Robert A. Stebbins - Social Worlds and the Leisure Experience

The idea of the social world is a scientific construction, albeit one that members of such a formation seem to recognize easily once given a simple description of their own. The social world is not, therefore, a folk term, even though it is exciting to be in one that will be described later in this chapter as complex. That is, there is in such involvement a feeling of belonging to a distinct social entity, of identity, and a sophistication about how that entity functions and about ones place in it. Moreover, a given complex social world is dynamic, often changing as members come and go, improving (or declining) in the core activity, while the nature of its tourists and strangers can vary for better or worse.2

Social worlds may be studied with reference to a demographic category as Unruh (1983), for example, did with the elderly or to a social status such as a variety of deviant (e.g., Bradley-Engen & Ulmer, 2009) or of ethnicity (e.g., Taylor, 1983, Chapter 1). Yet, these applications of the concept are rare compared with those centered on something palpable like activities, sites, technologies, and organizations typical of particular social worlds as Strauss (1978, p. 121) urged. Moreover, these conceptions of the social world differ substantially from that presented in the many books using the social world as a rough equivalent of society. The latter conception centers on broad social worlds, or social environments, in which most people interact on a routine basis framed in a shared culture and social organization (see Amazon.com/books/search term social world).

Nevertheless, a major problem with hitching research on social worlds to the wagon of activity is that the latter, despite Strausss observation, has until recently been insufficiently conceptualized. To be sure, the idea is a palpable matter, but what does that mean in real life? What is an activity? Nowadays, in leisure studies, it has been defined as a type of pursuit, wherein participants in it mentally or physically (often both) think or do something, motivated by the hope of achieving a desired end (Stebbins, 2012, p. 6). Over the years, it has become a foundational concept in the SLP. There it is argued that our existence is filled with activities, both pleasant and unpleasant: sleeping, mowing the lawn, taking the train to work, having a tooth filled, eating lunch, playing tennis matches, running a meeting, and on and on. Activities, as this list illustrates, may be categorized as work, leisure, or non-work obligation. They are, furthermore, general. In some instances, they refer to the behavioral side of recognizable roles, for example, commuter, tennis player, and chair of a meeting. In others, we may recognize the activity but not conceive of it so formally as a role, exemplified in someone sleeping, mowing a lawn, or eating lunch (not as patron in a restaurant).