Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure

Description

171 pages
Contains Bibliography, Index
$34.95
ISBN 0-7735-0901-1
DDC 306.4'812

Year

1992

Contributor

Reviewed by Ian C. Nelson

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Review

Stebbins has both distilled and elaborated his 15 years of individual
research and publishing into a serious sociological volume of eight
chapters centring on a study—referred to as “the Project”—of
professionalism and the pursuit of “serious leisure.” Initially, he
posits the need for such a study because of a trend to fewer jobs, to a
decreased work week, and to job sharing in the face of declining
economies. As well, he notes the North American unwillingness to
restrict people’s opportunities for personal self-fulfilment as long
as pursuing those opportunities doesn’t interfere with the person’s
capacity to serve as an active, productive employee.

This study effectively examines sociologically defined ideal-type
attributes with empirical observations to develop a formal grounded
theory. Stebbins identifies unexpected commonalities among the
professional/amateur/leisure activities studied: classical music,
theatre, archaeology, baseball, astronomy, entertainment magic,
football, and standup comedy. With sparse descriptions of these pursuits
and no examples of his instruments for observation and gathering data,
his attempts to define discrete attributes appear reasonable, yet
demonstrate—in this publication at least—both the valiant effort and
the strain involved in sociology’s scientific apparatus. The basic
challenge is to mark points on a conceptual spectrum where attributes
and qualities are difficult to measure beyond the statement that they
“represent only matters of degree.”

Using Stebbins’s own careful vocabulary, one might state that this is
a book for “professional sociologists.” The author would certainly
render a service to the general community if he could derive from his
various studies a simple pamphlet that would describe his findings in
succinct, popular terms. It could easily become a handbook for the
thousands of volunteers (in the technical sense) who sit on arts boards,
organizations mandated to distribute lottery funds, and civic or private
granting bodies who need guidance in assessing the needs and attributes
of potential clients spanning the professional to the serious amateur.

Citation

Stebbins, Robert A., “Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed November 11, 2024, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/12699.