The politics of leisure: social control and social development (1980)

In social work the debate continues as to whether social workers are primarily agents of social control or agents of caring. Much sociological work attempts to fuse the two by producing a set of variables in a matrix and situating the individual or group at some point where several variables –say, sex, age, and social class–intersect. But this is to reduce the influence of social stratification to the interplay of free-floating variables, a coincidence of otherwise independent social statuses. Even more ambiguous is social work’s intervention in the leisure-time activities of young people, whether they are defined as deprived or depraved. The general tenor of the argument is relatively straightforward: to establish that leisure is a political arena, where struggles over access to free time, adequate resources, and cultural meanings, are continuously taking place, even where leisure appears to be a most private and individual undertaking.