pottery-making as examples of tinkers or makers.

The third kind of hobbyist is the activity participant. Such people steadfastly pursue a form of leisure for the development and expression of skills and knowledge and for the personal enrichment it offers. Often the activity poses a challenge to be met, albeit a noncompetitive one. When carried out continually and purposely for these reasons, the following are among the things activity participants do: bodybuilding, backpacking, hanggliding, cross-country skiing, surfing, bird watching, tourism, fishing and hunting, and serious reading of a genre of literature (such as science, belles lettres, history).

When their pursuits are competitive, hobbyists can be classified in a fourth way, as players of sports or games. Unlike those in the preceding category, players are related to each other by a set of rules structuring their actions while they are engaged in the contest. These activities, which lack a professional counterpart, include canoe racing, cross-country running, darts, archery, shuffleboard, volleyball, horseshoes, softball, and rock climbing. Consistent with the definition of "hobbyist," participation is continual and systematic. The aim is to acquire and maintain the knowledge and skills enabling the individual to experience uncommon rewards from the endeavor. This orientation, whatever the type of serious leisure, can have unwanted consequences, as the following observations on dedicated runners suggest:

Such sports as baseball, hockey, bridge, and tennis are more accurately placed under the heading of amateurism, owing to their location in a P-A-P system. Other sports, like racquetball and possibly auto racing, being in the process of professionalizing, are thus difficult to classify at present.

Some hobbyists fit more than one category, such as the builders of motorized model airplanes who ultimately fly their constructions in a nearby field. Classification of individual hobbyists also depends partly on the contexts in which they pursue their activities. Swimmer number one is a player because he competes in swimming meets. Swimmer number two is an activity participant because she swims strictly for the pleasure of the development and maintenance of her skill and for the exercise it provides.

Historically, certain hobbies in the arts, science, sport, and entertainment fields have evolved over the years into full-time livelihoods for some of their enthusiasts and ultimately into professions. As professionalization occurred, those who retained their serious, albeit part-time, commitment to the activity were gradually transformed into amateurs. Before this, in the early days of the activity, all participants were the so-called gentlemen amateurs, usually independently wealthy individuals who had time to devote to leisure interests. In other words, the emerging professionalism was paralleled by an emerging amateurism. Through the P-A-P system that was taking shape, the amateurs in it learned what full-time work at the erstwhile hobby could produce, which, depending on the area, included greater rates of productivity, increased complexity of knowledge and instrumentation, new standards of performance excellence, expanded and formalized training requirements, and so on. This eventually reshaped the part-time pursuit of the activity, in the sense that, increasingly, it was modeled after its new professional counterpart. Historical research by Ainley (1980) and Lankford (1981a, 1981b) describe this process as it unfolded in ornithology and astronomy, respectively.

Van Til (1979: 11) states the essential differences between voluntary action and its subcategory of interest to us, namely, volunteering:

Bosserman and Gagan (1972: 115) and Smith (1975: 248) hold that, at the individual level, all leisure is voluntary action. In fact, such action may even be found in nonleisure settings. Voluntary action (and therefore volunteering) is undertaken for reasons other than economic benefit, self-preservation, physical coercion, physiological need, or psychic or social compulsion. Neulinger (1981: 19) reviews the conceptualizations of leisure as a social instrument in the community, as a means of serving others.

The conceptual framework of serious leisure encompasses three of the five categories of volunteering identified by Carter ( 1975: 106). Volunteers in management and board work engage in fund-raising, committee work, and board activities. Service volunteers perform such tasks as information-giving, volunteer driving, homemaking for others, friendly visiting, case aide work, tutoring, baby-sitting, youth work, and clerical functions. In the political and civic sphere, volunteers get involved in citizens' movements, social advocacy, social action, and political functions.

Because volunteering, when viewed as a type of serious leisure, is a recurrent, skill- and knowledge-based activity in which people can have a career in a special social world, the other two categories mentioned by Carter—financial help and gifts of self—are excluded from the present discussion. Donations of clothing and money may be recurrent, but they hardly meet the other criteria of volunteering as serious leisure. Gifts of furniture, blood, organs, tissues, eyes, and so forth are normally one-shot contributions and, except for furniture, pleasant only in the altruistic feelings generated from one's magnanimity.

Two aspects of the volunteering role distinguish its incumbents from the first two types of serious leisure participants. One of these is altruism. Though it is now established that volunteers are usually driven by both altruistic and self-interested motives (National Advisory Council on Voluntary Action, 1978: 11; Carter, 1975: 83), the former influences volunteers far more than it influences amateurs or hobbyists.

