Kenneth Roberts - Youth and Leisure

Age disqualifies this books author from first-hand, up-to-the-minute experience of adolescent leisure. I doubt whether this is a handicap. We all know how misleading personal impressions can be. I left school aged 16 in 1957, the era of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, and affluent young workers. My starting salary was 260 per annum, but with an assurance of yearly increments until age 30, and a non-contributory pension at 65. These were the rewards for a grammar-school education, O-levels and A-levels. Elders said they envied our opportunities, then accused us of misusing our wealth and freedom. Teenage crime, marriages and illegitimate births were soaring. Many of us wondered why we were missing the action. By 1961 my salary was 415 per annum. This was for office work; better money could be earned labouring 11 basic and 13 with bonuses and overtime, as I discovered before retiring to college. Politicians told us that we had never had it so good. They were right, from their position. Our parents had never been able to adorn their youth with second-hand scooters, annual made-to-measure suits, holidays at Butlins and on the Norfolk Broads. But how could we 1950s teenagers feel affluent when the bosses in our offices and factories were spending more on annual holidays than we earned in a year?

My standard of living did not decline upon forfeiting young-worker status and becoming a full-time student. University meant greater freedom from parents, work schedules and the thought-control that accompanies the prospect of a secure and progressive career, plus a non-contributory pension. Many students are drawn to sociology because their own experience of society discords with realities portrayed in the media, then amplified in domestic and peer-group interaction. I had always found it difficult to understand contemporaries who appeared happy to accept a lifetime of climbing incremental salary scales, the eight-to-five factory grind, who regarded their earnings as good money, and believed that adolescent leisure was a great time. By 1966, five years and two degrees after I withdrew from the workforce, sociology had transformed these earlier personal uncertainties info professional problems, and I completed my first research into how and why so many young people were and remain so deluded.

I now realise that many young people (and adults) have deep misgivings about their predicaments and futures, which they are unable to act upon, or even articulate. Many imagine that their own discontents are abnormal, and best concealed lest they be construed as personal defects. This is how the faade of the good life is preserved. The reason why sociology must desert common sense for abstract concepts and jargon is to penetrate lifes everyday appearances, and analyse the structures that shape peoples lives in ways that the subjects can rarely understand, let alone control. This is why no excuse is necessary for this book being essentially a sociological analysis rather than a participants account of youth at leisure. The author has seen both sides: sociology wins.

The sociology of leisure has been one of my major professional interests for over a decade. Another has been the entry into employment, and, in recent years, the predicaments of school-leavers facing labour markets offering an inadequate supply of jobs. The following chapters draw extensively from, and attempt to cross-fertilise, evidence and theories from youth research and leisure studies. I accept sole responsibility for the product, while gratefully acknowledging the assistance of Tricia McMillan, who typed the manuscript, and Deborah Chambers for commenting upon, and provoking an extensive revision of, an earlier draft.