Serious leisure

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Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where, in the typical case, participants find a (leisure) career in acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience. The adjective "serious" (a word research interviewees often use to describe their free time passion) embodies such qualities as earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness. This adjective, basically a folk term, signals the importance of these three types of activity (viz., amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity) in the everyday lives of participants, in that pursuing the three eventually engenders deep self-fulfillment.

  Amateurs

Amateurs are found in art, science, sport, and entertainment, where they are inevitably linked, one way or another, with professional counterparts who coalesce, along with the public whom the two groups share, into a three-way system of relations and relationships. By contrast hobbyists lack the professional alter ego of amateurs, though they sometimes have commercial equivalents and often have small publics who take an interest in what they do. The professionals are identified and defined in (economic rather than sociological) terms that relate well to amateurs and hobbyists, namely, as workers who are dependent on the income from an activity that other people pursue with little or no remuneration as leisure.

  Hobbyists

Hobbyists are classified according to five categories: 1) collectors, 2) makers and tinkerers, 3) activity participants (in noncompetitive, rule-based, pursuits such as fishing and barbershop singing), 4) players of sports and games (in competitive, rule-based activities with no professional counterparts like long-distance running and competitive swimming) and 6) the enthusiasts of the liberal arts hobbies, which are primarily reading pursuits.

  Volunteers

Volunteers, whether pursuing serious, casual, or project-based leisure, offer uncoerced help, either formally or informally, with no or, at most, token pay, for the benefit of both other people (beyond the volunteer's family) and the volunteer. Nevertheless the reigning conception of volunteering in nonprofit sector research is not that of volunteering as leisure (the volitional conception), but rather that of volunteering as unpaid work. This latter, economic, conception defines volunteering as the absence of payment for a livelihood, whether in money or in kind. This definition largely avoids the messy question of motivation so crucial to the volitional conception.

Further distinguishing characteristics of serious leisure

Serious leisure is further distinguished from two other forms of leisure -- casual and project-based -- by six qualities found exclusively or in highly elaborated expression only in the first. These qualities are 1) need to persevere at the activity, 2) availability of a leisure career, 3) need to put in effort to gain skill and knowledge, 4) realization of various special benefits, 5) unique ethos and social world, and 6) an attractive personal and social identity. Several personal and social rewards (e.g., self-fulfillment, contribution to the group or community) help further explain a person’s interest in serious leisure, which at bottom, is their leisure experience.

The serious leisure perspective

Serious leisure, along with the casual and project-based forms, constitute the serious leisure perspective. It is the theoretic framework that synthesizes what is known scientifically about these three main forms of leisure, showing at once, their distinctive features, similarities, and interrelationships. While this Perspective has its roots in the leisure experiences of individuals as they pursue their core leisure activities, it also provides a way of looking on the social, cultural, and historical context of those experiences and core activities.