The second aspect is the delegated tasks volunteers perform, tasks offered to them by their superiors who are employed in the organization in which the volunteers serve. That is, these tasks are ones the professional or managerial staff of the organization believe volunteers can do, given adequate training and experience, and which staff care not to do themselves (see Lauffer and Gorodezky, 1977: 9). This turns volunteers into "outsiders" in work organizations or agencies otherwise composed of insiders (Floro, 1978: 198). Indeed, they may even be threatening to some of the insiders (Deegan and Nutt, 1975: 351). It is for these reasons that volunteers usually require sponsors (Floro, 1978: 197), an arrangement unheard of in the individualized forms of amateurism and hobbyism. In the collective forms, tryouts provide a sort of immediate proof of a performer's or athlete's excellence, and obviate any need for a sponsor. All this means that volunteers are neither facsimiles of professionals, as amateurs are, nor bureaucratized workers. Rather, they are a special class of helper in someone else's occupational world (Floro, 1978: 194).

These two aspects enable volunteers, as they pursue their serious leisure, to contribute to society in a unique way. This they do by helping. It contrasts with the contributions of amateurs and hobbyists, whose commercial, scientific, sport, artistic, and entertainment activities are fundamentally cultural. While they do help on occasion, as in the case of the avocational scientists who collect data for professional analysis, helping is only a minor goal; it is but a secondary consequence of their self-interested search for leisure with durable benefit. There may be considerable self-sacrifice, as already mentioned, but this is done primarily for personal reasons and only secondarily for altruistic ones.

In their pursuit of serious leisure, volunteers reverse these values. They gain durable personal benefits from these endeavors, but helping remains their chief aim. Amateurs and hobbyists struggle through the difficult requirements of their leisure because they are expected to be devotees and because hard work engenders feelings of accomplishment. When volunteers labor, they do so with the conviction that they are needed and that to weaken in the face of adversity is to let down others, disappoint them, or leave serious personal or social problems unresolved.

Nevertheless, volunteers and amateurs do make one similar, contribution; in their own ways they relate the occupation or organization with which they are associated to its clients. Lauffer and Gorodezky (1977: 10) have noted, for example, that the "volunteers sometimes speak the clients' language more directly than paid staff." In science, amateurs have been recognized for their public relations efforts, such as working to educate the citizenry in the fundamentals of the discipline and lobbying government for legislation favorable to it (see Mayfield, 1979: 169; Stebbins, 1982).

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Differentiating

principle Amateurism Hobbyism Volunteering

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Motivation 1) Self-interest 1) Self-interest 1) Altruism

2) Public interest 2) Public interest 2) Self-interest

3) Altruism 3) Pecuniary interest

4) Pecuniary interest

Institutional role 1) Near professional 1) Nonwork 1) Delegated work

Contribution 1) Satisfaction 1) Satisfaction 1) Helping

2) Cultural 2) Cultural 2) Satisfaction

3) Helping 3) Commercial

4) Commercial

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Table 1 summarizes the conceptual discussion of the previous three sections. The number preceding each attribute signifies its rank order in terms of the degree of significance ascribed to it by the typical participant. The higher the number, the less significant the attribute. Indeed, depending on the type of serious leisure under consideration, the second, third, and fourth attributes apply only to a minority of individual participants. This ranking is based on current knowledge about the three types. Since research is badly needed here, new data could change this pattern, perhaps dramatically.

But the case for consideration of serious leisure does not end with a call to social scientists to give it more research attention. For at least some people, it offers an attractive alternative to the typical job, in an age when that job is consuming less and less of our time while continuing to function as the main source of personal income with which we sustain life and leisure. Yet, people must either discover for themselves or be shown that

The suggestion I believe to be implicit in Roberts's statement is that a steady diet of casual, unserious leisure in the sizable blocks of time left over after a substantially reduced work week, month, or year ultimately tends to cause spiritual dyspepsia. The work one does in the standard work period of the present may be alienating in the most poignant Marxian sense of the word. But replacement by "alienated" or "anomic" leisure (Gunter and Gunter, 1980: 369-372) is no way to improve the quality of life either.

Serious leisure requires, as I have tried to show, the development of skills and knowledge, the accumulation of experience, and the expending of effort. This background has somehow to be acquired. To the extent that an educational system can provide it, our present one will have to undergo some major changes (Jenkins and Sherman, 1979: 145). It must be reorganized to teach people how to be amateurs, hobbyists, or volunteers, as well how to fill jobs that will be not only different but also less time-consuming than those of today. If we succeed at this—and it is no mean challenge—then many of us are likely to reach the happy state envisaged by Cicero:

Cicero wrote better than two thousand years ago. Today we need not wait for old age to have such opportunities. Tomorrow the wait will be even shorter.

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