WHEN WORK IS ESSENTIALLY LEISURE

Abstract

Some work, called here “devotee work,” is so attractive that it is essentially leisure for those engaging in it. For them the only important difference between their work and what their counterparts in serious leisure do is that devotee workers get paid for their efforts. Occupational devotees turn up chiefly, though not exclusively, in four areas of the economy, providing work there is, at most, only lightly bureaucratized: certain small businesses, the skilled trades, the consulting and counselling occupations, and the public- and client-centered professions. In short, occupational devotees and serious leisure enthusiasts intensely love the same activity, finding there a powerfully attractive work or leisure career. Thus work and leisure are, contrary to conventional wisdom, neither wholly separate nor mutually antagonistic spheres of modern life. The close relationship, examined here between serious leisure and occupational devotion demonstrates that there can be joy in work just as in leisure and that this joy is, at bottom, qualitatively the same in both worlds. In other words such joy is basically a shared sentiment, in that the core activities in work and leisure which are so powerfully attractive – and which foster the joy – are highly similar, and in some instances, literally identical.